This page includes translations of excerpts from medieval works that relate to food and cookery.
Please note that the translations are all my own and are copyrighted. Should you wish to reproduce more than a line or two, please contact me directly. I am happy for you to quote a line or two without permission, but please do so accurately and you must credit me as translator.
The initial focus will be on medieval texts that I have researched for educational purposes for heritage projects and television work. I will be adding more translations as I complete them.
Translation of recipes from Fourme of Cury, the focus of my ongoing book project, will not appear here, but will be available in my book once it is published. You will, however, find some translations from that medieval cookery book and other medieval culinary collections throughout my blog, though these are all subject to revision/editing.
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Here are the translations:
- The master baker at Rochester Priory, Custumale Roffense, f. 53r, 13th-century
- The cooks at Rochester Priory, Custumale Roffense, folios 13th-century
The master baker at Rochester Priory, Custumale Roffense, f. 53r, 13th-century
(Translated from Latin by Christopher J. Monk.)
You can find the digitised manuscript page from Custumale Roffense here. You will need to ‘turn the pages’ using the arrow bottom right. You need 117/164. The text is found at the top of the right-hand folio (numbered 53, top right in pencil).
This extract commences a fascinating section (folios 53 to 60) of the customs book of Rochester Cathedral priory, all about the lay servants and their duties.
Translation
It begins with the office of the bakers, what they should do.
The master of the bakers ought, in fact, to see and feel the wheat at the door of the granary. And, if he is able or not to make for the monastery the best and finest bread, he should accept or reject it through [or, by means of] his mouth. He weighs the bread. Also, he will make settlement on all the bread at the cellarer’s store. And afterwards he will have one monk’s loaf and at Easter time a flan. His stipend, 7 shillings. It belongs to him to mix and knead the dough of the monastery.
Commentary
through his mouth Lat. per os eius. The phrase may carry two meanings. It may simply signify that he was to give a verbal yea or nay; or it may mean he was to test the grain by means of chewing. Since the baker was establishing whether he was able to make the finest bread, he needed to be sure the grain would be of sufficient quality. Chewing the grain into a kind of dough-ball, and then stretching it between the fingers, is one way of physically establishing the quality of the grain.
He weighs the bread. Though weighing the bread must refer, at least in part, to the predetermined size of the monks’ and servants’ loaves – the sizes are alluded to elsewhere in the record – there is some evidence that the priory’s bread may have been sold to pilgrims and other passersby, making it necessary for the baker to conform to the rules of the Assize of Bread and Ale, i.e. the thirteenth-century law governing the price, weight and quality of bread and ale produced in towns and villages. Indeed, a copy of the Assize relating to bread is included in the Custumale Roffense.
cellarer. One of the senior monks responsible for all the food and drink supplies of the monastery. The ‘cellarer’s store’, or range, is thought to be located along the West side of the present-day ruins of the priory’s cloister. See this post on Rochester Cathedral’s website.
flan Lat. flaco.1 A flan, or flawn, was essentially an open tart made with an egg and dairy custard filling. Versions containing cheese are recorded but more common are sweet milk or cream egg custards, usually sweetened with sugar. Dried and/or fresh fruits were sometimes added. During Lent, almond milk and a thickener, such as rice flour or wheat starch, were substitutes for milk, cream and eggs. Some surviving recipes include saffron and spices such as cinnamon, ginger, and cloves. Since dairy foods and eggs were forbidden fare during Lent, a flan would have been a suitably delicious way of marking the end of abstinence.
Select Bibliography
Old French-English Dictionary, ed. Alan Hindley, Frederick W. Langley, and Brian J. Levy (Cambridge University Press, 2000) [OF-ED]
Online sources:
Anglo-Norman Dictionary [AND]
Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources [DMLBS]
Notes
- See DMLBS , flado [var. flato, flaco] 1, ‘flawn, custard tart’ [accessed 13 May 2026]; cognate with Old French: see OF-ED, fladon/flaon, ‘flat cake; tart, flan’. See also AND, flaon, ‘flawn, a sort of pie, cake, bun’, https://anglo-norman.net/entry/flaon [accessed 29.10.25] ↩︎
The cooks at Rochester Priory, Custumale Roffense, folios 13th-century
This translation will be added soon.
MONK'S MODERN MEDIEVAL CUISINE 
