[Neal Matheson]

Later though perhaps relevant.
http://ceathairne.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/calo...rmies.html

[Pieter B.]

A small bit from Froissart



I read a lot more about Mutton and Pig than beef which is curious. I realize pigs are easy meat so to say but how does this work out for sheep? Do they compete with cattle on prime grass grounds?

[Neal Matheson]

It all depends on local conditions but generally you can get 5-6 ewes for every cow, Sheep can also graze on rougher pasture and cause far less compaction and damage to soil in the winter. You also get milk and wool from them. Mutton is phenomenal meat and really fatty.
Sheep theft was a serious crime in the Scottish Highlands.
Neal

[Michael Curl]

Quick comment on the dog thing (about how dogs mean that their is a lot of meat around).

I am currently living in the country of Georgia and I can tell you that dogs here eat very little meat (as we would think of it), and they do not ever get meat served to them. They only eat out of the garbage, and are fed a mostly bread diet. I know how this sounds to Americans, but I assure you, our host family's dog is fed a 100% bread diet, and has to steal anything else it wants out of the garbage or kill it itself.

I can tell you that literally no Georgian I have ever met would even consider giving a piece of meat to a dog unless it had fallen on the floor or was spoiled. So only that kind of meat would be given to dogs.

And there are A LOT of dogs here, especially strays. So in order to have a high dog population all you need is a lot of garbage (medieval cities certainly had those) and... that's about it.

[Randall Moffett]

"I am pretty sure that if you were peasant in the feudal system back then, you would've have been rather lucky to have meat even on occasion. Yes, they did have hunters and such people, but typically all the large game like deer were reserved for the nobles. Also tanning leather took a long time, and I'm assuming that the peasants who worked day and night in the fields didn't have the time needed to make many leather garments. Mostly their diet would have consisted of what little surplus of grain that they produced."

Not sure this is quite right as I said above. First off deer are hardly the only animals in forests. There are a number of smaller birds and other animals know medieval peasants ate. Second domesticated animal bones are fairly common in finds of trash pits in towns and villages. Goats, sheep and pigs, especially pigs are pretty low resources. You set them loose and they sort of do their own things. Salted pork and bacon. Assuming hunters only hunted deer is highly unlikely with so many critters. As far as we know peasants wore very little leather garments. Seems to have had pretty limited use for such things.

Why assume they had little surplus. This is the rise of the wealthy common farmer in the west. Clearly it was not so little for many of them as the period goes on.

As well why assume that they would first have to tan the leather to eat the animal? Why could they not have traded it to a tanner or someone with time and facilities for it? Seems like a pretty peripheral argument as to if peasants had meat.

EDIT-
Was doing something on this website and found this... something to look at some contemporary sources.
http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/booksforcoo...lfood.html

RPM

[J. Nicolaysen]

[Neal Matheson]

Thanks very much J. !

[Pieter B.]

[J. Nicolaysen]

[Adam Rose]

I don't know how much NZ sheep farming has in common with the middle ages, but it's normal for wool producers to castrate the male lambs very young, and keep or slaughter them a year later based on the following year's lambs - the male sheep still have perfectly good wool so you can keep more of them in order to fully utilize your grazing for maximum wool after a bad lamb season.

But if they're raised primarily for meat they normally get slaughtered earlier (less than a year old), as lamb meat is much more valuable than mutton.

[Gary T]

The Middle ages looked at animals first as a renewable source of food/energy, secondly as animals to be slaughtered.

The wild game (rabbits, squirrels, birds, etc.) would be a minor source of meat, unless the people are at closer to a starvation level. Not that wild game was relegated to food you eat when starving, but merely that a productive farm will have generally more meat produced than the woods around it. If times are very very tough, a good portion of the farm animals may have already been eaten.

I'd also have to add the percentage and type of meat in the diet could vary widely by area and by time. Apparently the earlier Saxons were big into pig farming, and pork was a big part of their diet. The Scandanavians, with colder climate and many fjords offering sea access had a lot of fish in their diet. I also understand that in Ireland and England Cattle farming became a "business" around the 15th century or a bit later onward. Instead of the model where cattle were bred first for work and milk, secondly for meat changed to a meat based farming system. Your smaller farms still probably would have used the earlier middle ages model, but there were large cattle specialty farms cropping up around this point as well. The increased use of the horse as a plow animal probably had something to do with this as well. This may have also led to cowhide becoming cheaper, and the "buff coat" somewhat replacing textile based protective garments.

The time and locale I am most familiar with regarding this is England from roughly the 11th-14th centuries.

One thing to realize as well - the size and production of middle ages farm animals were a fraction of what we see now.

Cattle were bred for oxen to pull plows and provide other work, and cows for milk. There was some surplus of males to be butchered, but a good amount of males were kept for labor.

Sheep - Males were not butchered in any great number as well, as the primary thing sheep produced, wool, was produced by male and female alike, which is why the ratio of male to female was relatively close.

Pigs - A pretty pure meat animal, produces little else that is productive. They breed rapidly, grow relatively fast, and eat almost anything. Would seem to be a great choice, but they were also very destructive, it was very common to see pig owners fined. Apparently though in the Middle Ages in England, they did not constitute a large percentage of the animals on a farm

Some of the biggest producers of meat were foul, most commonly chickens and Geese. Only problem with Geese is that they are rather monogamous, so the inefficient males had to be kept for breeding.

Chickens on the other had were not. Males were usually neutered and raised for meat (Capons). Most peasant would have some chickens on their toft and croft.

But with the Majority of the animals, other than Pigs and Chickens, and to an extent Geese, the animals were kept around for other products than meat, such as young, eggs, labor, and wool. When their productivity in these areas greatly declined, they were slaughtered, but this provided rather tough dry meat. And animals in the middle ages had a longer "shelf life" than today's animals. Today a dairy cow might be done after 4 years - in the middle ages it would be about twice this amount of time. This is also a portion of why modern animals produce more milk/eggs etc., as they are kept only during their most productive years.

[Pieter B.]

While we are on the topic:

Does anyone know how cities were supplied with non cereal crops? We have tons of evidence for grain import but I cannot find anything on Cauliflower or Sprouts. Nor any paintings depicting carrot fields.

[Jean Henri Chandler]

I'm going to side with the folks who said that meat was not unusual for "commoners" (which as others have noted means a really wide range of people). If you can go so far as to generalize... which is dangerous to do for medieval Europe because it's such a fiendishly complex world, mostly they ate a pretty rich diet in general, more than you might expect.

I've done a lot of research on the craft guilds in the Central European (mostly German or German / Slavic), Flemish, and Italian cities in the late medieval period (roughly 1360-1520), and in those places at least during that time period, there is evidence that meat was fairly common (except on the frequent saints-days when it was forbidden, but then they used to eat fish and other things). There are three sources of records for this I can think of off the top of my head.

Guild records will give you a lot of information - guild masters usually had to feed their journeymen and apprentices, and this shows up in contracts and in legal disputes between them (and there were plenty of those especially from the second half of the 14th Century through the 15th). Journeymen in particular used to cause trouble about food quite a bit. So there are records of this in apprentice contracts and in city council minutes related to disputes and lawsuits.

Work records. The second is a similar issue, people who hired craftsmen for example, masons to build a church or a castle or carpenters and shipwrights to build a ship, also often had to pay them, feed them, and provide them beer. So there are records of this as well. For example the 19th Century German historian Johannes Janssen described a labor disturbance by journeymen watermen (I think stevedores or people who operated the small lighters used to unload ships) in several Rhenish towns in 1469 as follows:

A coordinated strike by the powerful association of watermen in several cities of the Rhine in 1469 left us a rather amusing complaint from ships masters made to the Margrave of Baden: "…although receiving a florin a day, they are not contented at their meals with a soup, a good vegetable, together with meat, bread and cheese, but demand also a roast and dessert. This seems unreasonable, we cannot afford to give all this."

Whether this represents the actual situation or just poor-mouthing by the guild masters is hard to say. I don't remember what page that is from but it's somewhere in here:

https://archive.org/details/historyofgermanp15jansuoft

The third is all the regulations on butchers. There were a LOT of butchers in medieval towns and they were usually one of the most prominent guilds. Butchers were heavily regulated, including regular inspections by the guild and / or the city, and there are a lot of records related to the laws governing the butchers

I also know the towns had regulations for dealing with poor people, including the poorest day laborers and even beggars (a limited quantity of whom were tolerated in the towns) and even these people were frequently given meat on Holy days and festivals, either by the guilds, by the town government, or by various religious sodalities.

Military expeditions seemed to be amply supplied with meat as well. For example when the town of Regensburg sent some of it's militia (248 men including 73 horsemen, 71 crossbowmen, 16 gunners and various artisans) to join the doomed Hussite Crusade that had been called up, they brought the following supplies:

Forty one wagons carried powder and lead, 6,000 crossbow bolts, 300 fire-bolts, 19 handguns, cowhides, tents, and horse fodder for six weeks. Supplies for the 248 men included ninety head of oxen, 900 lbs of cooked meat, 900 lbs of lard, 1200 pieces of cheese, 80 stock-fish, 56 lbs of uncut candles, vinegar, olive oil, pepper, saffron, ginger, 2 tuns and 73 “kilderkins” of Austrian wine, and 138 “kilderkins” of beer. The total cost of this campaign was 838 guilders.

I got that from the Osprey book "German medieval Armies" but I think their source was a transcription by Hans Delbruck

The book Medieval Law and the Foundations of the State, Alan Harding, page 107 "A typical 15th Century Peasant can earn 20-30 florins per year18 from the sale of lumber, wheat, various animals, meat, eggs, honey, butter, fruit and vegetables" so I'm not sure typical Polish peasants were going around so hungry either.


I've seen a chart somewhere though I think it's kind of hard to find, which shows average height from skeletons found in the last 2000 years or so, and if I remember correctly, there is a peak in the late medieval period and then it gradually declines in the 16th Century and plummets in the 17th, reaching a low point some time in the 18th and then recovering slowly and then at an accelerating rate in the 19th and 20th. One of the reasons we sometimes have trouble understanding the medieval world is that we tend to look at the 19th Century and project backward. We know there was a lot of really desperate, squalid poverty in the 19th Century so we figure it must have been even worse in say, the 15th. But the opposite seems to be true.

Jean

[Randall Moffett]

Pieter,

That is tricky. In most English towns they focus on large market products. So think bulk. Wagon loads and high cost goods. Examples being grains for bulk or the likes and then high cost goods think armour or the likes. Towns tend to have markets even until this day which likely had a part in this. I suspect from cook books veggies were indeed present for the middle class and wealthy. You also have that part of produce could be owed to the lord so he may take his cut of the harvest in such items.

For the poor they had their own gardens. Even in many towns there were small gardens present at times, dependent on the town. but Southampton throughout the period had gardens around in the walls.

RPM

[Gary T]

I'd think the diet of the less than wealthy would be less rich in meat, and rural commoners probably had as much meat as their particular mix of animals and crops allowed.

Also don't forget that animal eaten is one that cannot be sold. A pig would put food on the dinner table, but the sale of same pig might provide other necessities.

But I would think for example a farm focusing on sheep and wool production would have some mutton in the diet, though likely the commoners would eat most old tougher animals harvested after they were no longer acceptable for producing wool.

I think the diets we are looking at examples of are often for the guild members, which is in itself a bit of status, the middle ages version of the middle class. How this compares to the diet of rural serfs I'm not sure, and rural made up the majority of the population compared to urban types.

[Pieter B.]

[Randall Moffett]

right, think veggies and some animals not massive fields for the most part.

RPM

[Philip Dyer]

[J. Nicolaysen]

So, what kinds of vegetables, fruits, nuts and legumes would have been available?

Tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, squashes and corn (maize) are all new world plants, so would not have been available pre-"Columbian Exchange".

Apparently the Italians had developed broccoli and other brassicas all the way back in Roman times.

I would think root veggies, carrots, turnips, beets would do well in Northern Europe, but I don't know how old.
Some beans thrive in cooler temps, but generally need hot temperatures to really grow well. Lentils, olives, fruits were all part of the Mediterranean diet long ago.

I don't know anything about leafy greens like lettuce, so I don't know if these would be found in household gardens from the time.

Surely Mediterranean Spain, France and Italy could provide citrus plants and perhaps other fruits.

It's an interesting subject.

[Pieter B.]