Italian invaders augmented and enriched the fare, without, perhaps,
materially altering its character; and the first decided reformation
in the mode of living here was doubtless achieved by the Saxon and
Danish settlers; for those in the south, who had migrated hither
from the Low Countries, ate little flesh, and indeed, as to certain
animals, cherished, according to Caesar, religious scruples against
it.

It was to the hunting tribes, who came to us from regions even bleaker
and more exacting than our own, that the southern counties owed the
taste for venison and a call for some nourishment more sustaining than
farinaceous substances, green stuff and milk, as well as a gradual
dissipation of the prejudice against the hare, the goose, and the
hen as articles of food, which the "Commentaries" record. It is
characteristic of the nature of our nationality, however, that while
the Anglo-Saxons and their successors refused to confine themselves
to the fare which was more or less adequate to the purposes of
archaic pastoral life in this island, they by no means renounced their
partiality for farm and garden produce, but by a fusion of culinary
tastes and experiences akin to fusion of race and blood, laid the
basis of the splendid _cuisine_ of the Plantagenet and Tudor periods.
Our cookery is, like our tongue, an amalgam.

But the Roman historian saw little or nothing of our country except
those portions which lay along or near the southern coast; the rest of
his narrative was founded on hearsay; and he admits that the people in
the interior--those beyond the range of his personal knowledge, more
particularly the northern tribes and the Scots--were flesh-eaters,
by which he probably intends, not consumers of cattle, but of the
venison, game, and fish which abounded in their forests and rivers.