FOOD TRADES
. Most medieval people spent well over half of their incomes on food and drink, making
the trade in victuals the most important sector of the medieval economy. In the
countryside, both lords and peasants concentrated on the agricultural production of
foodstuffs, particularly grains, meat, and grapes for wine. Peasants, many of whom lived
on the edge of subsistence, produced most of their own food and often paid their rents or
received wage payments in the form of food. By the late Middle Ages, however, an
increasingly large number of peasants produced a marketable agricultural surplus, which
they either sold to middlemen (like traveling cornmongers) or brought to village and
town markets themselves for sale directly to consumers.
Urban inhabitants were the most active traders and consumers in the medieval food
trades. Between 25 and 40 percent of townspeople worked in some branch of the trade in
victuals. Their occupations ranged from that of the wealthy vintner engaged in the
wholesale purchase and sale of large quantities of wine, to the petty huckster who sold
onions and garlic from door to door. Grains like wheat, rye, and barley represented the
most crucial foodstuffs. A middling-sized town of 3,000 people consumed about 1,000
tons of grain each year, an amount of grain that required about 4,500 acres of arable land.
Thus, a large city like Paris, inhabited by over 100,000 people in the early 14th century,
had to go far outside its own hinterland to acquire adequate supplies of grain. During
times of famine, municipal governments were forced to take spe-cial steps to prevent
hoarding and to secure a regular and cheap supply of foodstuffs. Indeed, the fundamental
anxiety over food supply, particularly grain, ensured that the food trades were among the
most regulated aspects of medieval town life.
Many of the urban food trades were organized into guilds that shared in the regulation
of foodstuffs. Most towns had guilds of bakers, butchers, and vintners; the largest cities
possessed even more specialized guilds, like those of the pastry makers at Toulouse or
poulterers of Paris. With the exception of those few merchants involved in the profitable
long-distance trade in grain, wine, or salt, however, few of the medieval food-trade guilds
attained the political power or prestige enjoyed by some of the other craft guilds, such as
those in the textile trades. Butchers probably represented the most prosperous food-trade
occupation aside from wine and grain wholesalers. Selling both salted and fresh meat, by
the piece or on the hoof, butchers also profited from the sale of hides, skins, horns, and
animal fat to other craftspeople. Mutton was the most common and cheapest meat they
sold; pork was twice as expensive and beef four times as dear as mutton. As stock
breeding expanded in the countryside and urban meat consumption increased in the late
Middle Ages, the affluence of butchers appears to have grown even more.
Many urban residents produced a good deal of their own food by raising their own
chickens, pigs, and even cows, and growing fruits and vegetables in their gardens. Some
made their own bread dough (but usually had to take it to the baker for baking). For other
essential foodstuffs, townspeople depended largely on the market. Fish, for example, was
usually purchased in the marketplace, although inhabitants of coastal communities easily
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