28 May 2015
A surfeit of Lampreys?
By Chin Chin
It is the English summer again with its associations with strawberries and cream and with the crack of willow on leather. These days, however, there is something else too. There is the beginning of a search for the remains of another English king, buried, as tradition now requires, under another municipal car park.
The discovery of the bones of Richard III gave deep satisfaction in all quarters. For the history buff there were endless television programs, feeding a nationwide discussion of the fate of the Princes in the Tower. For Leicester, the new royal tomb in the cathedral is a much-needed tourist attraction. Merchants made fortunes from pageantry, car park attendants received large tips (“I’m afraid the King has gone, Sir, but for a tenner I could find you a bay over one of his earls, a very superior gentleman. Oh, a man of the church I see. I could upgrade you to a very nice sub-prior’s bay over here.”) and as for Richard, now dead for more than 500 years, well , I expect that he would have preferred to be interred in Leicester Cathedral than forgotten beneath the wheels of the modern motorist .
Still, you can’t have too much of a good thing, as the promotors of reality TV shows say at the end of each series, so here we go again. This time it is Henry I who was buried in Reading Abbey, dissolved by Henry VIII and now largely disappeared. Is the tomb under the car park or under the adjacent school? Nobody knows but the team which unearthed Richard is going to do its best to find out. If it does, the whole carnival will begin again and Henry’s career will be dissected. Was he right to push aside his elder brother Robert? The need for a firm ruler says “yes” but others (including presumably Robert) would say no. Is it true that he never smiled again after his son was drowned? Since Henry lived more than 300 years before Richard, we will probably never be sure. The one fact about him, however, on which the historians agree is that he died “from a surfeit of lampreys”.
I was opening a tin of lampreys when I read about this and it gave me a bad turn. The lamprey is an unpleasant fish. Built like an eel it clamps its enormous circular jaws onto its victim and sucks out the flesh. It really is better not to disturb one when paddling. Still a dead lamprey is probably fairly passive and one tinned in a sauce of St Emilion almost certainly so; so when the stallholder in Bordeaux market pointed out that the recipe had been devised by Taillevent, head cook to the French kings Philip VI (who lost at Crécy), Charles V (who pushed back the Black Prince) and Charles VI (who lost at Agincourt), greed overcame fear and I handed over the Euros.
I hadn’t bargained though for the description of Henry’s death. Here I was serving a dish, too much of which had slain an English king. Not some pampered 18th century king either but a proper mediaeval one whose continual campaigning must have accustomed his intestines to all sorts of foreign foods. Just how many was a surfeit? Would the National Health Service know how to deal with it? Had Henry’s lampreys come out of a tin or had they perhaps gone past their sell by date? With a time gap of almost 900 years it is very difficult to tell.
Then of course it came to me. There are things which have probably changed little over the centuries and one of those is that when a man tells his wife that he has been poisoned by food, it’s odds on that the poisoning is really down to the drink which went with it. Henry was keen on the hunt. No doubt that involved a few glasses at the end of the day, he was hunting in France after all, and perhaps after a good day those glasses turned into bottles. A few too many and he would have encountered a problem we all know too well. How do you explain it to the wife?
“It must have been the lampreys, Adela,” Henry would have said, employing the self pitying whine most of us use when blaming a pizza or a big Mac. “They tasted a bit off” – a failed attempt to sound judicious. In the event Henry died and the fish never had the opportunity to shake off the reputational damage. Well anyway, I hope it was like that, Henry died a week after the fatal feast. We ate our lampreys three days ago. Time will tell.
