Banbury Cheese

Banbury Cheese!

Throughout the Middle Ages until the mid-eighteenth century, Nethercote along with the original hamlet of Grimsbury was the centre of Banbury’s cheese making trade, a product that was made from local resources and much prized at the time, although there is little mention of it by the nineteenth century

Banbury cheeses first appear in the historical record in 1430, when fourteen were sent to John of Lancaster, 1st Duke of Bedford, among supplies for France.

The cheese was renowned in its day. It was given as a gift to several significant figures, including Thomas Cromwell (1533 and 1538), Sir Joseph Williamson (1677), and Horace Walpole (1768).[1] Barnaby Googe, in his 1614 guide to husbandry, called in the third best cheese in England. Robert Burton was even more flattering in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): “Of all cheeses, I take that kind which we call Banbury Cheese to be the best”.[4] According to the Victoria County History, “in the sixteenth century the name of Banbury at once brought to the mind of the hearer the famous cheeses

The production of Banbury cheese essentially constituted a cottage industry, centred in Grimsbury and Nethercote.

A cow’s milk cheese, yellow and strongly flavoured, made in very thin (c1ins) rounds, known at least since Huswife 1594.

Banbury Cheese became something of a byword for anything unreasonably thin, Bardolph calls Slender a “Banbury cheese” in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor, and in Jack Drum’s Entertainment we read, “You are like a Banbury cheese, nothing but paring.”