The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (28 page)

You would have thought that fish would provide a welcome, non-meat source of protein for the peasantry. Welcome it is indeed, but it does not figure greatly in most rural families’ diets. For those living inland, there are obvious problems of obtaining fresh fish—transportation adding greatly to the cost. But there is another, underlying reason. The Church’s prohibition of meat consumption on certain days helps to create a strong demand for fish among the nobility, gentry, and clergy. For this reason fish is expensive. Manors where the peasants are allowed to fish for themselves (like Alrewas in Staffordshire), are the exception, not the rule.
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Normally the common man is not allowed to fish on the lakes, ponds, and rivers near his home—such rights belong to the lord of the manor. If you are hired to go fishing, your catch will go directly to the lord’s table. Even if the bailiff quietly allows you to keep a fresh trout, you might well sell it. Your peasant host will certainly have no difficulty choosing between two days’ wages and eating a status symbol. Members of the royal family send fish as presents to one another. The duke of York regularly sends pike, sea bream, tench, and salmon to his cousin, King Henry IV. When the royal family set such a high value on fish, what hope does a commoner have? Pickled and salted herrings are the peasant’s usual fish dinner, with salt fish (normally a white fish, like cod) and stockfish (dried cod) the next most common. These are available throughout the year from town markets. Eels may also be bought, either in sticks of twenty or in pies and pasties, being plentiful in medium-sized rivers and relatively inexpensive.

What is in that painted and glazed ceramic jug on the yeoman’s table? The answer is almost certainly ale: that is to say, a drink made from malted barley or oats without any hops in it (the inclusion of hops being the difference between ale and beer). Ale is so important in the medieval diet that its price, like that of bread, is governed by statute law. Four gallons of ale should be sold for 1d when the price of barley is 2s per quarter. The very best ale—which can be sold for as much as 2d per gallon—is made in Kent. But do not expect to find Kentish ale throughout the country: it does not keep. Without hops it goes sour very quickly. When alewives have brewed a new vat, they set about selling it straightaway, putting a bushel on a pole above the door of the house to advertise its availability. In peasant families, the brewing is done on a regular basis by the women of the household,
and when the ale begins to turn sour, it is flavored with herbs and honey or caudled with egg yolks. If spices are available, the sourness might be concealed with ground pepper, galingale (blue ginger), cinnamon, and other exotica, purchased from the local market. In this way, ale is turned into a sort of mulled drink.

Lifting your wooden mug or mazer and taking a swig, you will find that the ale in a peasant household tastes a little sweet. It is also weak. As most prosperous peasants have an aversion to drinking water—which is liable to convey dirt and disease into their bodies—they drink ale exclusively. Only the single laborer and widow, living alone in their one-room cottages, drink water (rainwater is preferred, collected in a cistern in the yard). Married men expect their wives to brew ale as one of their household duties. Cow’s milk is considered suitable only for cooking and for old women and children. Thus the ale cannot be too strong, otherwise the yeoman’s judgment would wobble under the effect of drinking strong alcohol all day every day. In some areas of the country cider and perry (cider made from pears) are drunk instead of ale, especially in the western counties. The cider
can
be strong. It is also quite cheap—half the price of second-best ale, at ½d per gallon. The same can be said of the honey-based drinks, mead and metheglin (the latter being flavored with herbs), which also are to be found in the west and south of the country: extra strength at half the price. Although your English peasant will never have encountered spirits and probably very little wine, drunkenness is by no means unknown. If a yeoman’s wife is good enough to brew full-strength ale or cider and let him drink eight pints of it in rapid succession, the result is quick, predictable, and not peculiar to the fourteenth century.

When you sit down to dinner in a town house, your expectations will probably be governed by what you see around you. If you are in a small wooden building, dining in a small, poorly lit hall, and being attended by your host’s wife, then your fare will probably be less tasty than the yeoman’s meal described above. If your host is an important merchant, on the other hand, and you are being entertained in the well-lit hall of a large house, with several fine pieces of silverware
and smart white linen tablecloths on display, and with a whole pile of trenchers stacked up in front of you (one for each course), then you can expect food far richer and more varied than the peasant could ever dream of offering. You might drink red wine and eat beef, lamb, or kid in sauces prepared by the merchant’s own cook, and taste wafers and sweetmeats afterwards, as would a lord.

In all probability your diet in a town will fall somewhere between the two extremes of peasant and lord, so let us here just consider what it is about food in towns and cities which is different from the country. For the countryman living three or four miles from a town, it is not just the cost of buying things which is restrictive, it is the time taken in getting to the market itself. Whereas the rural yeoman will try to cover all his needs in one trip, the merchant, shopkeeper, or laborer living in a town has no problems nipping to the bakery, or to the fishmongers’ market stalls, or sending a servant. Consequently the townsman—and especially the city dweller—has far less control over his food supply than his country cousins. If he needs bread, he buys a loaf directly from the baker; he does not normally go to the miller with his own grain unless he lives in a very small town and has a few strips of land in the open fields just beyond the walls. Similarly, his garden cannot provide all the fruit and vegetables he needs (except in the cases of a few prosperous merchants, who have substantial town gardens). Most people have to go to the market for garden produce.

As a result of this dependence on the market, food is both better and worse in a town than in the country. There are specialist cooks, who will prepare meat pies and pasties and sell them in the street, either from their cookshops or by wandering around with their wares. Meat is brought into town to be sold, and as there is no particular reason to farm an animal once it has arrived, townsmen are readier to buy and eat young ones, especially lambs and kids, which are less chewy and better tasting. More and more white bread is eaten in the towns and cities over the course of the century. Old men and women in the 1390s will tell you how their grandfathers who grew up in the country used to eat nothing but rye bread, vegetables, and the odd bit of boiled pork; but now they eat lamb and beef and regularly enjoy the luxury of white bread. Nor do they go without fruit. Apples are plentiful in the markets, as are plums and cherries (in season). More exotic fruit, such as oranges, figs, and pomegranates, are imported in
small quantities, although you will only find such luxury items at a fair or in the market of a major city.

Herein lies the advantage of the town. If you have sufficient money you do not need to grow things for yourself; you can just buy what you need. Moreover, in the larger markets you can obtain many things which are unavailable anywhere else. If you want to buy sugar, wine, almonds, dates, aniseed, licorice, sweetmeats, nutmeg, cinnamon, pepper, coriander, currants, raisins, figs, cloves, ginger, salt, rice, treacle—you name it—the market is the place to go. All these things are available in London in 1390. The list above is from one single account of Henry of Lancaster, drawn up by his officers as they prepare for a sea voyage.
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The key issue is cost. One pound of licorice is only Id but a pound of green ginger costs 2s, a pound of cloves more than 4s, and a pound of saffron 10s. A pound of orange conserve (”citronade”) costs 3s, as much as a skilled laborer earns in nine days. Can you imagine working for nine days for one pound of orange marmalade, or that it should cost a third as much as saffron
by weight?
Small wonder that the poor skip breakfast.

Not all spices are prohibitively expensive. In town you will discover that the better-off—and that includes the master craftsmen and prosperous officials, lawyers, and physicians as well as the
merchants—have a range of spices in their cupboards, which they often keep locked away. Pepper is one of the most popular, costing 20d to 22d per pound. Nutmeg may be obtained for 18d per pound. A cheaper way of buying spices is to opt for a mixture made up by the spicerer. These are sorts of curry powder: powder forte (strong) which contains ginger, pepper, and mace; and powder douce (mild, also known as powder blanche), which contains ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and possibly sugar and cloves. Talking of sugar, you will be amazed by the number of forms in which it comes. At the spice shop you will find an array of unrefined brown loaves weighing several pounds each and delicate cakes of refined sugar (”caffetin,” 18d per pound in 1390), red and white flat sugars (cheaper, 12d per pound), Cyprus sugar (cheaper still, at 8d per pound), and then all the derivatives: pot sugar, sugar water, sugar syrup, rose sugar, violet sugar, and barley sugar. The level of refining makes the difference between the cheapest sugars and the most expensive. Interestingly they are all used as spices (not as sweeteners) in sauces to accompany meat and fish dishes, especially those using vinegar, or in fruit pottages.

Although the foregoing makes the town sound appetizing, remember that town dwellers face at least two distinct food-related threats. The first arises from their lack of control of the food supply. If there is no grain, then there is no bread. If the price of grains escalates, and the town authorities try to insist on the prices established by the Assize of Bread, then the bakers are liable to go on strike. Without bread, the town quickly grinds to a halt and disorder breaks out. The second problem arises from having so many middlemen in the food chain. How can the town authorities police the sale of foodstuffs? It is very difficult. When a wild pig is seen dead in a street, and then suddenly disappears, people do not know whether it has been cleared up or cooked. Often they are right to suspect it has been disposed of in their take-away pies. London records are full of cases where a dead pig has been decomposing in the town ditch for a week or so and then ends up being scavenged by a pie-maker. Sometimes medieval people take recycling too far.

A major difference between dining in the country and in a town is the access to different sorts of drink, especially wine. Even a small barrel from a vintner costs between 8s and 10s. This is beyond the reach of a modest yeoman’s income. However, proprietors of urban
taverns buy wine in bulk and sell by the cup. In this way, at a cost of a
½d
or Id, many people can afford to drink a small amount of wine. Of course the cost varies, depending on how sweet the wine is and where it comes from. Most red wine drunk in England is from Gascony the area around Bordeaux (although it is not yet called claret).
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This sells for between 3d and 4d per gallon to bulk purchasers—more if being purchased by the cup. Twice as expensive is Rhenish wine, from the Rhine, costing between 6d and 8d a gallon wholesale. The wines of Rochelle and Spain—such as Lepe, a strong Spanish white wine, or Osey another Spanish white—are comparable in price to that of Bordeaux. Sweet wines from Greece, Crete, and Cyprus sometimes called Romonye and Malvesey (or Malmesey) are about the same price. Cheapest of all is English wine, which is only ever white and normally half the price of Gascon wine. It is scarce, however. Most wine production in England is carried out by the nobility and clergy for their own use. It rarely appears in taverns.

As taverns generally sell wine, not ale, they tend to be quite upmarket establishments. Given their numbers—there are 354 of them in London in 1309—it is not surprising that they vary in quality
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Their wine similarly varies. Establishments which sell poor wine tend to attract the rougher sort and are regularly closed down by the authorities. But there are some reputable establishments. An example of the latter will have mazers of silver-edged wood and clean linen cloths on the tables. It will serve professional people, such as clerks, merchants, officials, and the gentry. The taverner, mindful of the importance of a good reputation, will very probably show you the door with polite firmness at closing time (he is responsible for your actions after curfew). The wine itself is stored in a cellar, in its casks, and carried through to you at your table. In case you have any concerns about what you are drinking, ask to see the barrel. The taverner should keep his cellar door open at all times during opening hours and allow you to check the marks on the barrels. In London, prices are fixed by the authorities, so if you think you have been sold cheap wine in place of the best Rhenish vintages, you should be able to check and take the matter further. If guilty, the taverner will probably back down, knowing that if he is caught misselling his wine, he is liable to be fined or closed down, as well as being drawn to the stocks and having his own supply of wine poured over his head.