Eating, drinking and talking together is fun. Feasting like this in a community like a village or a group of streets in a town promotes a sense of community and well being which it's hard to beat. A great example is the agricultural shows of Scotland which are important occasions for everyone, especially outlying farmers who will come in from the hills for one of the most important community events of the year.

If your community lacks a sense of togetherness then I can recommend organising a Feast. If it already has a sense of community then it's just that bit easier. Whether you are focusing on a group of streets in a town, a number of small hamlets and outlying farms or an existing village, a Feast can do nothing but good. Lay on good food and gallons of drink, some entertainments, perhaps link it to some competitions, entertainments and local crafts and you have the beginnings of a recipe which can benefit everyone.

The Shelford Feast

Our experience is based mainly on the Village Feast at Great Shelford in Cambridgeshire, UK. Although the Feast goes back into mediaeval times it died out in 1939 until revived in 1994 - originally as a way of raising funds for the local primary school. Here's more about The History of the Shelford Feast. That 1994 Feast was organised in just six weeks and was a roaring success, but it also had many weaknesses which we've tried to fix in the years since - and which has lead us to the formula we use today: still with weaknesses, always open to improvement, but which we hope you can learn from. While there's nothing that can't be improved, we've had great success with our arrangements and writing this will help us too. Just remember that while we refer at times to alternative ideas the main part of this book is based on our summertime outdoor Feast. While we suggest other ideas, and have seen them work elsewhere, our expertise lies mainly in our own Feast.

Great Shelford

Great Shelford is in Cambridgeshire, England, and is the larger village of the two Shelfords, with some 4000 people. There's a school, two churches, three pubs, a garage, a library, a railway station, about twenty shops including a butcher, a greengrocer, a post office and two banks. The recreation ground and the village hall are in the centre of the village and are run by the Parish Council and that's where we hold the Feast on the third weekend in July. The people of Shelford may work in the village, in Cambridge which is only 4 miles away, or they may travel further afield - to London which is 50 miles away or anywhere in the south-east of England by way of a good network of roads and motorways. The pubs act as good meeting places for some, the churches for others. Many meet by way of the primary school, but there are few activities which involve everyone. The Shelford Feast is the main one of these.

The Bunch

"The Bunch" which is the name given to the group of men who organise The Feast, is a curious mixture. It seems as if the only thing we have in common is The Feast, and it's a constant surprise that so many of us are still together after a dozen years. Between us there is or have been a bus driver, local broadcaster, wine expert, teacher, microbiologist, supermarket executive, trainer in international shipping, genetics researcher, painter and decorator, carpenter, technician, builder, education writer, quantity surveyor, chef ... with other skills in computing, accountancy (and pig roasting) which have also proved useful. It's perhaps in this patchwork of skills, which came together quite by chance, that we have our strengths. While we often think we're well organised, we know we have to do better and this handbook is another step on the way to organising ourselves.

Feasting in the First Millennium
from The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger

The Easter feast was appreciated the more by people who had encountered the reality of famine.Today we watch famine on television, but it is scarcely a source of personal anxiety to those of us who live in the developed West. It is another of the crucial distinctions between us and the year 1000, where the possibility of famine was ever-present and haunted the imagination.

The rhythm of fasting and feasting was another medieval experience which is foreign to most Westerners today, and it brought a special intensity to the joy with which Easter was celebrated, both in church and at the table after the triumphant Easter morning service. Meat was the principal ingredient of an Anglo-Saxon feast - large spit-roast joints of beef being considered the best treat. Mutton was not a particular delicacy. Wulfstan's memorandum of estate management described mutton as a food for slaves, and pork seems also to have been considered routine. The relatively small amounts of fat on all these meats would be viewed by modern nutritionists with quite a kindly eye... All Anglo-Saxon animals were free range, and the Anglo-Saxons would have been shocked at the idea of ploughing land to produce animal feed. Ploughland was for feeding humans.
So farm animals were lean and rangy, their meat containing three times as much protein as fat.As well as chickens (considered a luxury food) an Anglo-Saxon feast might feature ducks, geese, pigeons an various forms of game birds - with venison the most highly prized game of all. Feasting, however, was about much more than mere nutrition, since conviviality lay at the very heart of Anglo-Saxon life. The epic poems of the time all come to rest in the banqueting halls ... There are beams and rafters and draughts through the walls, with a fire in the middle of the floor and damp rising up through the greasy floor covering of rushes, into which have been flung old chicken bones.	Photograph from an early Frankie Howerd film about Robin Hood in Merrie England. Note that this pig would not rotate at all when the pole was turned as there is no way to anchor it to the pole!
	In the year 1000 a noble feast was a lavishly staged affair, and the wills of the period suggest that people's most prized possessions were the accoutrements with which they entertained. There were drinking horns - but no cutlery. The eating fork was not invented until the seventeenth century, and when you went to a feast you took your own knife. Mead and wine were drunk. ... beor was not strong enough to produce intense intoxication... Not until the fourteenth century is there evidence of hops being generally used to give English beer its bitterness - as well as a longer shelf life. Like wine, the ale of the year 1000 had to be consumed without delay, and it was probably quite a sweet beverage with a porridgy consistency. Ale was the drink of the Middle Ages, much safer to consume than water, since its boiling and brewing provided some sort of protection against contamination.

If you do find this handbook useful we ask just one thing. E-mail Duncan Grey and tell us how you got on.
You might have comments or experiences we can gain from.
You might have had a good time which we can celebrate too.
Once you've joined the Feast Community life will never be the same again! Here's to the next one!