I’m reading a cool book right now, called A History of Food in 100 Recipes, by William Sitwell. He asserts that when the Normans invaded England and seized the throne (after the Battle of Hastings, in 1066), the Normans introduced a key new tool to England, which made white bread possible. You can see some bakers in the Bayeux tapestry, like the guy in the middle who’s lifting bread out of the oven with tongs:
As well as this baker, doing the same thing:
Here’s William the Conqueror (I’m pretty sure) enjoying his refined white bread:
So the cool new tool they introduced was called a hair sieve. I couldn’t find a picture of this pivotal baking device, but according to Sitwell, it propelled England out of the middle ages. It was a sieve with a mesh of woven hair (most likely horsehair) that was used to sift the bran out of the flour in order to produce a white loaf of bread. From that point on, bread became a status symbol. The nobility ate white bread, the tradesmen ate wheat bread, and the poor ate bran. (39-41)
Over the centuries that followed, bakeries tended to cater to different social classes as well—those that provided brown bread for the poor, and those that baked white loaves for the wealthy.