This article tries to explore the question of whether the Anglo-Saxons in the tenth and eleventh centuries actually had an interest in elaborate and socially distinctive food preparations – whether, to use words that have been employed and defined by anthropologists and other social scientists, their food practices distinguished ‘cooking’ from ‘cuisine’, or even ‘gastronomy’. Through the study of written sources and archaeological data, we address several issues which can tell us about the Anglo-Saxons’ attitude towards food: the existence of proper kitchens and specialized cooks; the question of ‘privileged foods’ – categories of food widely recognized as suitable for social elites; and the ways by which recipes were transmitted. The answer is that the Anglo-Saxons may have known some forms of elaborate ‘cooking’, that ‘cuisine’ may have existed but cannot be identifi ed as such, and that ‘gastronomy’ was not a part of their thought world.

This article studies the question of Anglo‐Saxon hospitality, that is, in the first place, the gift (from a host to a guest) of food, fodder, roof and bed for a night or for a longer term. Contrary to Romantic visions, it was nothing like a spontaneous and free practice: Marcel Mauss and other anthropologists after him have shown that giving and receiving were obligations, compulsory acts in pre‐market societies. In Anglo‐Saxon England, hospitality was always a duty, strictly limited and framed by custom. It may have been provided to a single traveller, to a member of a formal or informal network (particularly ecclesiastical), to a king or to his agents in the form of a pastus or feorm: a kind of ‘guesting’ or compulsory hospitality which was progressively given up by kings as they booked lands to religious institutions. The forms and beneficiaries may vary, but the opposition between ‘spontaneous’ feasting and ‘compulsory’ guesting must not be stressed too much: hospitality was always a kind of binding exchange, even when it assumed the shape, the aspect, and even the values of a free and open practice.

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