Why you should avoid hair-pulling, and cannibalism, at royal banquets

There won’t be any cannibalism happening at the state banquet this week in Windsor Castle, in honour of the 47^th US president, Donald J Trump. I haven’t seen the menu, but I think that’s a reasonable guess. I also suspect that Prince Harry won’t be in attendance, despite his recent trip to the UK and reconciliatory tête-à-tête with his father, King Charles III. However, if you believe this piece in The Times, while the king and his youngest son might be mending their relationship, Prince William cannot forgive his brother Harry for his apparent betrayal of trust in recent years.

That’s where the cannibalism comes in. Back in the 11^th century, two brothers – one of them destined for the throne of England – had a pretty big falling out. It led to an event at a feast that most people would find very hard to forgive. I’m talking about Harold and Tostig Godwinson. Harold, of course, went on to become Harold II of England, after the death of Edward the Confessor in 1066. He had to defend his crown against Tostig, who had joined the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada in an attack on the country from the north. Harold beat Hardrada and Tostig at the battle of Stamford Bridge, and both of the would-be invaders were killed.

The root of the brotherly tiff went back a few years before that. In 1063, according to the 12th-century historian Henry of Huntingdon (who is unique in offering us this account, so we ought to be sceptical about its veracity), at the royal hall in Windsor, Tostig grabbed Harold’s hair while he was pouring wine for King Edward. Tostig, apparently, was so embittered that the king thought more highly of Harold that he was unable to “check his hand from his brother’s flowing locks”.

Nobody would drink to this

Hair-yanking in front of the king is one thing. But it gets worse; a lot worse. Henry of Huntingdon goes on to explain that Tostig flounced out of Windsor in umbrage and went to Hereford, where Harold’s servants were in the process of knocking up another royal banquet. It’s quite a long way from Windsor to Hereford, but in the course of what must have been a few days’ travel, Tostig’s anger had not abated. When he got to Hereford, he dismembered all his brother’s servants, and put their severed heads, legs and arms into all the drink containers. Then he sent a message back to the king saying that there was lots of salted meat waiting for him at Harold’s place. Unsurprisingly, King Edward wasn’t delighted about this act of anticipated anthropophagy, and exiled Tostig.

According to Professor Heather Blurton, who has written a book about cannibalism in medieval literature, the whole thing is a symbolic fiction that draws on Greek mythology: “Tostig’s transformation of a royal banquet into a cannibal banquet is densely symbolic. The suggestion of a Thyestian feast rewrites history, casting an unnamed Edward the Confessor as the putative father of two feuding sons whose struggle for power is ultimately futile. In myth, Atreus kills Thyestes’s sons and serves them to him, leaving only their hands and feet, with which he taunts Thyestes. The invocation here of the myth of the House of Atreus, with its cursed history of murder and cannibalism, condemns Harold and Tostig as unworthy heirs to the kingdom. Simultaneously, its narrative intrusion into the prelude to the Norman Conquest of 1066 centres cannibalism as a privileged metaphoric mode for representing invasion and conquest in high medieval England.”

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Yikes. So, basically it probably didn’t happen. Nevertheless that is pretty much the worst example of a royal banquet that I could find, with the added contemporary spice of a fraternal spat. As I say, it’s unlikely to offer any sort of model for what is going to happen at the state banquet in Windsor this week. Princes Harry and William won’t be present together, and I very much doubt there will be any hair-pulling, and definitely no cannibalism.

The location of this week’s banquet is St George’s Hall in Windsor Castle. It was badly damaged in the fire of 1992 but it’s been restored and still bears the coats of arms of all the past Knights of the Garter. That is the chivalric order created by King Edward III back in 1348. Edward is closely associated with Windsor and spent loads of money doing it up in the 14th century. He was a huge fan of the legends of King Arthur and he was basically trying to reinvent Windsor as a new Camelot.

King Arthur was notable as the host for another very bad banquet. It’s recorded in the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Helen Carr goes into the story in forensic detail in this membership-only article, but I’ll briefly remind you of the basics. It’s Christmas, King Arthur is enjoying a hearty festive feast with his knights arranged around the Round Table. Then an uninvited guest barges in – he’s tall, lean and strangely green. Yes, it’s the Green Knight. He bizarrely wants to play a game: a beheading game. Sir Gawain accepts the challenge and promptly decapitates the oddly coloured interloper. That would have been enough to spoil most banquets, but in a surprising plot twist, the body of the knight proceeds to retrieve his head and explain that Gawain will now himself have to submit to being beheaded in a year and a day. So that’s quite a downer for the whole feast, but Gawain’s agreement to seek out the Green Knight and accept his fate is the sort of act of chivalry that Edward III revelled in.

Feasting, of course, has been a mainstay of lordly soft power for centuries, millennia probably. It was the duty of a leader to provide for his or her followers, and a great way to do that was by creating opportunities for copious and conspicuous consumption. Certainly in prehistory – and we can’t really talk about royalty here because we cannot know the make-up of their political structures – feasting was a big thing. Just last week, the results of a new survey about eating in the Bronze Age–Iron Age transition came out. It showed that back at the end of the Bronze Age, Britons were having massive food festivals, the like of which weren’t seen again until we get to the Middle Ages. People were travelling considerable distances to get to these huge banquets, and bringing their dinner with them, too. The midden, or rubbish pit, from one such feasting site stretches over FIVE football pitches.

Boasting, drinking, amputation – that's some banquet

For a really great banquet scene, we need look no further than Beowulf, the 10^th or 11^th-century story of the sixth-century adventures of the eponymous hero in Scandinavia. In the timber hall of King Hrothgar, Beowulf and his warriors engage in hard drinking, heavy boasting and lengthy tale-telling. The festivities are marred by the angry arrival of the monstrous Grendel, who sneaks in late at night and attacks the place, smashing it up with demonic glee, until Beowulf gets hold of him and literally rips his arm off. Maybe there will be some boasting and some modest drinking when President Trump is entertained by King Charles III in Windsor, but I don’t suppose they will be pinning the severed arm of a nocturnal devil-beast to the wall of St George’s Hall the day after this banquet.

One thing we can be sure of is that the food served will be reassuringly expensive, because ostentatious displays of wealth have always been key to a good aristocratic banquet, as Charlotte Palmer explained in a piece about medieval banquets on HistoryExtra (read it here if you’re a member). Take, for example, the feast thrown in 1491 by Ercole I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara in northern Italy, for his son’s wedding. No expense was spared in the production of some elaborate sugar sculptures for the guests, but before they could tuck in, the servants threw these delightful treats into their laps. Bit weird. They then brought out a second round of these saccharine creations for everyone to actually eat. The point being, of course, that the duke could afford to literally throw money away.

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Singing deer and two-headed horses

Maybe the display of wealth won’t be quite so crudely displayed, but I’m sure they will have the good silver out in Windsor this week. And of course, really nowadays, it’s all about the pageantry, because that’s the one thing you simply can’t buy. If you want to know how to really go to town on this front, consider the obscenely over-the-top banquet of 1454, hosted by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy: the Feast of the Pheasant. Will King Charles have organised for his guest to be served, as the duke was, by a two-headed horse ridden by two men sitting back to back, each holding a trumpet, and then by a monster, consisting of a man riding on an elephant? There was also apparently a white stag that sang a tenor accompaniment to a chorister. It’s hard to find deer that can do good harmonies these days, probably not even in the herds that grace Windsor Great Park, but that is the sort of display that I think President Trump would lap up.

Assuming magical animals are not available to provide this level of spectacle, the food is going to have to be absolutely top drawer to give the feast the wow factor it needs. I’ve never hosted a banquet, and I don’t suppose I ever will, but Lulu Grimes, managing editor at GoodFood.com, has been to more than her fair share of posh dinners. I asked her what makes the difference:

“Banquets are all about illusion. Recipes must be easily replicable hundreds of times, look impressive and taste good. The table must look astonishing, the cutlery intimidating, and the glassware signal an incoming challenge to sobriety. Above all, the meal needs to keep you entertained for a VERY LONG TIME because banquets do drag on (oh my god, the speeches), and you can’t decide who you sit next to.

“I know what I’m talking about, I’ve sat and eaten through my fair share of banquets over the past few years; I am the reluctant plus-one for a liveryman of the City of London. There are few institutions more enamoured with banquets than the City, and my goodness, they do pomp and circumstance well. I once sat next to the Serjeant at Arms, who arrived with a special goblet rather than use the array of wine glasses at each setting. One would hope the threat of a bit of casual poisoning is long gone, but why change a bit of ceremonial flashiness now?

“Matching menus to occasions is vital. In 2023, His Excellency the President of the Republic of Korea was treated to barbecued quail, an upscale cottage pie, and chocolate mousse – welcome to Britain. Wrestling with a small bird while chatting politely is in a frequent banqueter’s skill set. This year President Macron enjoyed a lemon curd, gin and pastis cocktail (see what they did there), Norfolk chicken and English sparkling wine made by a French champagne house. No ruffling of feathers on either side, all very diplomatic. What with all that cutlery flying around, gastronomic slights are best avoided, an incident-free banquet is a good one.”

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Wise words from Lulu there. I assume President Trump will enjoy something as exciting and innovative as that served up for his counterparts from Korea and France. But I also predict that the quantity of food on offer in Windsor Castle this week will be modest by comparison to some of the banquets that we know of from history. In 1575, there was a 19-day banquet served up by Robert Dudley for Queen Elizabeth I at Kenilworth castle. Forty barrels of beer and 16 barrels of wine were consumed, per day, between firework displays. Dudley’s aim was to persuade the queen to marry him. It didn’t work. The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, and despite not being a man, it ought to have done the trick because Elizabeth famously professed that “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king.” As Tracy Borman told me in my Life Lessons from History series, Elizabeth’s superpower was procrastination to avoid the attentions of suitors like Dudley, so even a boozy pyrotechnic extravaganza like this wasn’t going to sway the queen.

In this banquet, it’s the other way round: the host is the king, and he’s trying to impress the president, and persuade him to give us all those trade deals we want. They only have 48 hours to work the royal magic on Donald Trump, but he does seem remarkably wowed by British pomp and ceremony. So maybe it’ll do the trick – just so long as he keeps the demonic monsters out, avoids decapitation and amputation, goes easy on the hair-pulling, and keeps clear of cannibalism.

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