Up And Down The Buttery Stairs.

It’s lots of food and drink!

Since discovering ten or so years ago when first visiting Warkworth Castle in Northumberland the delectable nugget of information that a buttery is where the butts are kept, and also that a butler is the person in charge of the buttery, and that butts contain food and drink, I had thought that this was a ripe topic for a song.

The opportunity to compose that song came a few years later when I was asked by Peter Lindley at Ford First School in the north of the county to go and be musically creative during a couple of days of Medieval Castle immersion study. The children cooked Medieval-style food for lunch, dressed up in castle-y costumes, made an amazing blue lion mask, and we created a musical drama.

This song formed part of that drama as the children learned a  little about the life of the servants working in a castle before a visit to Warkworth Castle itself. It contains some vocabulary from Medieval times, is in an enthusiastic, Medieval-inspired style and can be sung as a cheery round. We performed the song with bells and percussion and incorporated some solos too.

The photos in the video are all of Warkworth Castle – the kitchen with its dramatic pair of fireplaces, the beer cellar, and the stairs that lead from the beer cellar to the buttery and pantry.