Burnt offerings provide a rare insight into the medieval diet

​The village of Durfort dates back to the mid-14th century. It guards the entrance to a steep-sided valley in south-west France where the Sor flows out from the Montagne Noire. Before this ‘new' village was founded, the population lived halfway up the mountainside in a walled settlement called Castlar a hundred metres or more above the river. The houses were built onto bare rock, the streets were steep stairways, and the fortified site covered an area of around 40 by 110 metres (almost exactly one acre).

​At the highest point stood a tower, or keep. I pass it regularly via a circuitous and hence less-vertiginous route, but earlier this week I chose to clamber up the short way through the remnants of the dwellings (the average slope is 1-in-3). Although Castlar was established sometime in the mid-12th century, there is nothing remarkable about the faint traces of its houses. Even the walls of the keep are only waist high, but this site hid rarer secrets that kept a team of archaeologists busy between 1981 and 1997. ​

At the lowest part of the village is a building which caught fire 700 years ago. Unfortunate for the villages, but a godsend for the archaeologists. In its soil they found 400,000 carbonised seeds, and elsewhere in the village they found more seeds in several silos (to learn more about storage silos in general, see give-us-this-day-our-daily-bread-or-food-security-in-ancient-times.html). Among the debris of a building near the castle keep, they also unearthed numerous bones of butchered animals. 

​Analysis of these culinary remains – burnt and unburnt – provides a fascinating insight into what the people of Castlar were eating seven or eight centuries ago. In the list below, I have grouped the foodstuffs found at Castlar into four categories, with the first item in each category being the most abundant and the others being listed in alphabetical order.

• Meats: rabbit, along with beef, chicken, goat and pork.
• Grains: rye, along with barley, linseed, millet, oats and wheat.
• Pulses: broad beans, along with chick peas and lentils.
• Fruits and nuts: grapes, along with cherries, figs, medlars, peaches, plums, sloes, walnuts and wild strawberries.

​All this food had to come from somewhere, and that somewhere was almost certainly close at hand. And that suggests the surrounding slopes looked very different all those centuries ago. Fight your way through the undergrowth around the ruins today and you will spot traces of retaining walls for agricultural terraces, a sign that this was once productive land.

Should you find yourself at Castlar on a winter’s afternoon, you will also notice that the south-facing slopes around the village enjoy considerably more sunshine than Durfort down below. So why did the population move to be beside the gloomy river? Were they tired of struggling up and down the steep streets of Castlar? Or was it because they had discovered what can be done to recycled copper with the help of a trip hammer? I’ll explore how Durfort became Copper City in my next article.

EXPLORE BY TOPIC OR MAP