In Hollywood’s version of the Middle Ages,  peasants ate sad gruel while nobles ate stuffed pigs and peacocks.

But what was  eating in medieval Europe really like?

Hello, and welcome to Footnoting History.

I’m Lucy, and on this episode, I’m going to be discussing food and diet in medieval Europe.

This topic was suggested by one of our listeners, Ruth Buechler; thanks, Ruth!

And apologies if  I’m pronouncing your last name in too German a way.

Ruth wanted to know about cuisine in Europe  and Asia and Africa before the globalization of cuisine in the sixteenth century.

Any one  of these would be an interesting story.

There’s a rhapsody on pasta from  fourth-century China that speaks to my soul.

But I think it makes sense  to stick with one continent at a time, so I’m starting with medieval Europe,  the time and place I specialize in.

Particularly in the US, pop culture ideas about  medieval Europe are much more widespread than actual knowledge about medieval Europe.

And  the most durable clichés about medieval Europe, whether those relate to the idea of  a permanently downtrodden peasantry, or indulgent banquets attended by  people who didn’t know how to use forks, have been around for a long time.

So  let’s start with a bit of debunking.

The most widespread differences in what people  ate were the results of seasonal and regional differences in diet.

So, for instance, then as  now, we could speak of a “Mediterranean diet”; it just wouldn’t involve tomatoes.

I know.

Also,  while Farm-to-Table is now a call for sustainable eating, and a label you might find on the menus  of cute cafés, it was just… the norm for most of human history, everywhere there was agriculture.

And the importance of agriculture and agricultural rhythms to defining the lives of medieval people,  especially the vast majority — over 90% — who were involved in working the land, cannot be  overstated.

This is why I get really excited about any depiction of farming in medieval TV  and movies.

Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood may be a mixed bag, but at least there’s a grain supply  subplot!

I love the grain supply subplot.

Anyway: technological change affected medieval  agricultural work, as did cycles of weather.

The shift from a two-field to a three-field  system as a dominant model was a significant one, enabling better crop yields, and thus improved  nutrition, food security, and population growth.

Another important factor in what people ate  was what some historians have called The Cereal Revolution, which is a really fun phrase  to say.

Now, if you do an internet search for cereal revolution, you’ll find mostly information  about Corn Flakes, Grape-Nuts, and other breakfast innovations of the late nineteenth and early  twentieth centuries.

But for medievalists, this term refers to agricultural developments  of early medieval Europe, roughly from the late ninth century onwards.

In this period, we see the  development of a moldboard plough… Stay with me here!

I promise it’s more exciting than it sounds.

This plough does several things at the same time, which is important in regions with relatively  cool climates and heavy soil.

The coulter slices, the moldboard turns the soil, buries  larvae and remnants of old crops, raises nutrients to the surface, and  it enables improved field drainage.

So this reduces the risk of seeds rotting  in the soil before they can sprout, and helps contribute to what some historians  have called the “cereal revolution,” with more rye and barley entering the everyday diet.

So you have an increased range of delicious and nutritious whole grains for breads, cakes,  and, yes, porridge or gruel.

Parenthetically, just a few months ago I saw a blog post titled  “This winter, gruel is so back.” This doesn’t say great things about purchasing power,  but it did contain a number of good recipes.

But what did medieval people eat to go  along with the bread, cakes, porridge, and beer made from grains?

Subsistence farming  and small-scale gardening were the norm, so most people had a range of vegetables in  their diet.

What vegetables, you ask?

Well, whatever they liked, and whatever would grow  in their climate.

So, if you lived in Italy, you might have a fig tree in your garden.

In England, well, sorry about that; maybe an apple tree instead.

One thing that a  colleague of mine and I were discussing just the other day — apropos our own backyard gardens — is  that we don’t always know what medieval people did with their fruits and vegetables once they were  harvested.

(My colleague currently has a lot of turnips and I am about to have more kale than  I know what to do with.) For medieval people, for safety reasons, cooking fruit and veg  was more common than eating them raw.

As Sam Gamgee memorably says about the South  American potato: boil ‘em, mash ‘em, stick ‘em in a stew.

You can do any of those things  with turnips too.

Or apples, for that matter!

In short, then, location probably mattered more  than class for most fruits and vegetables.

Though the luxury of having a large enough household for  a walled garden, and people to work in it, would obviously make a larger range of foods possible.

King John of England — at least according to some accounts — died of a surfeit of peaches.

Now, as modern historians have pointed out, attributing John’s death to eating unwisely was  a way for chroniclers to criticize his character.

But the fact that he could at least plausibly  access peaches in England in autumn indicates that the monks he’d been staying with kept peaches  in their gardens.

And by the end of the reign of John’s son Henry, English monarchs had peaches  in the gardens of the Tower of London.

The fact that we know this points to another fact about  medieval cuisine: our textual sources for it, as discussed by Kristin in another episode,  are focused on quite elite levels of cooking, eating, and thinking about food.

I  think it’s extremely cool to know that dyeing foods different colors could be  understood to change their qualities because of humoral theory.

But that doesn’t tell  us about food for most of the population.

The monks, meanwhile, didn’t just keep  peaches in case the king stopped by.

Monks and nuns had their diet restrained  and closely regulated by the church year, but fruits and vegetables were always allowed,  unlike meat.

For most of the peasantry, too, no matter where they lived, meat other than  fish (and pork when pigs were killed in the winter) might be a comparatively  rare treat.

Not so, of course, eggs, which you could easily get from your own  poultry, whether chickens or ducks or geese.

The importance of location to what you ate  when is illustrated by the island of Korčula, an island in the Adriatic that is now part of  Croatia.

In large part since it was an island, food often overrode other issues in  local governance.

The island had multiple administrative districts, with different  food production capabilities.

Villages were “agricultural hotspots” in fertile regions, and  rural and urban areas, as elsewhere in Europe, were counterpoints to each other.

Vineyards  were held by islanders of all social strata, and figs and wine were both major exports.

Olives  were grown in great quantity but not exported as much.

Grain fields, meanwhile, had fairly low  yield due to seasonal water shortages.

The island economy was fueled by both agriculture and  pastoralism, which is the herding of livestock.

And this could lead to conflicts, as recorded in  legal documents.

Guards were hired for vineyards.

And the question of which olive tree was damaged  by which sheep could be brought to arbitration.

While archaeology may have the most to tell us  about the food people grew and ate in medieval Europe, legal records can also be a good  source for telling us about how they ate, and things like how shared ovens were managed  in urban areas.

Religion also affected what people ate and how it was prepared.

Seville,  in Spain, had Christian and Jewish butchers as well as those who followed the laws  of the majority Muslim population.

The halakhic laws of Judaism — often elaborated  during the medieval period — covered both what was eaten and how and when it was prepared.

Elisheva Baumgarten, studying northern Europe, has found charming evidence for a Christian  woman lighting her Jewish neighbor’s fire when she noticed it had gone out on the Sabbath.

And for Christians, meanwhile, certain foods were off the menu — at least theoretically —  during all of Lent.

And Advent.

And Wednesdays, and Fridays.

The longer this list gets, the more  significant that “theoretically” may seem.

But in monastic communities, this was strictly  observed, which is part of what led to the much-misunderstood medieval debate about whether  the beaver, clearly a river-dwelling creature, counted as a fish or not.

This isn’t a case of  medieval people not caring about animal taxonomy.

It’s a case of knowing whether or not you can  legally stew that weird-looking beast during Lent.

One perhaps surprising source for what foods were  available to people in medieval Europe is sets of medical recommendations and recipes.

Diet advice  existed both for specific groups, like pilgrims (don’t drink the water unless you’re absolutely  sure it’s safe, and give your digestion time to adjust to unfamiliar cuisines), for individuals,  like kings (please, your grace, consider eating less bacon, it’s bad for your health no matter how  tasty it is) and for the general population, for instance, in the famous Salernitan regimen, which  took its name from the medical school of Salerno,

in southern Italy.

This gives sound advice like:  get moderate exercise and sleep enough, as well as eat a variety of foods.

Medieval medical theory  meant that they didn’t follow the fads of modern diet advice, which tends to label certain foods as  either good or bad.

According to medieval theory, it really depended on a person’s individual  balance of the four humors, which in turn could be affected by age, gender, and temperament.

Dark-colored meats were linked to melancholy, for instance; whereas warming foods like  red wine and ginger could help cheer you up if you had a tendency to melancholy yourself.

Color, as I mentioned above, was also linked to

ideas about food: eating a bland diet of bread  and dairy was clearly abstemious.

Contemporary psychologists tell us that the color of food — and  even the color of serving dishes — can affect our perception of taste.

But sensory perception  is at least partially culturally defined, so we can’t know the extent to which this  was true for medieval people as well.

Apropos the advice for pilgrims not to  drink potentially-unsafe water, I feel I should make clear that the myth of people never  drinking water in medieval Europe is just that: a myth.

It plays into a lot of other myths about  medieval Europe: that it was dirty and irrational, a place where nothing was safe and people were  maybe drunk all the time.

I actually once had a student ask me if medieval Europe was the way  it was because people were constantly buzzed.

Many assumptions there.

And the answer is no.

For one thing, the “small beer” or “small ale” that most people in northern Europe regularly  consumed was fermented for a few days at most, and had a very low alcohol content.

Watering  wine was also common.

And because of reading a lot of legal disputes, I can say with complete  certainty that people also really prized their access to fresh well water, particularly in  cities.

So: did people often create fermented drinks to make sure what they were drinking  was safe?

Yes.

Was all water in medieval Europe

unsafe?

No.

There you go: an actual yes/no  answer from a historian!

It’s a miracle!

This takes me to a final set of myths about food  in medieval Europe, and these are connected to

spices.

Myth 1: medieval people just  used spices to cover up the taste of spoiled food.

For one thing, that sounds so  gross.

For another thing: even if it worked, the idea that it was effective would only last  until… maximally a couple of hours after the first time someone tested out that theory.

An  infamous, often-quoted set of regulations says that spoiled food from town markets can be given  to the residents of hospitals.

But this, too,

is one of those things that just makes no sense:  unless you assume that the people of medieval Europe actually were rational human beings, and go  from there.

And from there, saying: okay, people very clearly cared about having strict regulations  on food health and safety in the markets, and cared about ensuring the continuity of hospitals,  I think it makes perfect sense if what’s happening here is the equivalent of a bakery donating  day-old bread to a community food program.

This food may be past its medieval sell-by date,  but it’s still useful, and it’s going to be used.

In hospitals, making sure that food was  prepared in ways suitable to support people’s health needs was the norm; they wouldn’t just  be throwing rotten vegetables in the soup pot.

This takes us to perhaps the most elusive question  about medieval food: what did it taste like?

We can reconstruct recipes, of course, but  this can only get us so far.

We know that long-distance trade routes brought ginger and  pepper and saffron into medieval Europe, but that doesn’t in itself tell us details of how they  were used.

And crucially, to my mind, we don’t know what the medieval palate was like.

It wasn’t  spoilt by the quantities of salt and sugar we’ve been used to for… at least a hundred years or so  now.

And a lot of recipes don’t have the kinds of

measurements that would enable us to say: this is  definitely what they meant by sweet, or spicy, or sour.

Moreover, while archaeologists can do work  that shows us average soil fertility in places that were under cultivation in medieval Europe,  we can’t know details of how changes in soil nutrients between then and now changed the nature  of the food that was grown in that soil.

Recent comparisons between organic and conventional,  intensive agriculture have shown us how dramatic those changes can be, but that just leaves us with  bigger questions, in some ways.

So… I really wish I could know what a medieval apple tasted like,  fresh off the tree.

Or a fig, or as many figs as I could fit in a basket.

Or spiced wine, or turnip  stew, or the chicken and barley recipe that at least one medieval hospital served to help people  get over chest colds in the winter.

And these are all things that, alas, we can’t know.

But we do  know that people weren’t dependent on sad gruel.

This and all of our Footnoting History  episodes are available captioned on our YouTube channel.

Thank you  for listening and subscribing,

and until next time, remember: the best  stories are always in the footnotes.