St. George's Day ¡ 23rd April
St. George's Day tends to get a quiet ride. A flag on the church, maybe a pint of bitter, and that's about it. But if you're looking for a reason to celebrate England, I'd argue the cheese is as good a place to start as any - because the story of English cheesemaking is genuinely ancient, and a lot of the cheeses we mature and sell at Rennet & Rind have roots that stretch back to the medieval period and beyond.
When Edward III adopted St. George as England's patron saint in 1348, the country was already a serious cheesemaking nation. Monasteries were the engine rooms. Cistercian and Benedictine monks had brought techniques from France and developed them into something distinctly English - hard, pressed, territorial cheeses built to last. Farmhouse wives made cheese from surplus milk as a way to preserve it. Markets in towns like Chester, Leicester, and Gloucester traded cheese as a staple commodity. This wasn't artisan food as a luxury - it was the backbone of the rural economy.
What's remarkable is how many of those medieval traditions survive today in the work of the small, independent cheesemakers we partner with. So here are five cheeses from our counter that carry a genuine connection to that deep English heritage - five cheeses fit for St. George's Day.
1. Yoredale Wensleydale
Wensleydale Creamery ⢠North Yorkshire
If any English cheese can claim a truly medieval origin story, it's Wensleydale. In 1150, Cistercian monks from Roquefort in southern France settled at Jervaulx Abbey in the Yorkshire Dales and began making cheese from the milk of local ewes. They brought their cheesemaking knowledge with them - and over the following centuries, as the recipe adapted to English conditions and eventually switched from sheep's to cow's milk, what emerged was something entirely its own.
The monastery was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1536, but by then the recipe had passed into the hands of local farming families, and Wensleydale cheesemaking survived. It's one of the clearest, most direct lines you can draw from a medieval monastic tradition to a cheese you can buy and eat today.
Yoredale Wensleydale, the version we stock from Wensleydale Creamery, is a lovely, crumbly, honeyed cheese with a gentle lactic tang. It's the real thing - made in the dale it's named after, carrying nearly 900 years of continuous heritage.
2. Montgomery's Cheddar
J.A. & E. Montgomery ⢠North Cadbury, Somerset
Cheddar's medieval credentials are well documented. In 1170, King Henry II's pipe rolls record the purchase of 10,240 pounds of cheese from the village of Cheddar in Somerset - at a farthing per pound. He declared it the finest in Britain. His son, King John, continued the tradition, ordering Cheddar cheese for royal banquets. The natural caves of Cheddar Gorge provided perfect conditions for ageing: cool, humid, consistent.
That's over 850 years of continuous cheesemaking in Somerset. Montgomery's is the heir to that tradition. Jamie Montgomery's family has been making Cheddar on Manor Farm in North Cadbury for three generations, using raw milk from their own herd, traditional pint starters, and hand-cheddaring. It's one of only three or four genuinely traditional Cheddars left in the world.
When you cut into a wheel of Montgomery's and get that deep, complex, almost brothy savouriness layered with a bright tang - you're tasting something that connects directly to the cheese Henry II was buying in the twelfth century. Different hands, same land, same craft.
3. Appleby's Red Cheshire
Appleby's ⢠Hawkstone Abbey Farm, Shropshire
Cheshire is one of the oldest named cheeses in England. There's a persistent myth that it appears in the Domesday Book of 1086, but that doesn't hold up to scrutiny - the first confirmed written reference is from around 1580, in Thomas Muffet's Health's Improvement. Even so, that still makes Cheshire one of the earliest English cheeses we can put a name to, and it's widely accepted that cheese was being made in the Cheshire plains long before anyone wrote it down. The salt-rich pastures of the region - sitting on top of ancient salt deposits - gave the cheese its distinctive character.
Before Cheddar rose to dominance, Cheshire was England's cheese. By the mid-1600s, over 4,000 farms were producing it. It was the cheese of London, the cheese of the Royal Navy.
Appleby's is the last family making traditional clothbound Cheshire with raw milk. Their Red Cheshire, coloured with annatto in the old style, is crumbly, minerally, and bright - with that saline tang from the Shropshire soil. When the Appleby family retires, this cheese dies with them. It's living history, and it deserves your attention.
4. Cornish Yarg
Lynher Dairies ⢠Pengreep Farm, Cornwall
Cornish Yarg is a modern cheese with medieval roots. The recipe - a semi-hard cheese wrapped in stinging nettles - is based on a formula dating to the thirteenth century, rediscovered in the 1980s by Alan and Jenny Gray (Yarg is Gray spelled backwards). Nettle-wrapping was a common preservation technique in medieval England: the leaves created a natural protective rind, helped control moisture, and contributed their own gentle, mushroomy flavour to the cheese beneath.
Catherine Mead and the team at Lynher Dairies on Pengreep Farm near Truro have turned that old idea into one of the most distinctive cheeses in Britain. Local foragers hand-pick nettles from Cornwall's clifftops and hedgerows. Each leaf is laid by hand onto the young cheese. As it matures, a delicate bloom grows through the nettles, creating that beautiful, lace-like rind.
Under the nettles, the cheese is creamy and lemony near the rind, firmer and more lactic at the core. It's a cheese that looks medieval - green and wild and wrapped in the hedgerow - and in a real sense, it is.
5. Sparkenhoe Red Leicester
David & Jo Clarke ⢠Sparkenhoe Farm, Leicestershire
Leicester has been a market town since the Roman period, and cheesemaking in Leicestershire is documented from at least the seventeenth century. The county sat at the heart of England's medieval dairy belt - rich Midlands pastures that fed the growing demand for hard, transportable cheese. Leicester cheese was coloured with annatto, a natural dye from the seeds of the achiote tree, originally brought to England through the spice trade - a practice that connected English farmhouse cheese to a much wider world.
By the twentieth century, traditional clothbound Red Leicester had vanished entirely. Every Red Leicester on the market was factory-made, rindless, dyed, and bland. Then in 2005, David and Jo Clarke at Sparkenhoe Farm decided to bring it back. They tracked down historical recipes, sourced raw milk from their own herd of Holstein-Friesians, and started making Red Leicester the old way - clothbound, hand-made, annatto-coloured, properly aged.
They were the first people to make raw-milk Red Leicester in over fifty years. The result is a cheese with a deep, butterscotch richness and a firm, slightly crumbly texture - nothing like the plastic-wrapped blocks you'll see in a supermarket. Sparkenhoe is a reclaimed piece of English cheese heritage, and it belongs on your St. George's Day board.
Five cheeses, five threads running back through English history. Monastic cellars, royal courts, market towns, hedgerow preservation, and a family reviving a lost tradition from scratch. That's what I love about British cheese - it isn't static. It's a living craft, constantly being handed forward.
So this St. George's Day, skip the bunting and build a board instead. These five will do you proud.
- Perry