But, they would be eating lots of whole grains which are sources or both.
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In addition to the comment that was made abour heating, I have a feeling medieval folks didn’t spend that much time walking around indoors. They would be outside, or they would be inside sitting down or sleeping.
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Yeah, canning and freezing - both of which are quite modern - effectively mean one doesn’t have to eat seasonally even when eating locally. (And I suspect they hastened the loss of many traditional preservation methods that actually nutritionally benefited food in ways that freezing and canning don’t.)
Well, for people living in far-North Arctic and Ice Age conditions, maybe, but those were an extreme exception to what’s been normal during human history. (And even Arctic peoples eat some fruits and vegetables.) Apparently Inuits have genetic adaptations that help with a meat-heavy diet, and they eat things like raw whale skin that provide vitamin C and other nutrients that would be lacking in a meat diet elsewhere.
What’s interesting is that although early Mediaeval people were almost as tall as now, they actually got shorter later, particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries. (From whence we have more surviving houses, which probably contributes to the notion that people used to be shorter, because they sometimes were…)
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You can get pretty close to a balanced diet if you eat all the animal, including the stomach contents. Depending on your prey though. Probably won’t live as long as someone with good access to greenery but it’s not necessarily instant scurvy.
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Came here to say that!
Enjoyable video, which will lead mt down yet another Youtube rat hole. And a very interesting discussion about fish.
and drying and pickling. we used a variety of techniques from multiple periods in ways best suited to our circumstances.
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Also, the Industrial Revolution, which did a number on the health of the industrial laborers.
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‘The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century’ by Ian Mortimer has a good section on food - pottage features prominently.
With all its grains and pulses I’m surprised it hasn’t made a hipster comeback in a Shoreditch cafe.
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Scandinavians around 1000CE were a little shorter than their modern descendants:
http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/vikheight.shtml
Though looking at the numbers on that page, some of them would have been tall even in a modern crowd.
I was confused by how the bit before the title sequence talked about warrior’s food (supported by “THE KNIGHT” in big letters in the title itself), while the rest of it all appeared to be about peasant food. Is the implication that the military caste ate the same food as peasants, at least on campaign?
English is, so I understand, unusual in that several meats have names distinct from the animal they are sourced from: typically, the name of the animal derives from Anglo-Saxon, and the name of the meat from French. So:
- cow → beef (Fr. boeuf , “ox”, “bullock”)
- sheep → mutton (Fr. mouton, “sheep”)
- pig → pork (Fr. porc, “pig”)
I was always told that this was because the English-speaking peasants would raise the animals while the French-speaking aristos would eat them, though I guess this could be a just-so story. The other common domestic food animal, chicken, uses the same name for both creature and meat: I was interested that there was no mention of chicken in the video.
The chap presenting the video, Jason Kingsley, is quite a character: he spends the money he’s made from his games company on being a modern-day knight, complete with a stableful of horses and several sets of jousting armour.
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Actually sometimes such tests are necessary. For example after slaughtering a pig (or hunting wild boar), it absolutely has to be tested for parasites. The tissue sample has to be inspected under a microscope by a qualified person (usually veterinarian).
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A friend of mine grew up in Shandy Hall, home of the novelist Laurence Sterne. The oldest part of the building dates from around 1430, and there are plenty of low beams lying in wait for the unwary. Sterne was, if I remember correctly, said to be well over six feet tall, maybe 6’3" or so. I’m about 5’11". I used to concuss myself pretty much every time I visited. I believe there is a PhD thesis to be written on the possible influence of a series of stunning blows to the head on Sterne’s writing and, indeed, English literature as a whole.
It’s possible that medieval doorways didn’t reflect the height of people as much as the costs of construction. If you build the doorways or the roof six inches higher, you have to find that much more material for the walls and all the other supporting timbers in the place. If your situation is a bit marginal, you might well make the trade-off: shorter construction times and lower costs against having to remember to duck when going through doorways for the rest of your life. Also, a high-ceilinged house would be harder to heat in winter. There are lots of reasons why it might have been a good idea to build low.
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Okay, I’m not a serious researcher, but digging around a little I see that every source says that medieval people averaged under 5’ 6" in height, based on skeletal analysis, except one guy, from Ohio State or something, who is quoted in a bunch of BuzzFeed-like sites claiming that his analysis of everyone else’s data shows that medieval people were actually tall.
Maybe he’s a genius who’s turned the entire field of forensic osteology on its head, but I’m skeptical. I’ve seen up close way to many examples of bitter small town professors with no academic reputation to lose and everything to gain from pushing out a viral man-bites-dog “scientific” nuglet.
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Like I say, the ceilings weren’t particularly short, just the position of the beams. There would be no thermal or economic gain from doing so. Interestingly, the 18th and century parts of the house, when I’m told people were suddenly shorter, were a more normal height.
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You ate what you could get. If you were on campaign, that probably meant hammering on the door of a local peasant and saying “Feed me.”
I think that many members of the warrior caste weren’t that far above the peasants in any case. A knight would have enough disposable income to be able to equip himself and his men (who would be firmly in the peasant class), which meant that he owned some land and had serfs or tenant farmers to work it. But for every great lord with a keep and a few hundred men at arms, there were probably dozens if not hundreds of younger sons of younger sons who might have a fortified manor house (if that), and a half dozen or a dozen armed retainers. They’d call themselves knights too, but their standard of living probably wasn’t a great deal higher than that of a well-to-do smallholder, and their diet may not have been that different.
Chicken is the word for both animal and meat, but the general term ‘poultry’ is indeed derived from the French ‘poule’, so the rule still holds up, more or less.
The pattern is so marked in English that I think it’s more than just a just-so story. It may not have been the case that the Norman aristos were the only ones eating meat – the bulk of the peasant diet might have been starches (bread, and root vegetables like parsnips or turnips), but there was probably a little bit of protein (meat, eggs, dairy) at every meal, at least in good times. But perhaps the upper classes talked more about the food they ate, so that French was the language of recipes, of discourse about food as food.
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There’s also the fact that a lot of produce is quite tasty and edible even if it doesn’t look like a grocery store display. I live in Massachusetts, have gone through several snowstorms and hard freezes, and can still pick at fresh red kale and fresh spinach. It is still very good although there are some leaves that are wilted. Most look very fresh though. If I had a glassed in garden bed, I could also add fresh carrots, cabbage, and possibly scallions too.
From the sixteenth century on, I believe, at least some people had access to cold frames. In the American colonies, I’ve read that composting horse manure was used to heat the cold frames. So, probably more variety was available than we know of.
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The blandness wasn’t always true historically. It was just tightly tied up in a bunch of class issues. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/26/394339284/how-snobbery-helped-take-the-spice-out-of-european-cooking
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For 3 years I lived in a lovely stone cottage terrace house made from an 18th Century coach house. The ceilings were fine but every lintel was at eyebrow height; I’m 6’1" for comparison and obviously lucky to be alive…
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As a native Midwesterner, it’s weird to me how flavorless and terrible a lot of food was when I was a kid. A lot of food is grown here. I mean, I realize a lot of the grocery store food camne from California actually, and nowadays from other countries, but I grew up on garden-grown vegetables and I didn’t know that grass-fed pasture-raised cattle were anything special until later in life, because I grew up on pasture-raised, grass-fed beef.
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pasteurization alone eliminated a swath of disease that were really common back in the day but completely unheard of now. Like, who the hell gets Scrofula any more?
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