Forbidden Flesh: Meat Restriction as a Tool of Class Control

What you’re getting yourself into

For a thousand years, keeping meat from the poor required force, mutilation, and Acts of Parliament. These days, a Netflix subscription does the job.

England, 1085. A man steps out of his cottage on the edge of the New Forest. Six years ago, it was his forest. His father hunted deer there. His grandfather hunted deer there. His great-grandfather hunted deer there, back when hunting deer was simply what you did in a forest that wasn’t anyone’s in particular, because the concept of a forest belonging to a king the way a table belongs to its owner hadn’t been invented yet.

Then William came.

Now the forest belongs to the Crown, and the deer belong to the Crown, and if our man goes in there with so much as a bent stick and comes out with a haunch of venison, the best he can hope for is that they settle for cutting his fingers off. The penalty for killing the king’s deer is blinding and castration. The law says so.

He goes back inside. He eats pottage. He wonders, probably not for the first time, whether the Normans have genuinely taken leave of their senses or whether this is all an extraordinarily elaborate scheme.

It is, in fact, a scheme. It just doesn’t end with the Normans.

The King’s Deer

When William I conquered England in 1066, he inherited a kingdom with a fairly functional relationship between its people and the land they lived on. Under Anglo-Saxon rule, forests were not legally carved out for royal pleasure. Kings hunted. Everyone hunted. The forest was, with various customary caveats, something approaching a shared resource.

The concept of reserving land as an exclusive royal hunting ground was introduced to England by the Normans after 1066, and at the height of this practice in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, fully one-third of the land area of Southern England was designated as royal forest.

One third of southern England. Think about that for a moment. Not one third of the trees. One third of the land, with all its game, its wild boar, its deer, its fish. All of it declared legally off-limits to the people who had been living in and off it for generations.

Within these royal forests, commoners were forbidden to hunt game and hunt the king’s deer, but also couldn’t enclose their land with fencing, cut timber for building houses, or collect fallen wood for fuel. You couldn’t own a dog capable of hunting. Mastiffs were permitted as watchdogs, but they had to have their front claws removed to prevent them from hunting game.

The punishments were not gentle. Penalties might include fines, as well as harsher consequences including imprisonment, blinding, castration, and in some cases and in some eras, death. Disturbing a deer meant punishment that included blinding or having a hand cut off, and actually killing one, even to feed hungry children, could lead to execution. Forest law was so severe that it was said to be designed to “leave the English nothing but their eyes to weep with.”

This wasn’t wildlife conservation. This wasn’t resource management. This was protein confiscation at sword-point, applied to a population that had previously been perfectly capable of feeding itself. The deer didn’t suddenly become too precious to eat. They became too prestigious for the wrong sort of person to eat.

The crucial detail, the one that tends to get glossed over in history lessons more concerned with Magna Carta and the feudal system as abstract concepts, is what the Forest Laws were actually doing to people’s diets. A peasant on the edge of Sherwood Forest or the New Forest was not living in some Arcadian vegetable paradise. Agriculture had already done considerable damage to the human diet long before William arrived. But he was at least living next to a vast supply of animal protein. One that had now been physically fenced off and placed behind a legal threat of mutilation. The food was right there. He was simply not allowed to have it.

The Class War on the Dinner Table

The Forest Laws were the bluntest instrument of meat restriction, but they weren’t operating alone. Medieval England ran on a fairly elaborate system of codified food snobbery that extended well beyond the question of who could hunt deer.

In the late Middle Ages, the increasing wealth of middle class merchants and traders meant that commoners began emulating the aristocracy. This threatened to break down some of the symbolic barriers between the nobility and the lower classes. The response came in literature warning of the dangers of adapting a diet inappropriate for one’s class, and sumptuary laws that put a cap on the lavishness of commoners’ banquets. Animal parts were even assigned to different social classes.

Animal parts assigned to social classes. Not just which animals, but which parts of which animals, legally stratified by rank. Prime cuts of beef, pork, and lamb were designated for noble consumption, while commoners were limited to cheaper, tougher portions. Butchers who sold premium cuts to unauthorised customers could lose their licences and face serious legal consequences.

Edward III in 1336 tried to restrict merchants and the servants of gentlemen from eating more than one meal of flesh or fish per day. In 1433, an act of the Scottish parliament prescribed the lifestyle of all social orders in Scotland, going so far as to limit the use of pies and baked meats to those who held the rank of baron or higher.

Pies and baked meats. Reserved for barons. The pork pie, that proudly working-class staple of every good butcher’s shop from Melton Mowbray to Manchester, was once a baron’s prerogative.

In 1517, Parliament passed a series of sumptuary laws designed to limit the “excessive fares” of the nobility. They spelled out the kinds of meats and number of dishes per meal each class could serve. Cardinals could serve nine dishes. Dukes, Earls, and bishops could serve seven. Lower lords could have six, and the gentry could serve three. The working man, predictably, didn’t make the list. Not because he had no restrictions, but because the restrictions were, simply, everything above scraps.

The most telling detail is not the laws themselves, but why they existed. Nobody passes sumptuary laws restricting meat consumption unless meat is genuinely desirable, genuinely conferring status and strength and vitality on the people who eat it. Gout was called the disease of kings in medieval Europe, because only the wealthy could afford the foods thought to cause it: meat, seafood, and alcohol. Meat itself was seen as a food of indulgence, something that heated the blood and sharpened the disposition. The aristocracy did not restrict beef because it was bad for peasants. They restricted it because it was good for everyone, which made it symbolically dangerous. You can’t have the common man looking as well-fed and vigorous as the lord of the manor. That undermines the entire architecture of the feudal imagination.

The lower orders were not being guided toward a plant-based diet for their own good. They were being steered away from animal protein because animal protein was power, and power was not for them.

The Slow Theft of the Common

The Forest Laws were an overnight confiscation. The Enclosures were something more insidious: a theft conducted in slow motion, across centuries, via Act of Parliament, while the people being robbed were assured that progress was being made.

Before the enclosures, the English peasant had access to common land. Not as a charity, not as a favour from his betters, but as an ancient customary right that predated the Norman Conquest and went largely uncontested through the early medieval period. On this common land he could graze his animals. His cow. His pig. His geese. These were not luxuries. They were his protein supply, his fat supply, his insurance against a bad harvest, and in the case of the pig, his entire winter larder.

For centuries, English agriculture depended on common land, land that was privately owned but to which others enjoyed the legal right of access. It was universally understood that common and waste land were to be used for planting crops, grazing livestock, gleaning, foraging, and sometimes hunting and fishing.

Then came the enclosures. Beginning informally in the Tudor period and accelerating through parliamentary acts from the 17th century onward, the process was straightforward: land that had been common was fenced, deeded to private owners, and the ancient customary rights simply ceased to exist. Between 1604 and 1914, over 5,200 individual acts enclosing public land were passed, affecting 28,000 square kilometres. In 1786 there were still 250,000 independent landowners in England. In the course of thirty years, their number fell to 32,000.

With the common land went the animals. The pig in the back garden required somewhere to forage. The cow required somewhere to graze. Remove the common land and you don’t just remove a theoretical agricultural right, you remove the actual physical basis on which ordinary people kept livestock and fed themselves animal protein. Historians concluded that “before enclosure the cottager was a labourer with land; after enclosure he was a labourer without land.” And without land came without animals. And without animals came without meat.

The process was not bloodless. The denial of customary rights of pasture and enclosure of common land often led to what historians have called “enclosure riots.” On some occasions, village disturbances turned into large-scale rebellions, like Ket’s rebellion of 1549, which culminated in the capture of the city of Norwich. Similarly, the Midland Revolt of 1607 began with mass protest against enclosure. The underlying motivation was to symbolically restore the rural customary rights that landlords had turned “upside down.”

These were not riots about abstract principles of land tenure. These were people fighting for their ability to keep a pig. To graze a cow. To eat meat. The resistance was visceral because the deprivation was visceral.

By the 19th century, the transformation was complete. The English working class, which had once grazed animals on common land and hunted in forests that were not yet anyone’s property, was now crowded into industrial towns eating bread, potatoes, and whatever offcuts the butcher couldn’t sell to anyone with the means to insist on better. The protein that had sustained their ancestors had been systematically removed, first by Norman decree, then by parliamentary legislation, and at each stage the legal fiction was maintained that this was simply how the world worked, how it had always worked, how it ought to work.

It had not always worked this way. It had been made to work this way.

What The Science Actually Suggests

There is an argument, deployed with great confidence by people who prefer their history tidy, that the English peasant didn’t eat much meat to begin with, and therefore didn’t lose much by being denied access to it. This argument is, to put it charitably, doing a lot of work with limited material.

The archaeological record is genuinely complicated. A major bioarchaeological study analysing the bone chemistry of over 2,000 individuals buried in England between the 5th and 11th centuries found that regular meat consumption was lower than historical texts suggested across social groups, with the isotopic evidence suggesting that diets in this period were much more similar across social groups than previously thought. People likely livened up bread with small quantities of meat and cheese, or ate pottages of leeks and whole grains with a little meat thrown in.

But this study covers the pre-Norman and early Norman period, when the forest confiscations were fresh, and it measures regular daily consumption, not the occasional feast that Anglo-Saxon food lists describe. Those lists are extraordinary. A food list compiled during the reign of King Ine of Wessex amounts to an estimated 1.24 million calories, over half of which came from animal protein, with each guest receiving 4,140 calories including 712 grams of meat, 300 grams of fish, plus cheese, honey and ale.

The feast, in other words, was meat. The celebration was meat. The aspiration was meat. When people got together to mark something significant, they ate animals. Not because animals happened to be available, but because meat was what a good meal looked like, what abundance looked like, what a body well-nourished looked like. You don’t build an aspirational feast around pottage.

The question of what ordinary people ate on a Tuesday is separate from the question of what they desired, what they valued, and what they were being denied. The Forest Laws weren’t passed to restrict something people weren’t interested in eating. The sumptuary laws weren’t enacted to prevent commons from consuming something they didn’t want. The riots against enclosure weren’t motivated by abstract land rights alone.

The restriction was meaningful because the thing being restricted was meaningful.

The Twentieth Century: A Different Kind of Law

The Forest Laws were repealed. The enclosures are ancient history. The sumptuary laws haven’t been on the statute books since the Tudor period. And so, by the middle of the twentieth century, the English working class was finally, finally, in a position to eat as much beef as it could afford.

This coincided, with exquisite timing, with the arrival of institutional dietary advice telling them not to.

The story of how saturated fat became public health enemy number one has been told elsewhere on this blog, and it is not a flattering story for the institutions involved. What matters here is the structural observation: the dietary guidelines that emerged from the 1950s onward, built substantially on the flawed epidemiology of Ancel Keys and amplified by food industry lobbying, converged on a simple message. Eat less meat. Eat less fat. Eat more grains. Eat more vegetables.

This message landed with particular force on the people who had the least money. Beef is expensive. Chicken thighs and mince are cheap. Bread, pasta, rice, and seed oil are cheaper still. The shift from animal-based nutrition to carbohydrate-based nutrition was sold as health advice, but it mapped perfectly onto what the poor could afford and what the processed food industry was capable of producing at scale and profit.

Nobody sat in a room and planned this. The structural outcome does not require a conspiracy to explain it. It requires only the observation that the financial interests of the food industry, the ideological commitments of the public health establishment, and the economic realities of low-income households all aligned to produce the same result that forest laws, sumptuary acts, and enclosures had produced by rather different means.

The working class ate less meat. They ate more carbohydrates. They got fatter. They got sicker. The metabolic consequences of that shift are still playing out. And they were told, with great authority, that this was what health looked like.

The Voluntary Surrender

We arrive, finally, at the present day. And the present day contains a peculiarity that would have bewildered our man on the edge of the New Forest in 1085, and would have baffled the rioters at Kett’s rebellion, and would have genuinely defied comprehension by every agricultural labourer who watched his common land disappear behind a parliamentary fence.

The present day contains millions of people who could eat meat but have decided not to.

Not because a Norman king threatened their fingers. Not because a parliamentary enclosure act took away their land. Not because they can’t afford it. Because they watched a documentary. Because their favourite influencer told them it was destroying the planet. Because a nutritionist with a book to sell explained that red meat causes cancer, that saturated fat clogs arteries, that the populations held up as models of plant-based longevity were eating pork and lard all along, and that the ancestral diet of every farming community in recorded British history is, in fact, bad for you.

The mechanism has changed entirely. The outcome is identical.

For a thousand years, the project of keeping animal protein away from the people who could benefit most from it required force of law, threat of mutilation, physical confiscation of land, and the occasional military suppression of a popular uprising. In the twenty-first century, the same outcome is achieved by funding the right research, controlling the right institutional frameworks, and deploying the right emotional pressure: environmental guilt, animal welfare, public health anxiety, until a meaningful portion of the population surrenders the most nutrient-dense food in human history of its own free will, with a clear conscience and a vague sense of moral superiority.

It is, from a purely technical standpoint, an impressive achievement.

The beef still exists. The land still grows it. The butcher’s shop is still open. No gamekeeper will blind you for buying a ribeye. And yet the ribeye goes uneaten, because the person who could eat it has been persuaded that eating it makes them a bad person.

William the Conqueror didn’t have access to Netflix. He had to use threats of castration instead. You have to work with the tools available to you.

What Was Always There

The case for meat as the preferred human food does not require ideology. It is embedded in the archaeological record, in the skeletal evidence of populations before and after they lost access to animal protein, in the persistent fact that every population on earth, given the choice, has historically reached for animal foods first and built its feast culture around them.

It is embedded in the history of resistance. People do not riot over abstract agricultural rights. They riot when you take away something they need, something they value, something they understand at a gut level to be theirs. The consistent thread across the Forest Law protests, the anti-enclosure rebellions, the poaching cultures that persisted in every community adjacent to a royal forest for centuries, is not political philosophy. It is hunger. It is the human recognition that something necessary has been taken.

It is also embedded, rather uncomfortably for the current consensus, in the physiology. The nutrients concentrated in animal foods, complete amino acids, haem iron, fat-soluble vitamins A, D, K2, creatine, carnitine, the long-chain fatty acids that build and maintain brain tissue, are either absent or drastically less bioavailable in plant foods. This is not a fringe position. It is the biochemistry. And plants, for their part, are not the passive nutritional gift they are marketed as. The working class communities that lost access to animal protein across the centuries of enclosure and restriction did not thrive as a result. They shrank.

None of this is to claim that vegetables are without value, or that every dietary guideline issued since 1960 is a coordinated conspiracy to keep the working class malnourished. The history of meat restriction does not require malice to explain. It requires only the consistent observation that restricting access to animal protein has always served the interests of those doing the restricting, whether that restriction takes the form of a royal decree, a parliamentary act, or a well-funded public health campaign.

The friendly local dietitian advising you to limit red meat to 70 grams per day is not William Rufus. She almost certainly believes she is acting in your best interest. The question is whether the framework she’s been trained in is correct, or whether it is the latest iteration of a very old story about who gets to eat the good stuff.

The Forest Laws lasted for 600 years. The Charter of the Forest was still on the statute books until 1971. The dietary guidelines that told you saturated fat would kill you are now being quietly revised, the evidence having failed to cooperate.

History, as a discipline, tends to be fairly clear about who was right about the New Forest.

Take your time with the dietary guidelines. They’ll come around eventually.

The Carnivore History Series

This is part of an ongoing series on the history of meat-based and ‘plant-powered’ civilisations.

• People Of History Who Ate A Carnivore Diet
• The Forgotten History Of Carnivore Nutrition
• The Carnivores Of History — How Meat Built Empires
• The Forgotten History Of Rabbit Starvation

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