I love breakfast. I love the idea of breakfast, the anticipation of breakfast, the emotional

promise of breakfast. It feels comforting and grounding in a way that other meals don't because

it's a meal we, I associate with starting the day fresh, doing the day properly, getting

off to a good start breakfast of champions, which is why

to me it feels ancient, like something humans have always done. You wake up, you have your coffee,

you eat your breakfast. Obviously, except that's not actually how the majority of people in the

past lived. If you went back just a few hundred years,

especially to the late medieval or tutor period, the thing that we now call breakfast would

feel really weird. Not absent exactly, but not guaranteed, definitely not celebrated, not even

fully respectable. The idea that breakfast is the most

important meal of the day would have sounded odd, even kind of indulgent. Eating early was sometimes

practical, sometimes tolerated, sometimes even frowned upon. It depended on who you were, what you

were doing, and how your body was perceived to work.

This is one of those moments where modern assumptions can trip us up. We imagine history running on

roughly the same rhythms that we do today, three meals a day, roughly the same times of day each day.

But breakfast is not a timeless human constant. It's a cultural

habit, one that took a very long time to settle into something that we would recognize. And the

tutors sit straight in the middle of that change and that shift. They inherited medieval ideas

about food, morality, and the body, but they were also

living through changes in work pattern, court life, travel, and routine that slowly began to

reshape the day. Breakfast starts to edge into view properly during this period, but it does so

awkwardly. It's not quite the confident meal that it is today.

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