Extra notes on ‘rowen’ cheese

Yesterday, I posted about the autumn-produced cheese known in the Middle English cookery book, Forme of Cury, as chese ruayne (‘rowen cheese’). I had some really interesting responses, both on the blog comments and on social media, about the meaning of this word ruayne, for which I thank everyone. It’s really good to get such great feedback.

I thought it might be helpful to explain in a little more detail why ruayne/rowen cheese does indeed refer to cheese made from the milk of cows who have been grazing on the second growth of grass during the pasture season or, perhaps more pertinently, on the hay made from this. This second growth or crop was known as ‘rowen’.

To do this, I’m going to look at the word I’ve translated as ‘rowen’ a little more closely and show you how it is used in Middle English, Anglo-Norman and Latin, the three core languages used in the late medieval period of England.

Ruayne, etc…variant spellings

Probably what makes things a little confusing is the lack of standardised English spelling during the medieval period. And variation also affects Anglo-Norman and Latin spellings of this word, too.

So, let me just write here some of the variant Middle English spellings for ‘rowen’ I’ve come across:

rewayn (inserted into a Latin survey, see below)

roweyn (in a poem by Lydgate: ‘What doon hors than to speke in wordis pleyn? The secunde crop thei carie hom roweyn.’ Note how it is called the ‘second crop’.)

rewaime (referring to cheese ‘facti de rewaime’ ‘made from rowen’, inserted into a Latin accounts document)

ruayne (in the John Rylands manuscript of Forme of Cury in connection with cheese)

ruayn (in the British Library roll of Forme of Cury in connection with cheese)

It should be pointed out, here, that all of these variants sound very similar, almost identical, when spoken. This is the problem with Middle English: often the way a word sounds can be captured in a variety of spellings, which can be bamboozling to us moderns.

What I also need to point out is that from examining the various contexts, none of these spellings match the Middle English word meaning ‘rowan’ (as in the tree and berries), i.e. raun (or rawn) which apparently is of Scandinavian origin.

Alas, then, I will have to say to those of you who made the marvellous suggestion that perhaps our ‘chese ruayne’ was made using rowan berries to curdle the milk, that this seems very unlikely.

Etymology

As far as the direct route into Middle English of the word rewain, and all its variants, goes, my understanding is that it is a loan-word from Anglo-Norman, a dialect of Old French. The two spellings in the online Anglo-Norman Dictionary are regain and rewain: ‘g’ and ‘w’ often being interchangeable in Old French.

As far as I am aware, there is no analogue word in Old English, what we call the English language before the Norman Conquest in 1066 (and surviving for some time after this event), so this backs up the idea of the Middle English borrowing from the Anglo-Norman, something extremely common in the evolution of English at the time.

It may be that the early medieval folk (the Anglo-Saxons) didn’t have a specific term. I checked what specialists in farming scholarship Debbie Banham and Rosamund Faith have written and they do not appear to refer to ‘second growth’ or ‘second crop’ of grass in their discussions of pasturing and hay during this earlier period (Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming, Oxford University Press, 2014).

Anglo-Norman documents

Please note, this section has been edited and expanded since I originally wrote it. I was able to get hold of the proper edition of Walter of Henley and Other Treatises, rather than rely on the online version, and this led to a few corrections on the translations and some clarifications.

That rewain includes the second crop of grass upon which cattle are fed, and the cheese made from the milk of cows who do feed on it, can be deduced from a thirteenth-century collection of treatises on husbandry, written in Anglo-Norman (Dorothea Oschinky, Walter of Henley and Other Treatises on Estate Management and Accounting, Clarendon Press, 1971).

In the Husbandry by Walter of Henley, the question of how much milk one’s cows should yield is addressed. After giving the yields for cows fed on salt marsh pasture, the text provides the amounts for those fed in woodland pasture or ‘in grassland after the mowings‘ (‘apres fauchesuns‘): ‘three cows ought to yield one stone of cheese and a half gallon of butter each week between Easter and Michaelmas [29 September] without rewain‘ (‘santz rewayn’) (c. 87, p. 332).

We may infer from this that the rewain would be fed to the cows later, as hay, likely during the months when the herd could not be left at pasture, and also that the cows would continue to yield up some milk.

The second mention of rewain in this group of texts is provided in the anonymous Seneschaucy, which is a treatise on managing and improving manors in the care of stewards and bailiffs.

Under the section, ‘Here begins the office of the cowherd’ (chapter 7), the instruction is given: ‘No cow ought to suckle her young or be milked after Michaelmas to make cheese of rewain [‘formage de regain’], for such suckling and such rewain [‘rewayn’] make the cows grow thin and lose strength; it makes them mate later next year, the milk will be less because of it, and the calf smaller and poorer.’ (Translation based on Oschinsky’s, pp. 282-85).

In this particular treastise, then, the milking of cows and the subsequent making of rowen/rewain cheese is discouraged because of the negative impact it has on the cows, their milk yield the following year, and their offspring. But the implication is that such cheese was something produced after Michaelmas, i.e. 29th September.

Confirming this is another treatise in this collection, the anonymous Husbandry, which gives the instruction: ‘The dairy woman ought to make cheese from Michaelmas until Christmas’, though not beyond Christmas, as it was more profitable just to sell the milk during the remaining months leading up to the next cheese-making season, which began on ‘the first day of May’ (see Oschinsky, pp. 430-31).

Latin documents

I should point out first that, like Middle English, the Latin word for ‘rowen’ borrows from Anglo-Norman. The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (DMLBS) seems to make this clear: see rewainum.

Perhaps the clearest evidence for understanding that there was both ‘rowen’ pasture and ‘rowen’ cheese is found by looking at Anglo-Latin texts of the thirteenth and fourteeth centuries (a number of these are cited in the DMLBS reference, above).

In Bishop Hatfield’s Survey (c. 1382), which is a record of the possessions of the See of Durham, we find an entry that refers to ‘pastura prati, post asportationem feni de Rewayn’ ‘meadow pasture, after the carrying away of the hay of the rowen’ (170).

Here, the Middle English word has been inserted into the Latin text, and it seems that ‘feni de Rewayn’ may either mean the hay of the second crop of grass itself, or what this ‘Rewayn’ produces when fed to the cows, thus meaning ‘the hay of Rowen cheese’.

More precisely, we have another text, which appears to be some king of custumal, which refers to a rent of 86 caseis de rewanno, ‘rowen cheeses’, which were owed the Lord at the feast of St Martin (November 11^th).

Finally, we have a text where both rowen cheese and rowen butter are mentioned: xxxvij caseis factis de rewann’ et … de una lagena buturi de rewann’, translating as ‘37 cheeses made from rowen and one gallon of butter from rowen’.

Conclusion

It is always interesting to explore possibilities, and I thank everyone for making their suggestions about rowen cheese. Please keep your comments coming. One way or another, I always end up learning a great deal.

From the medieval texts we’ve looked at, it seems clear that ‘rowen cheese’, including the chese ruayne of the Forme of Cury, refers to cheese that was made from the milk of cows who ate rowen, which in context seems to be the hay made from the second growth of grass, harvested in the autumn. This cheese appears to have been made after the end of September and eaten during the colder months.

I think we now need a picture of cows: