A village on the Great North Road.
Stilton sits on Ermine Street, the Roman road that later carried the Great North Road. Its two principal inns were the Bell, recorded from 1515 and rebuilt in 1642, and the Angel, early seventeenth century and rebuilt as a red brick house in the eighteenth. At its height the village kept fourteen public houses for a population of about five hundred.
Cooper Thornhill, a corn merchant, took the Bell in 1730 and bought the Angel opposite in 1743 for £850, which gave him both sides of the road and the cheese trade passing along it. The Angel stabled three hundred horses and kept its own farriers and blacksmiths.
An illustration of about 1840 shows Stilton cheese going into the boot of a coach at the Bell, in among the luggage and a brace of mallard. The Wadesmill to Stilton stretch, authorised by an Act of 1663, was the first turnpike road in England. The cheese travelled the prototype of the toll road.
The argument, and its paperwork.
The Stilton Cheesemakers' Association holds that the cheese was first made in the country around Melton Mowbray and never in the village of Stilton at all. The documentary record is less obliging. The earliest known printed reference is William Stukeley's, in an entry dated October 1722 and published in his Itinerarium Curiosum of 1724.
Richard Bradley printed a recipe for the famous Stilton cheese in a series of monthly articles in 1721 and 1722, later gathered into his General Treatise of Husbandry and Gardening of 1726. His informant was the horticulturalist John Warner, who noted that the man at the sign of the Bell kept strictly to the old receipt, while others thereabouts seemed to leave out a great part of the cream. That is more than one maker in the neighbourhood, working to something already old.
The Compleat Grazier of 1776 gives the cheese at eighteen pounds, sold at twelve pence a pound by all that make it in Stilton, though the same author adds that only one house there still followed the true method. Richard Landy has set the two accounts against each other document by document. The question is not settled, and we are not going to settle it here.
A cheese named for a village that is now forbidden to make it.
Clay, grass and the Vale of Belvoir.
The Vale of Belvoir is floored by the mudstones of the Lias. Heavy wet ground favours grass over reliable corn, and permanent pasture is what a milking herd requires.
The south-eastern edge rises in a scarp capped by resistant Jurassic Marlstone ironstone, which is why Belvoir Castle stands about a hundred metres above the valley floor and the Vale reads as a bowl. Enclosure turned open field into hedged permanent pasture. Robert Bakewell of Dishley Grange, born 1725, worked out systematic selective livestock breeding in the same county later in the same century.
A dozen Vale farmers formed the Long Clawson dairy in 1911; Colston Bassett opened its dairy in 1913. Melton Mowbray took the by-product, or so the usual account runs: dairying makes whey, whey fed pigs, and the pigs gave the town its pork pie.
The pear has no Leicestershire claim.
It should be said plainly: the pear did not come from here, and the pairing is not old. The Romans brought pears to Britain. Medieval England grew the warden, a pear that never truly ripens and has to be cooked, first noted at the Cistercian abbey of Warden in Bedfordshire in the thirteenth century, with the Black Worcester recorded growing there by 1388.
It kept through winter without refrigeration and travelled without complaint. Shakespeare has warden pies in The Winter's Tale. The perry counties lie west of here, and Gloucestershire alone held more than a hundred varieties of perry pear under more than two hundred local names.
Conference, now about nine tenths of the British pear crop, was raised by Thomas Rivers at Sawbridgeworth in Hertfordshire and named for the National British Pear Conference held in London in 1885, where it took first prize. Cheese and pear is a modern cheeseboard convention. It is set down here as one.
