Long before European maritime trade with Asia, Asian spices were reaching Europe along the route of the Silk Road. Indeed, the 9th Century English medical textbook known as Bald's Leechbook contains a number of herbal remedies which include ground black pepper. Of course, food would also use the wide arrays of herbs, spices and flavourings native to, or found throughout Europe, such as salt, garlic, thyme, marsh mallow, horseradish, chicory, basil, fennel, hops, rosemary, sage, parsley, oregano, etc.

British Library MS Add. 32085 is a fragmented text from the late 13th or early 14th Century which contains in part a series of recipes including:

Here's another dish called sage sauce. Take the good spices, that is, ginger, cloves, cinnamon and galangal, and grind them in a mortar; then take a handful of sage and rub it well with spices in the same mortar; then take eggs and hard boil; take out the yolks, pounded with sage, mix with wine, apple or malt vinegar, take egg whites, finely chop and add to the sage mixture; put in pork legs or [other] cold meat, and then serve.

As you can see, plenty of herbs and spices. A recipe for ravioli states:

Take good flour and sugar, make a tough dough; take good cheese and butter, mix thoroughly; then take parsley, sage and shallots, crumble them well, put in the filling; put the cooked ravioli on a bed of grated cheese and cover with grated cheese, then heat it again.

Many recipes simply tell the cook to "take the good spices" and occasionally saffron.

The Forme of Curry is an English cookbook from the 1390s that contains a variety of recipes which call for a gode broth containing erbes. One example is:

Take noumbles of calf, swyne, or of flesch schepe, perboyle hem & kerve hem to dyce, cast hem in gode broth & do therto erbes, grynde chiballes y hewe smal, seeth it tendrer & lye it up with yolkes of eyroun, do therto verjous, safroun, poudour douce & salt & serve hitt forth.

It was also relatively common to season meat with fruits and sweetness. A recipe from The Forme of Curry for "Egredouce" entails:

Take counynges or kydde & smyte hem on pecys rawe & fry hem in white grece, take raysouns of coraunce & fry hem, take oynouns perboyle hem & hewe hem smal & fry hem, take rede wyne, suger with poudour of peper, of ginger, and canel salt * cast therto, & lat hit seeth with a gode quantite of white grece & serve it forth.