Beef And Liberty: The Century England Put Its Politics On A Plate

Ask why the French call the English rosbifs and you get a paragraph about cooking. Ask why the guards at the Tower are called Beefeaters and you get a paragraph about rations and a French word that turns out never to have existed. Both answers stop exactly where the story starts.

For about a hundred years from the 1730s, a joint of English beef was a manifesto. It was sung in theatres, painted as satire, stamped on the brass buttons of London’s most celebrated dining society and roared from the gallery during a riot. It stood for a free man at his own table eating what he pleased, and against a Frenchman on thin soup who belonged to his king. The English said it so loudly, for so long, that their neighbours named them after it.

They were right about the beef. They were rather less honest about who was eating it. And the country that once toasted the sirloin as the fuel of its freedom now has an official daily figure, in grams, for how much of it a citizen ought to swallow.

What came before this story, the forest laws and the enclosures, is told in Forbidden Flesh. The century after the Black Death, when labourers won their meat and Parliament tried to legislate it back off their plates, is in what the medieval peasant really ate. The long view of the national table lives in The British Table. This is the century in the middle, when the English stopped merely eating their beef and started campaigning with it.

The song they kept off the stage

In the spring of 1731 Henry Fielding, 24 years old and already the sharpest satirical playwright in London, had a piece in rehearsal at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, an expanded rewrite of his Welsh Opera from that April. The Grub-Street Opera was a ballad opera loaded with barely disguised jokes about the royal household and Sir Robert Walpole’s government.

It never opened. The papers announced it was in rehearsal, then that a performer had fallen ill, then in the middle of June that it was postponed indefinitely. Nobody has ever proved why. In the same week a clergyman who wrote in Walpole’s defence was gloating in print that the government had not accepted the play.

It survived only as a printed text, and among its songs was the one that outlived the play. The printed chorus went “Oh! the Roast Beef of Old England, And old English Roast Beef!”, and the verses were a lament, set in a golden age when the national dish was beef and the national men were stout. The villain lived in England:

“But since we have learnt from all-vapouring France To eat their ragouts as well as to dance, We’re fed up with nothing but vain complaisance.”

Verses added later, once the song had left the play behind, mourned the age of Elizabeth, “ere coffee, or tea, or such slip-slops were known”. The target was the English gentleman who had taken up French food, French manners and, by implication, French politics. Beef was the patriot’s dinner. The ragout was the courtier’s.

The bass singer Richard Leveridge gave the words a new tune, added verses of his own and sang it in public, and London took it up. Theatre audiences made a habit of singing it before and after plays, and on occasion in the middle of them. Before God Save the King settled into the role, it was about as close as England came to a national anthem. The Royal Navy still goes in to dinner at mess nights to it.

Fielding’s reward for this kind of thing arrived in 1737. His later satires on Walpole helped provoke the Licensing Act, which put every new play under the Lord Chamberlain’s pen, and his career as a dramatist was finished. The man who wrote England’s great hymn to beef and freedom was licensed out of the theatre, and went off to become a magistrate and write Tom Jones.

The night the gallery sang

A year later, in the autumn of 1738, a company of French comedians took the same little theatre in the Haymarket. Their bills carried the words “By Authority”. English players, under the new Act, complained they were being kept off the stage.

London noticed. On the opening night the French actors met hissing, catcalls, ringing hand-bells, pelting and the candles being knocked out, and a guard of musketeers could not keep the stage. The French ambassador left early. The crowd outside smashed the theatre’s windows.

Benjamin Victor, a writer who was sitting in the middle of the pit on one of those nights, described what the opposition’s organisers did while two Westminster magistrates watched from the house. One of the ringleaders called out for the song in praise of English roast beef. A man planted in the gallery sang it, the whole theatre came in on the chorus, and they finished with three cheers. The magistrate Thomas de Veil declared this a riot, which it was.

So a government that had gagged its own playwrights licensed foreign ones, and the audience’s reply was a song about dinner. It was not the first time beef had gone into opposition. In 1733 and 1734 London had a Rump-Steak or Liberty Club, whose members were described as eager in opposition to Walpole. The steak and the word liberty had been sharing a table for some time.

Hogarth at the gate of Calais

In the summer of 1748, with an armistice holding before the peace that ended the War of the Austrian Succession, William Hogarth crossed to France. He did not care for it. On the way home he stopped at Calais and began sketching the old city gate, which still carried the arms of England from the centuries when Calais was an English town. The French arrested him as a spy.

He took his revenge in oils, and borrowed the title from the song. O the Roast Beef of Old England, now in Tate Britain and better known as The Gate of Calais, puts a sirloin of beef at the dead centre of the picture, carried through the gate by a cook in a white apron towards the Lion d’Argent, the English inn. Around it the ragged French soldiers lug a cauldron of watery soupe maigre and look at the meat the way a dog looks at a butcher’s van. The only well-fed Frenchman in the frame is a fat friar, reaching out to touch the beef. A group of fishwives kneel over a skate that seems to be pulling a face. Slumped against the wall with a raw onion and a crust sits a Scottish Jacobite exile, a man who had backed France and was living on its hospitality. Away to the left, Hogarth has painted himself at his sketchbook, with the halberd and the hand of the soldier who is about to arrest him coming round the corner behind.

The whole argument is in the composition. France had a king, a church and an army, and the one decent meal in town was being delivered to the English.

The kitchen was fighting the same war. In 1747 Hannah Glasse, the most successful cookery writer of the century, complained in the preface to The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy that the “blind folly of this age” meant the rich would rather be imposed on by a “French booby” than employ a good English cook. The same book gave the country a recipe she called a Yorkshire pudding: batter set in a tin under the roasting joint to catch everything that fell off it, which is still the correct use for the dripping. The modern version is here.

Beef and Liberty on the buttons

The most famous beef-eaters of the century met on Saturdays in a room at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, and there were only ever 24 of them at a time.

The Sublime Society of Beef Steaks was founded in 1735 by John Rich, the theatre’s manager, the man who had staged The Beggar’s Opera, with his scene painter George Lambert. One version of the origin has Lambert too busy to leave the painting room and grilling a steak on its fire, and his visitors enjoying the steak enough to make a regular thing of it. Another has an earl dropping in on Rich, being given a grilled steak, and asking to come back the following week. Either way, the menu never changed much: beefsteaks off the gridiron, port, punch, and later baked potatoes and onions.

Members wore a uniform. A blue coat, a buff waistcoat, and brass buttons stamped with a gridiron and the words “Beef and Liberty”. When James Boswell was taken there in 1762 he found the president sitting under a canopy with the motto above him in gold letters. Membership was capped at 24, and the society was fussy enough to object to being called a club.

Hogarth was a founder member. The actor John Philip Kemble joined, as did the Earl of Sandwich and, in 1785, the Prince of Wales, and later two of his brothers. So did John Wilkes, the radical whose supporters in the 1760s filled the streets chanting “Wilkes and Liberty”, and who spent those years being prosecuted with the enthusiastic help of Sandwich. Both men belonged to the same society of 24.

That is what the steak was claiming. The dinner was plain on purpose. No French cook, no sauce to disguise it, a piece of English beef over an English fire, and a toast to liberty. A prince and a radical could both sit under that motto because it described something every Englishman in the room was sure he possessed, and was equally sure the French did not.

The idea travelled. There had been a Beef-Steak Club in London since about 1705, presided over by the actor Richard Estcourt. Dublin had one from 1749, run from Thomas Sheridan’s theatre, which made the actress Peg Woffington its president and its only woman. Other beefsteak clubs met across London and beyond, many of them under the sign of the gridiron, and the name reached as far as the Gridiron Club of Washington. The Sublime Society itself met almost continuously until 1867, and has been revived since 1966.

What the French called them back

The French were listening. Their word rosbif is a borrowing from English, and it arrived in the kitchen long before it arrived as an insult. The earliest French record is in François Massialot’s Le Cuisinier roial et bourgeois of 1691, spelled ros de bif. Later editions of the same book give a ros de bif de mouton, a roast beef made of sheep, which tells you how much of the original meaning made it across the Channel.

The personal use came quickly. In 1727 the dramatist Louis de Boissy put an English merchant on the Paris stage and named him Jacques Rosbif. The standard French historical dictionary dates rosbif as a name for an Englishman to 1774. The nickname is well over a century older than the version usually repeated, which has it settling in during the nineteenth century.

And the joke is older than the word. Fulke Greville, writing before his death in 1628 about England’s old wars in France, reckoned England had once conquered France more through French factions than through English bows, “or Beef-eaters, as the French were then scornfully pleas’d to terme us.” The French had been sneering at the English for eating beef for generations. The eighteenth century is simply when the English decided to take it as a compliment.

The Beefeaters

The Yeomen of the Guard were raised by Henry VII in 1485, and the Yeomen Warders of the Tower later took on the same dress. The nickname was already an old English sneer before anyone pinned it on them. From around 1600 a beef-eater was a well-fed menial, a servant living off his master’s meat. In a play published in 1610 a man throwing out his household calls them “greedy beefe-eaters” who cost more to feed than the cormorants of Calais. The word echoes the Old English hlaf-æta, a loaf-eater, which was simply the word for a servant, the man who ate his lord’s bread.

By the 1660s it was circling the royal guard, and they did not like it. Andrew Marvell turned the phrase around in a poem of 1667. In a play of 1671 a guardsman hears himself called a beef-eater and answers “Beef-eaters, you rascal!” as though he has been slapped.

In 1669 Cosimo de’ Medici, heir to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, toured England, and his companion Lorenzo Magalotti kept the record. He noted that the guards at court were given a very large daily ration of beef, and that they might fairly be called beef-eaters. That line gets quoted as the origin. It is really an Italian visitor confirming a joke the English were already making.

The guidebook story is the buffetier: an old French word for a servant at the royal sideboard, supposedly mangled by English mouths into beefeater. It is a lovely story and it has no word in it. The Oxford English Dictionary called the theory “historically baseless” and pointed out that no such form as buffetier exists. It was invented to give an English nickname a French pedigree, which is a very eighteenth-century way to go wrong.

So the name that now sells gin and fridge magnets began as a snigger at a man eating someone else’s beef.

Who actually got the beef

A song is not a shopping list, and the singing tells you what the English wanted to believe about themselves. For what they ate, you need the people who counted.

The Swedish naturalist Pehr Kalm spent six months of 1748 in England, from February to August, the same year Hogarth was arrested at Calais. He was impressed. He wrote that he did not believe “any Englishman who is his own master” had ever eaten a dinner without meat. He admired how the English roasted a joint, and noticed that all English meat, whatever the animal, carried a fatness and a flavour he put down to the country’s pastures. The cattle themselves have their own history.

The qualifier carries the whole century. His own master. The free man who owned his dinner ate meat every day. The man who did not own his dinner was another matter.

The state knew exactly who needed feeding. The Royal Navy’s regulations gave every sailor 4 pounds of salt beef and 2 of salt pork a week, served on fixed days, alongside his biscuit and beer. Samuel Pepys, who ran the navy’s administration in the previous century, had warned that Englishmen, and seamen above all, loved their bellies above anything else, and that cutting their victuals was the fastest way to make them hate the King’s service. Soldiers serving in America during the Seven Years’ War were allowed 7 pounds of beef a week, or 4 pounds of pork, which is a pound of beef a day. When the country needed men to stand in a line or climb a mast under fire, it fed them meat by the pound, most of it beef.

The labourer was a different case, and the best evidence for him is the most unglamorous. In 1787 the Reverend David Davies, rector of Barkham in Berkshire, began writing down the weekly accounts of his poorest parishioners, and in 1795 he published them with over 100 more gathered from across the kingdom. One Barkham family was a man, his wife and 5 children. Their meat for the week was a pound of bacon, boiled two or three times with greens, the pot liquor going with bread and potatoes to make what Davies called a mess for the children. That is a pound of pig for 7 people, in a county that was singing about roast beef.

It varied by region. In Scotland and the northern English counties, oatmeal often stood in for bread and milk did much of the work, and northern farm workers were often better fed than the bread-and-tea families of the south. But the budgets everywhere are built on bread, and meat turns up in them by the ounce.

Fielding’s golden age was one in which “our fathers” kept open house, with good cheer all day, “which made their plump tenants rejoice.” The beef in the most famous patriotic song in England came from the landlord’s table. The tenant’s part was to be plump and grateful.

The English were right that beef made men strong, and the navy was right to buy it by the ton. Where they deceived themselves was in believing the beef came with the liberty. Kalm had it the right way round. The beef came to the men who were their own masters, and to the men the state could not do without. Everyone else got the song.

From the sirloin to the Sunday joint

Then the country moved to town, and the national dish shrank to fit the week.

In the early 1860s the Privy Council sent the physician Edward Smith to find out what the poorest working households in England actually ate. His survey ran to several hundred households of silk-weavers, needlewomen, shoemakers, glovers and stocking-weavers, and Charles Dickens’s weekly All the Year Round summarised it for the public. The silk-weavers’ families averaged a little over 2 pounds of meat a week between them. It came irregularly: nothing in a bad week, more when work picked up, and above all it came for Sunday dinner. Often a baked sheep’s head or a breast of mutton, with the dripping saved to spread through the week and the leftovers eaten on Monday. Only where there was real thrift and a decent income did meat appear on the table every day. The same inquiry found the working man usually fed better than his wife and children, who in some counties were miserably fed.

That is where the roast beef of Old England ended up for most of the country. One joint, one day, and a tin of fat to make it last. The dripping carried the other six days, on bread, in the pan, under the potatoes. The skill of saving it is in rendering tallow at home, the taste of it is in beef dripping on toast, and the decades when it disappeared from British kitchens, and who talked it out of them, are in British traditional foods.

The Sunday roast is the survivor of all of it. The songs went, the clubs dwindled, the navy’s salt beef went into the history books, and what was left was a family sitting down once a week around the most expensive thing they bought. If you want to do it properly, the cuts and a roast calculator will get the joint the right size.

A number for the plate

In February 2011 the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition, the committee that advises the British government on diet, published a report on iron and health. It advised that adults eating around 90 grams or more of red and processed meat a day should consider cutting back, and the Department of Health turned that into a figure. Cut down to 70 grams, cooked weight.

The 70 was the average intake of the adults who ate red and processed meat in the national diet survey of 2000 to 2001, a decade before the advice. The committee measured the country, wrote the national average down, and handed it back to the public as the amount to aim for. Its own chairman wrote in the preface that the evidence did “not allow quantification” of how much red and processed meat might be linked with bowel cancer, which is why the advice to high eaters was only to “consider” reducing. Then the figure went up on the NHS website, and a figure on a government website is not something most people read as a suggestion.

The NHS helpfully explains what the numbers mean in real food. A portion of Sunday roast, 3 thin slices each about the size of half a slice of bread, weighs 90 grams. By the government’s own arithmetic, the meal the English kept when they lost everything else is over the line. The same 70 grams covers the sirloin and the salami without distinction, as though a roasting joint and a packet of cured sausage were the same thing. The difference between them is the subject of the site’s full account of red meat and bowel cancer.

Then the reason changed and the number kept going. In February 2025 the Climate Change Committee, the government’s official climate adviser, published its Seventh Carbon Budget. Its pathway has average meat consumption falling by a quarter by 2040 and by more than a third by 2050, red meat by 40% by 2050, and the national herds of cattle and sheep cut by 27% by 2040. The report counts fewer deaths from bowel cancer, heart disease and type 2 diabetes among the benefits, as long as the meat is replaced with something else rather than simply dropped. What it means for the farms that raise the animals is covered in British farming.

Nobody is marching into a Haymarket theatre to sing about any of this. Fielding’s complaint in 1731 was that Englishmen had let somebody else decide what went on their plates. The somebody now sits on a committee and publishes the portion size in grams.

The Royal Navy still goes in to dinner to The Roast Beef of Old England. Nobody has told the band how much of it they are allowed.