Material and Social Life in the Middle Ages197A diet of bread was monotonous and poor in virtu-
ally every nutritional element save carbohydrates.
Whenever possible, people tried to supplement it with
other foods, but their choices were limited. Protein was
provided mainly by dried peas, beans, lentils, or chick-
peas that were cooked into a wide variety of soups and
stews. Meat was rare except on the tables of the feudal
aristocracy. Their chief leisure pastime was hunting,
and they tended to consume vast quantities of game,
seasoned after the twelfth century with powerful spices
from the East and washed down with great drafts of
wine or beer. Many peasants could not afford to keep
animals at all, though ducks and chickens were raised
for their eggs and stewed or made into soup when they
had passed their prime. Those with capital or excess
land might have some hogs or a cow. Even for them,
meat was likely to be a seasonal delicacy. The cost of
feeding livestock over the winter was high, and even the
wealthier peasants slaughtered their animals in the fall,
eating some and preserving the rest by smoking or salt-
ing. By Lent, this had been consumed, which probably
meant that the prohibition against eating flesh in the
holy season caused little hardship.
Hunting and fishing provided other dietary supple-
ments, though in many areas both fish and game be-
longed to the lord and poaching was discouraged by
ferocious penalties. Even the gathering of nuts in the
forest might be prohibited. Other sources of protein
were milk and cheese, and salted herring became in-
creasingly important as an item of commerce in the
thirteenth century. Owing to the widespread use of salt
as a preservative and to the general monotony of diets,
scholars believe that medieval people consumed many
times the quantity of salt that Westerners are accus-
tomed to eating today.
Fresh fruits and vegetables were also rare. Those
who possessed a kitchen garden might have a fruit tree
or a cabbage patch, but many of today’s most common
vegetables were either unknown or raised, such as let-
tuce, for medicinal purposes. Onions and garlic, how-
ever, were common, as were indigenous spices such as
thyme, rosemary, basil, and marjoram. Honey was the
primary sweetener. Sugar was largely unknown and
remained prohibitively expensive until the seventeenth
century when it could be imported in quantity from the
New World.
A wide variety of fermented beverages completed
the medieval diet. Wine was rarely produced north of
the forty-ninth parallel (roughly the latitude of Paris),
though it was consumed everywhere, especially by the
rich. North of the wine districts, the popularity of mead,
a drink made from fermented honey, declined during
the Middle Ages while that of cider appears to have in-
creased. Beer, or “liquid bread,” was an important food
supplement throughout all of central and northern Eu-
rope. Properly speaking, medieval beer was a form of
ale. It was brewed from malted grain, preferably barley,
using the top fermentation process. Hops were some-
times used on the continent but never in the British
Isles. The result was a dark, rather sweet concoction that
resembled the stouts and Scotch ales of today. Bottom
fermentation, which produces lager or pilsner beers, was
invented by the Germans in the fifteenth century. Brew-
ing was usually done in the home and, like other aspects
of the beverage trade, was dominated by women. It was
an important economic sideline for those families who
could afford the vats and other equipment. A skilled
woman who was otherwise housebound by small chil-
dren could manage the process. Tea, coffee, and tobacco
were as yet unknown in the West, while alcohol, dis-
tilled in alembics on a small scale, was used primarily for
medicinal purposes. Water was regarded with suspicion
because it was thought to cause an imbalance of humors,
an impression no doubt created by the effects of drink-
ing from polluted sources.
The nutritional value of medieval diets is difficult
to determine. It varied widely according to region
and social class and tended to fluctuate with the sea-
sons. Autumn, when trees bore their fruit and animals
were killed for the winter, was usually a time of
relative abundance, while spring, for all its promise
of harvests to come, was the leanest of seasons.
Important as they were, even these variables were
overridden by considerations of price and availability.
Fluctuations based on the relative scarcity or abun-
dance of different commodities were dramatic and
often terrifying, especially for the poor who had
limited opportunities to store food. The failure of a
single harvest could lead to hunger for those who
were economically marginal.
The best balance between protein, fats, and carbo-
hydrates was probably found in pastoral villages and on
the tables of rich townsfolk. Urban laborers and peas-
ants on manors whose primary crop was grain suffered
chronic deficiencies of everything except carbohy-
drates. Everyone else fell somewhere in between,
though the feudal aristocracy may be suspected of eat-
ing too much animal protein. The concept of vitamins
was unknown. The general scarcity of fresh fruits and
vegetables ensured that minimum daily requirements
would rarely have been met by anyone and deficiencies
were probably common. The poor in particular were
often deformed by rickets or goiter and likely were
physically smaller than those with better access to