Food, Drink, and the Rhythm of the Year in the Late Middle Ages
What a peasant, a merchant, and a baron ate in the same week of 1380 was recognisably the same set of foods and recognisably different in proportion, and the difference was a sign of rank. This section examines that difference in three connected parts. The first article surveys what people actually ate: the bread and pottage of the peasant, the meat-and-fish rotations of the better-off, the use of the viande and poisson categories of the Viandier of Guillaume Tirel, called Taillevent (c. 1300, first printed c. 1490 in Paris), and the Italian cookbook tradition from Maestro Martino to Platina. The second article looks at ale, beer, and wine as the everyday drink: the brewing of small beer in the home, the great monastic and lay breweries of the Hanseatic League, and the regional preference for wine in the Mediterranean and ale in the north. The third article reconstructs the medieval year — the feasts of Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and the local patron saint, the fasts of Advent, Lent, and the Ember Days, and the agricultural cycle of plowing, sowing, harvest, and slaughter that the church’s calendar both mirrored and shaped.
What was eaten, and why it varied
The standard synthesis of the medieval diet comes from the Annales school, with Fernand Braudel’s chapter on the European meal in Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme (1966–79) and, more specifically, the dietary reconstructions of Guy Fourquin and the late Robert Fossier. For the late medieval period the working tool is the synthesis of Melitta Weiss Adamson, Food in Medieval Times (2004), and the historical-anthropological analysis of Massimo Montanari, The Culture of Food (English translation 1994), which treats medieval cuisine as a system of signs as well as a system of nourishment. Robert Delort’s La vie au Moyen Âge (1992) remains the best single-volume survey of the western European everyday.
The evidence is unusually rich. The manorial accounts of English and French estates, the cellar rolls of monasteries, the Italian merchant letters, the household ordinances of the Visconti and Sforza courts, and the great cookbooks — the Viandier of Taillevent, the Le Ménagier de Paris (c. 1393), the Libro de la cocina of Maestro Martino (c. 1465), and the De honesta voluptate et valetudine of Bartolomeo Platina (1474, the first printed cookbook) — together make it possible to reconstruct the typical week of a country gentleman, an urban artisan, and a great lord with unusual precision. Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (1989), brought the manorial and the archaeological evidence together and showed that the consumption of meat, fish, and dairy rose significantly in the better-off peasant households after the Black Death, when the real wage rose by perhaps fifty per cent by 1400.
Ale, beer, and the daily drink
The daily drink of the late medieval north was ale or beer; the daily drink of the Mediterranean was wine. The small beer — a weak ale of about one per cent alcohol — drunk at every meal was a food rather than an intoxicant, and the great monastic and lay breweries, the grange breweries of the Cistercians, the guild breweries of the Hanseatic cities, and the Braurecht of the Flemish towns, were major enterprises. Richard W. Unger, Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (2007), is the standard account of the trade; Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England (1996), gives the women’s history; the regional surveys of Teuvo Koskinen on the Finnish sahti and of Jean-Pierre Molénat on the Castilian beer are a reminder that the brewing map of Europe was a mosaic of local styles.
Winetown Europe is studied through the great mercantile republics. The Florentine merchants who travelled to Bordeaux, Lisbon, and Madeira in the late 1400s left a correspondence that is one of the best records of the wine trade. The household accounts of the popes at Avignon (1309–76) and of the cardinals of the papal chapel preserve a picture of a Mediterranean drinking culture in which wine was the standard beverage of the Mass, of the banquet, and of the field. The post-plague 1400s saw a sharp fall in wine consumption in some northern regions, partly because the population had fallen and partly because grain was being diverted to brewing.
The liturgical year and the working year
The medieval year was a single rhythm in which the agricultural and the liturgical seasons reinforced each other. The labor of the season was the opus of the farmer, the opus Dei of the choir, and the opera of the kitchen. The framework of feasts, fasts, and vigils is treated in the older work of Francis X. Weiser and, more recently, in Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars (1992), which treats the late medieval English parish calendar as a lived practice. The devotions of Corpus Christi (extended to the whole western church by Urban IV in 1264), the Visitation (raised to a universal feast in 1389 by Urban VI), and the Seven Joys of Mary reorganised the second half of the year around the Body of Christ and the Mother of God.
The agricultural rhythm is best handled through the regional monographs. Christopher Dyer’s An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages (2005) gives the English picture; the work of Georges Duby on the Mâconnais and of Robert Fossier on Picardy is the standard for northern France; the German Dorf studies of Wilhelm Abel and the Italian campagna studies of the Milanese archivists give the eastern and southern counterparts. The combined picture is of a working year that was long, hard, and punctuated by the feasts of Christmas, Easter, May Day, Midsummer, and Michaelmas — feasts that were also, in many cases, the work-team of the battage and the aratura.
Articles in this section
- What did medieval people actually eat?
- Ale, beer, and the medieval drinking habit
- The medieval calendar of feasts, fasts, and labors