Ahead of my discussion with Jennie Hood and Professor Giles Gasper at the Serve It Forth Food History Festival about how the Normans changed the way we eat, I had a chat with Kevin Booth, English Heritage’s Head Curator of Collections, about what the skeleton of ‘Conquest Man’ can tell us about the diet and health of the English at the time of the Norman invasion.
Facial depiction by Face Lab, Liverpool John Moore’s University. Credit: English Heritage
There’s also a little taster of the other courses my co-curators ( A Curious Appetite, Neil Buttery and Thom Ntinas) are serving up during the festival which features Eleanor Barnett, Paul Couchman, Sally Grainger, Sudi Pigott and Alexandra Sills. Tickets for the online festival are available here.
The Serve It Forth Food History Festival is made possible with the generous support of our sponsors ckbk, Steenbergs, Regency Fiction Writers, Replica, Blackfriars Restaurant and Lindisfarne Mead.
If you happen to be in or near Barton on Humber in Lincolnshire on 20 September 2026 between 12pm and 4pm you can see Conquest Man’s skeleton and find out more about this project at St Peter’s Church.
If you’d like to get a sense of what life was like for Conquest Man and his contemporaries during the Norman Conquest, Battle Abbey in East Sussex is hosting its annual reenactment of the Battle of Hastings on 10 and 11 October 2026, the week before Serve It Forth. Hundreds of reenactors take part, recreating Norman and Saxon camps and giving visitors an insight into everyday life for people almost 1,000 years ago. Tickets are now available from www.english-heritage.org.uk/battle
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A huge thank you to Thomas Ntinas of The Delicious Legacy for doing the sound mixing on this season of the podcast. Sound effects and music provided by Zapsplat and Pond5.
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