By Nancy Thomas

Wills and Inventories1 are a fascinating source of material for local historians, and challenging as well, especially to those of us who may be just starting actually to ‘do’ local history. After we have struggled through the difficulties of early handwriting and the subtle blurrings wrought by time and the Xerox machine, it would seem only fair that the Inventories should then yield up to us a clear picture of how our predecessors in Warton lived.

Far from doing that, however,- they set us still other tasks: to discover what the words we have extracted actually meant when they were written and to try to piece together from the details given,as well as from those not given, the ’picture of life’ we are looking for. There are many ways Wills and Inventories may be used by local historians, and doubtless the pages of The Mourholme Magazine will carry articles inspired and informed by them for many issues to come. In this article, however, I propose to describe some of the kitchen or cooking equipment listed in the Inventories for the Warton area from about 1580 to 1650. Almost every Inventory lists some articles that have to do with cooking. One of the short cuts used by the ’praysers’ who made the Inventories was to list ‘All the Iren stuffe in the howse’. This, of course, is not very helpful to us. But some Inventories name a number of items before lumping the rest under ‘other Iren geere’, and others give very detailed lists. Thus, although it is impossible to say precisely what every house contained, we can get a good idea of the iron hardware and utensils in use in Warton parish at the time.

We know from studies of the vernacular architecture2 of the area that the fire would probably have been an open fire on a floor-level hearth at one end of the main room, the room referred to in several of our Wills as the ‘fire- house’. From our Inventories we can be quite sure that the chief fuel for the fire was turves or peats, cut with turf spades from the local mosses. Occasional references to fire-wood establish it as a supplementary fuel.

Among the iron gear frequently identified is a racken- crook. The term combines the words ‘ racken’, a chain originally, and ‘crook’, a hook, end describes a device used to suspend cooking utensils over the fire. Racken- crooks in use in Lakeland farmhouses in the 19th century3 were fairly complex arrangements of two iron bars held together in such a way that one could be moved up or down along the length of the other, the moveable bar having a hook at the lower end. The racken-crooks of our Inventories may have been simpler devices, but similar in allowing the height of the utensil to be adjusted. Examples from 19th century Lakeland were generally suspended from cranes, iron bars or brackets hinged to the wall so that they could swing across the fire. Cranes do not appear in our Inventories, however, so the racken-crooks of our houses probably were hung from the more ancient ‘rannel-balk’ or ‘randle-tree’. This was an iron bar or wooden beam laid across beams fixed under the chimney hood4. The racken- crook could be moved along the bar and the bar along the beams, allowing the cook an added degree of temperature control for her boiling pot. Neither rannel-balk nor randle-tree appears in our inventories because they would have been considered part of the fabric of the house rather than ‘goods and chattels’.

The piece of iron equipment most commonly listed is the ‘brandreth’. The word is derived from a Scandinavian word which described a grate on three legs, a kind of portable fire. In our period it was a trivet used to support utensils over or beside the fire. Examples from Lakeland farmhouses and elsewhere have round tops with three metal prongs forming the grid and stand from 8″ to 15” high5. ‘Brandreth’ is a word used in other contexts in the Lake District. In Cumbrian dialect ‘brandreth steann’ means a boundary stone at the meeting of three townships or parishes6. Brandreth, one of the Western fells, is divided into thirds by three different watersheds, and a feature on High Seat is called Threefooted Brandreth. It seems an inescapable conclusion that the little trivet with its top resembling a pie cut into three pieces was a familiar fixture of Lakeland hearths from very early times.

A third cooking device frequently listed is a ‘spit’. The spit is an easy enough term for us today, but what the Warton appraisers meant by it is something of a puzzle. Roasting with a spit requires a rather complex apparatus: the skewer or spit rod to pierce and hold the meat and some sort of hardware to support the ends of the rod so that the meat can be held over the fire and rotated. Inventories from other parts of the country clearly identify the parts of the spit: ’spit’ or ’broache’ for the skewer and ‘cobiron’ or ‘andiron’ for the supporting parts7.

Cobirons were iron bars fitted with rows of hooks and were simply leaned from the front of the hearth to the back wall at a suitable angle. Andirons were similar to modern andirons but for spit use were fitted with hooks along the vertical member. The 19th century Troutbeck spit, illustrated by Dr. Rollinson, was supported at each end by what might be described as cobirons hinged in the middle to allow them to take the shape of an inverted ‘V’.

Our Inventories, however, tell us tantalisingly little about the design of the Warton spit. Andirons do appear, but infrequently, always in the singular, and never in conjunction with a spit. They were presumably used simply to support logs or to keep them from rolling away from the fire. Of the 25 or so Inventories that include a spit, only one records any support hardware specifically. Richard Hadwen’s Inventory (Carnforth, 1604) lists a spit with racks. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, racks were ’sets of bars of iron or wood’, and the illustrating quotation (1617) describes a rack as made of iron with ‘a long ranke of barres on it’. In other words, racks must have been very like cobirons. It seems strange, however, that iron supports of the complexity of those described, if they were in general use, would have been relegated so regularly to the ‘other Iron gear’ department. The answer may be simply that the term ’spit’ was used to cover the whole complicated apparatus. Or it may be that a simpler and cruder mechanism was used in our area, end that we have yet to identify it.

The cooking utensils listed include cauldrons, kettles cressets, frying pans, girdles, skillets, tongs, pots, and pans. Cauldrons and kettles were large, deep, wide mouthed vessels with half hoop handles or bails by which they could be suspended from the rackencrook. Frying pans also had bail handles but were wide, low-sided vessels.

Regularly listed with the frying pan is the cresset, an iron vessel used to hold grease or fat. The rendered fat or tallow collected in the cresset, in addition to any culinary uses, was the ingredient that rushes were dipped into to produce the rushlights that provided domestic lighting.

A girdle was a round, flat, iron plate, with either a bail or two dog-ear handles, used for open-fire baking. It is almost always coupled with the brandreth in the Inventories, and the two together occur not only more frequently than any other item but also where no other cooking equipment is listed. A reasonable inference seems to be that the girdle was customarily used on the brandreth, not suspended, and that the combination formed the basic minimum of equipment required for the kitchen hearth. Girdle and brandreth, in fact, would have been the means of producing that staple of Lakeland and N. Lancashire diet, the oatcake – the traditional bread of the region.

Gridiron and brandiron are occasionally listed, but the way they occur suggests that ‘gridiron’ was used to mean ‘girdle’ and ‘brandiron’ to moan ’brandreth’.

Of the remaining iron utensils, skillet appears infrequently. It was something like a modern saucepan but with a very long handle and three short legs and was designed to sit in the embers of the fire. Tongs then were probably like tongs today.

Last of all come pots and pans. They are such a large and interesting subject in themselves, however, that they will have to have an article on their own.

Notes

  1. Inventories were required for probate. Shortly after a person’s death, ’four honest men’, usually neighbours, were appointed by the Court to make a list of all the deceased’s ‘goods and chattels’, together with an appraisal of the market value of each item or group of items. Words appearing in the Inventories have been modernised. ↩︎
  2. R.W. Bronskill. Vernacular Architecture of the Lake Counties (1978), pp. 50-53. ↩︎
  3. W. Rollinson, Life and Tradition in the Lake District (1981), fig. 8, p. 33. See Ch. 2, ’Hearth and Home – Some Farmhouse Equipment’, for descriptions and illustrations of other implements mentioned in this article. ↩︎
  4. J. Wright (ed.), The English Dialect Dictionary (1961). ↩︎
  5. Esp. the Museum of English Rural Life, Reading University. ↩︎
  6. W. Dickinson, A Glossary of the Dialect of Cumberland (1899). ↩︎
  7. B. Trinder and J. Cox (eds.), Yeoman and Colliers in Telford (1980), Salop; J. Moore (ed.), The Goods and Chattels of our Forefathers (1976), Gloucs ; F.W. Steer, Farm and Cottage Inventories of Mid-Essex 1635-1749 (195O); J. Woodall, From Hroca to Anne (1974), Ch. 17, Warks. ↩︎

Published in Mourholme Magazine Issue 1 Autumn 1982.