[Jean Henri Chandler]

Regarding gardens inside medieval cities, the medieval city of Danzig / Gdansk had a large section called the "long garden" (Dlugie Ogrody) which was pretty substantial size, about as big as the other major municipalities in the town, the Altsdat or the Rechstadt. From a map I have it looks like it was about 500 meters wide and something like 1 km long at one point in the 15th Century. This wasn't behind the main town fortifications but it did have a wall around it. I don't know how much you can grow in that kind of space or how many acres that works out to but it's more than just a back yard garden that is for sure.

You can see it here, a bit truncated (about 300 x 300 meters), in a much later map of Gdansk after they had added another ring of trace Italienne artillery fortifications enclosing the city in the 17th Century . It's in the center-right part of the map, I think it says langgarden or something in the middle of it.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/...1910-2.jpg

I think a lot of medieval towns would usually build their walls much bigger than the actual city, and there would often be substantial space between the walls and the first buildings. The walls are always a problem for the growth of the town (this is part of the reason many of them were destroyed in the 18th or 19th Centuries) Then when the space gets filled in with buildings they build another section of the town outside of the walls, which in turn gets walled in eventually and etc. Until then there would typically be large gardens and plowed fields. The same also occurred when a town decayed or had suffered economic damage and was shrinking. I've read that by the time of the final Ottoman siege in 1453 much of the space inside the walls of Constantinople was actually plowed fields.

You can see a substantial amount of green space in and near the walls on this map of Frankfurt am Main



Getting back to the original question, I feel like when discussing this I always have to reiterate that it' s dangerous to generalize about Medieval Europe. If you are talking about say, the part of Europe which is equivalent to present-day Romania, commoners probably had a pretty restricted diet. If you are talking about certain parts of France even, or southern Spain, much the same thing.

But in the more urbanized parts of Europe, including Northern Italy and a lot of Central and Northern Europe I think the whole model of the three estates with filthy rich nobles, wealthy churchmen, and destitute serfs, really isn't even close to accurate. When things were going well, the cities were really rich, their economies were booming. For example here is some economic data related to Gdansk / Danzig: In the year 1474 seventy two Danzig ships visited France alone, and fifty one cast anchor on a single day in the mouth of the Vistula. In a single year six to seven hundred ships laden with grain were sent from Danzig to England. From Scotland they bring wool and furs, in Flanders they traded lumber for textiles and manufactured goods. In 1481 no less than 1,100 Danzig vessels of all sizes (including smaller coastal ships) brought wheat to Holland. In the six year period from 1441 to May 1447, Dutch merchants paid Danzig more than 120,000,000 thalers.

Source: Geschichte des deutschen Volkes seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters, "History of the German People at the close of the Middle Ages”, Johannes Janssen, pages 49-50

An early 16th Century observer (the Ventian Francesco Guicciardini) noted that 2,000 carts entered the city of Antwerp every day.

Also even the more rural regions like France and Poland produced huge amounts of grain and other foods.

I don't have exact figures for meat but I know Poland produced a lot of grain. Wikipedia says that average yearly production was 120,000 tons, of which the towns consumed 19%, and that they exported herds of 50,000 cattle annually to Germany.

This is the famous medieval granary of the town of Grudziadz, it was set up with wooden pipes to ship the grain down to the Vistula river for export more efficiently

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vistula#mediavie...s_2009.JPG

Until the fisheries collapsed (probably due to overfishing) the Scania Fish market in the southern shore of what is now Sweden produced an enormous amount of herring. The wiki says that they routinely exported 300,000 barrels of herring from this area alone. Once the herring fishery collapsed there incidentally they just shifted to other places, and other species of fish (like Cod). Until the Black Death in the mid 14th Century, the European population was booming.



It took a long time to recover but you can see that the rate of population growth pretty quickly starts to become almost vertical again until the 30 Years War in the 17th Century.


In places like Flanders, Southern Germany, Northern Italy, and the Rhineland, gentry were often poorer than even middle-ranked merchants who could be amazingly rich even by today's standards. I don't know if anyone ever converted Jacob Fugger's wealth circa 1520 into the modern equivalent but I think he would be considered an Oligarch today. He was rich enough to loan money to Popes and kings, and he wasn't the only one, not even the only one in his own town (the Welsers were nearly as rich as the Fugger's and there were 2 or 3 other ultra wealthy families in Augsburg in the 15th-16th Centuries).

I think the main issue as it relates to health and diet in this period is that it was unstable. Everything was unstable (very generally speaking of course). People in the middle classes, free landowning peasants, artisans, low ranking merchants and gentry, skilled servants, middle ranking Churchmen etc., got a lot of food (and an almost dangerous amount of alcoholic beverages), I suspect, even a lot by today's standards - during the good times. But harvests failed, (there was a horrific famine in the early 14th Century for example cross almost all of Europe which lasted several years). There were sieges. There were floods. Wars which cut off trade routes. Outbreaks of piracy and robber knights. Major invasions by the Turks or whomever. Economic depressions due to unstable currencies. All kinds of problems which could disrupt the normal flow of goods and the economy. During these times people didn't necessary eat so well.

I think veeeeery generally speaking, if you are talking about the high or late medieval period, most people in the middle to upper ranks of society (and yes there definitely was a middle class) ate pretty well and at least a small amount of meat was not at all rare in their diet (except for days when they ate fish). But I think most people (except perhaps the wealthiest princes, kings, prelates and merchant patricians) also typically experienced hunger and even starvation at some point in their life, and that is the biggest difference between life as it relates to diet back then, and in somewhere like Western or Northern Europe today or the US / Canada / Australia / Japan etc.

However I think it's dangerous to look at the more squalid periods of the 19th Century and project backwards to a Monty Python esque medieval world. There was an enormous amount of prosperity in those times, it wasn't all mud and leprosy.


Oh and as far as salad goes, the artist Benvenutto Cellini mentions eating salads several times in his 16th Century autobiography.

Jean

[Craig Peters]

[Jean Henri Chandler]

That salad sounds a lot like tabouleh from modern (and presumably, much older as well) Lebanese food.


I think you can add peas and lentils to the basic diet. Peas were even used to make flour.

On the other hand, oats were apparently considered horse food.

I also remember reading a medieval recipe for Pike but I can't remember where.

I was thinking a bit more about the butchers regulations from Nuremberg and Augsburg, and I remembered a few more things. Processing an animal which was already dead when it was found was grounds for being permanently banished from the guild. Calves slaughtered before a certain age could not be used and had to be disposed of. When meat was put out for sale, the date and time of it's slaughter and which cut of meat it was had to be posted clearly, and there was a time limit on how long it could be left offered for sale. Meat that was inspected and looked bad to the inspector in any way was destroyed. I guess those things are important in an era before refrigeration.

This article alludes to some of the regulations I'm referring to

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/leithart/200...-economics

This article claims that "The average medieval peasant however would have eaten nearly two loaves of bread each day, and 8oz of meat or fish, the size of an average steak. This would have been accompanied by liberal quantities of vegetables, including beans, turnips and parsnips, and washed down by three pints of ale."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7148534.stm

Maybe somebody can find the actual paper they were referring to, the author seems to be a guy named Dr Roger Henderson and that the paper was funded by Lloyds pharmacy. No idea if it's legit, the guy sounds like a medical doctor not an historian. But I'd like to see what they base those claims on.

Jean

[Craig Peters]

For the sake of completeness, we might as well look at the different kinds of meat that medieval people ate. For the purposes of this list, I am conflating meats eaten by the poor and rich. As before, the list is compiled based upon various meats listed in medieval recipes, or meats that are commonly known to have been eaten. The list is not exhaustive, but I hope it will be fairly comprehensive.

We have the usual domestic animals: lamb, mutton, goat (I'm assuming on this one), beef, chicken, pork, and, if you were starving, horse. Turkeys come from the New World, so not surprisingly one of the earliest European recipes is from Italy in the 16th century, making it post-medieval.

As far as game: hares, rabbits (only later in the Middle Ages for England), venison, boar, squirrel, beaver. I'm not sure about bear or elk.

For wild fowl: quail, duck, pigeon, bustards, goose, pheasant, falcons, swans, storks, bitterns, cranes, herons, gulls, partridge, larks, doves, plover, crake, rails, egrets, peacocks and more were served.

For seafood, we find fish (pike, haddock, salmon, sciaenas, cod, pilchards, whiting, pompano, shad, mackerel, tench, herring, carp, char, loach, sole, sturgeon, mullet, turbot, perch, plaice, trout, among others), eels, lampreys (Henry I of England famously contracted a fever and died after stuffing himself with lampreys), scallops, shrimp (although this is a 16th C recipe, too), squid, sea cucumber, oysters, crayfish. Presumably, medieval people also collected clams, mussels, whelks, and other shellfish although these are not attested in the recipes I have seen.

I hope this list gives a good idea as to the immense variety of meats eaten in the Middle Ages by the wealthy, if not by everyone.

[Jean Henri Chandler]

Bears were definitely hunted in Europe, there are numerous accounts of their being hunted in Poland. Bear fat was a commonly mentioned food and folk remedy for a variety of ailments including sword cuts. In that region of Poland - Lithuania (including much of what is now Belarus and Ukraine) were covered in thick forests with few restrictions on hunting. They were also hunting notable megafauna there such as the Aurochs and the Wisent, the latter is still around in some limited numbers since they have been re-introduced. The last wild population of them was in the Bialoweiza Forest, where laws protecting the species were introduced in the 16th Century. Large deer species like Elk and Red Deer were also common. All of the above were dangerous prey (especially the Aurochs) and injuries or deaths were not unusual when hunting big game.

Beaver were hunted almost to extinction in Western Europe because their fur (specifically their fine inner fur) was a major component for the production of felt. As a result the beaver trapping industry had largely moved to the Baltic by the 15th Century and much of it transferred to Canada and what is now New England by the 17th. In the 16th Century beaver felt was used to make top-hats. Presumably these beaver were eaten.

Jean

[Pieter B.]

Thanks for the pointer Jean, I had a look at a few renaissance maps of larger cities across Europe and most did include a ring of gardens around the housing blocks but inside the wall. I still wonder if those gardens would provide and adequate supply for the entire city because they do seem rather small.

[Jean Henri Chandler]

No they aren't enough, in fact they weren't really the main means of feeding the town during sieges by any means, for that the towns would also build huge granaries (note the image I posted) where they could store food for years during sieges. The gardens give you some extra variety I'm sure, as would livestock brought in, but not enough.

During sieges town populations would also swell enormously in many cases as the rural population would come in behind the protection of the walls.

Towns were also frequently (almost always) situated on navigable waterways, and tended to have powerful naval assets, this too would often be a means of resupply. It was a major issue in many sieges. During the siege of Nuess Charles the Bold tried and failed to keep the town from being supplied. During the 13 Years War one of the most important battles was over an attempt by one of the Teutonic Order's mercenaries to cut off the water supply to Gdansk.

Jean

[Pieter B.]

[Brad F.]

Funny, I was just reading about this subject. Some lovely research has done some neat calculations on the medieval peasant and its calorie content. Actually looks like a pretty healthy diet, if monotonous.

http://people.eku.edu/resorc/Medieval_peasant_diet.htm

[Jean Henri Chandler]

[Jim H]

I have no expertise as to what people in the past routinely ate, but I can offer what I know to be true from my personal experience. It has been said that sheep and pigs seemed to be far more common in the diet of regular folks than beef. My experience would say that this could very easily be so. A number of years ago I did my own life experiment in "subsistence farming". It was my families goal to get as far off the grid as we could, and provide as many of our daily needs as possible from what we grew and raised. We plowed our fields for our gardens with a horse, and used the same horse to skid logs for our firewood. We stayed away from modern devices and chemicals as much as possible. Backbreaking work and long days, but some of the happiest years of my life. We raised several beef critters over the ten plus years that we lived this way, but they were the exception. This is because a steer (male beef critter - good for nothing else) is just an all around much bigger deal, and a much bigger gamble than raising a few sheep, goats, or hogs. A beef critter can take a couple of years to get to a decent slaughter weight. The smaller animals get there much quicker. A beef critter needs more land covered in a higher quality feed than the others. An animal the size of a growing, or grown beef critter is much more of a pain to live with. They need much stouter fences and if you own one you always get to spend a certain amount of time chasing them around the neighborhood because few fences will stop a half ton, or larger animal that really, really wants to sample the neighbor's garden. Then there is the gamble. Even today, domestic animals die for a zillion reasons. Deciding to pour all the resources and work into one animal of large size is much more of a gamble than spending the same amount of resources and labor on a herd of animals of a smaller size. Too large a gamble for folks living close to the edge. And, in the end, once slaughtered, in the days before freezers, there had to be the question, "what do you do with it?". A large breed beef critter could cause you to end up with five or six hundred pounds of meat that is going to go bad real quick if something was not done soon. Drying it, salting it, and other methods could be used, of course, but it would be a mammoth project for a normal family. Given all of the above, at least in my experience, raising a beef critter was probably often beyond the scope of many of the small family, subsistence farming operations. It could be done, but it just didn't make as much sense. Pork and mutton are good. Chickens and other fowl are easy. Rabbits are no big gamble. Beef is good and everyone eats it whenever they can, but in light of the variety of what else is available and economically sound, there is no real need to take the plunge.

That is not to say that beef was not available. They may have done like I did. The economy of raising animals for food lies in not raising just one. The higher number of animals that you can raise causes each individual one to come in cheaper per animal. I stopped doing it when I discovered that after taking the gamble, doing the work, and chasing foolish cows all over the place at least once a week, I could buy the beef, already slaughtered and hanging, from a guy down the road who raised just herds of beef for less than what I had in mine per pound. I suspect that back then, as now, there were folks around who had the land and the where-with-all to raise herds of beef critters for sale to the public. Folks back then probably could have got their beef that same way that I did most of the time. Barter. Trade the guy that raises beef some pork for some beef. I can even go out on a limb and suggest that in older times, these beef raisers were probably located more often near an urban area because they would need to get rid of large amounts of beef fairly quickly. So, families in a very rural area might not have had this opportunity quite as often, if at all. Given what else was available, however, I am sure that everyone liked it, like today, but I doubt that anyone mourned it if it was not readily available to them due to the idiosyncrasies of their location.

A quick thought about dogs. Dogs are omnivorous. They eat a lot more grain than they do meat. Look at the ingredients of most any commercial dog food. Mostly grain. It just looks like meat to make you happy. A dog can live and thrive on an almost steady diet of grain. He needs a little protein too, but dogs aren't too choosy how they get it. How often have you seen your dog gobbling down bugs? Border Patrol Agents of the past used to patrol huge stretches of the border with a horse and a dog. They packed along a sack of grain to supplement what the horse and dog couldn't find for themselves along the way.

Just my thoughts based on my own experiences in life with no intention of claiming that I know the actual history. Living off the land at the subsistence level back then probably was not a whole lot different than doing so today, except today is a lot easier and the penalty for failure is not so severe. If my crop failed, or my beef critter died, I just went down to the local supermarket. I suspect the economy of various animals and the risk of raising them meant a lot more to them.

[Pieter B.]

Great points to which I might add something.

Raising beef for well; raising beef is an expensive option. Pigs can be set loose as free range meat producers to some extent. Cattle requires prime grazing ground.

*Everything from here on is speculation*

Raising cattle for beef is risky when land is expensive. Medieval Europe wasn't america where large herds could be left to their own device. Every acre had to be used carefully to feed its ever growing population. Dairy farming is more labor intensive because you require more human labor for milking (20 cows provided enough work and money to sustain 2 families in 1930-1940) but the caloric gains are more immediate. Dairy farmers would have a few calves each year of which a part ended up as bulls/oxen but most as veal or traded for money on a market. Old dairy cows were slaughtered for meat (which is what Frisian-Holland were bred for), probably not the best meat nor a particularly high quantity compared to pork which could be slaughtered way sooner. The beef cattle thing is American in origin and only arrived in Europe quite recently. Before that cattle was held with a dual purpose of milk and meat but milk was the priority. Perhaps this goes a long way to explain why Europe has many beef stews.

*End speculation*

[Jean Henri Chandler]

This anecdote is very interesting, and certainly ads context to the discussion. But it also is from the perspective of a single family, I think you actually hit the nail on the head when you described the person you bought beef from. But lets consider some other angles.

First, keep in mind, Europe was not necessarily a crowded place in the Medieval era nor land necessarily rare or especially precious (like Europe today). The world population in 1400 was around 400 million people, vs. 7 billion today. So very generally speaking (obviously each part of Europe was different in this sense) there was a lot of room to graze animals and so on.

http://www.medievalages.net/wp-content/upload...lation.jpg

Much of the late medieval period, after the demographic collapse of the Black Death, consisted of repopulating Europe and systematically colonizing new lands (this included going up, for example, moving into mountain ranges which had previously been unpopulated or very thinly populated, like the Riesengebirge mountains in Silesia, which were not populated until the 13th Century). They even had a special job called a 'locator' who would go out and survey and found new towns and villages, and peasants were given all kinds of special benefits (like freedom from taxation) to lure them to new lands, to convert 'waste' land like forests and swamps into farmland and so on. There was an entire movement of colonization into Central and Eastern Europe known to historians as the Osteidlung

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostsiedlung



So in a way, this does sound like a kind of frontier situation, but that can be a bit of an illusion. Medieval families weren't isolated homesteaders like in the (at least literary / cinematic trope of) the American 'Wild West'. Even in frontier areas they settled in large, organized groups with highly specialized experts with different skill sets. In other words, in addition to farmers and herders, even in small villages rather than just one village blacksmith in charge of making everything from horseshoes to plows to armor, you would have specialist crafts artisans: fullers, furriers, butchers, bakers, joiners, dyers, weavers, millers, cutlers, shoemakers etc. etc. They also used a lot of automation in the sense of water powered and wind powered machines for example, to power grain mills, sawmills, Catalan (automatic) forges, Barcelona (powered trip-)hammers, fulling mills, paper mills, and so on and so forth. Those people were often working in literal cottage industries which were linked to craft guilds in nearby urban centers (where their children typically traveled to become apprentices).

This water and wind power cut down on a lot (certainly not all by any means, but a lot) of the backbreaking labor you mentioned. A single watermill could grind as much grain as 50 Roman slaves had been able to.

As early as the 11th Century, in the Domesday book of the Normans, a kind of vast tax survey, they noted that they already had more than 5,000 water mills in England, and England was one of the least developed and urbanized parts of Europe.

Towns tended to use a lot of this kind of water powered machinery for all kinds of things, but there were many mills in the countryside too, and even in the most rural areas, you have a communal system, people shared the work. While the adults did other work, little kids watched the cattle (with the help of dogs), and like most herd animals these weren't typically even kept in pens most of the times, but herded from one place to another, like up into a hilltop meadow or out into the forest or swamp (cattle in particular could actually be let loose in swamps and forests which were hard to grow anything else in. A lot of people aren't aware cattle swim quite well).

Rural villages had large common fields which were shared, in addition to the private allotments, and the commons was where a lot of herd animals were kept. The biggest threat to these, more than disease, drought or famine, was raids from neighboring knights, foreign enemies, or some invading army. This incidentally is why people rarely homesteaded out all by themselves in large numbers, they would tend to cluster together for mutual defense as well as cooperative labor and the ability to specialize etc..

Pigs, ducks, sheep, fish, eggs and chickens did probably make up a larger part of the diet than beef (and grain and vegetables more than any kind of meat) for all the reasons you mentioned, but we have records that vast herds of cattle were brought into towns on a routine basis. Quite a few people clearly figured out how to develop a sophisticated herding and ranching industry in Medieval Europe. I wish I had a little more time to get into it but work calls... but even in rural areas you would have these large processing centers - which became actual towns (albeit, small towns) which were basically just for butchering cattle for sale in various regional markets. One example is the little town of Rottweil, a small city in southwest Germany, made up of butchers. It's where Rottweiler dogs come from.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons...tweil.jpeg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rottweil

We tend to think of the middle ages as being like the way the 19th Century is different from today, only more so. So more backward, more isolated, more dirty, more cave-man like. But this isn't really the way it was. In many ways the medieval was very much like today, and anyway, it's clear that they did eat a lot of beef, because they consumed a lot of cattle. Many medieval towns had streets named after cattle that were driven in every day to be slaughtered, and the butchers guild was almost always one of the larger, more prominent and richer guilds in medieval towns and villages.

Jean

[Pieter B.]

I found this on a site on middle dutch. It's part of the Bouc vanden ambachten / Livre des mestiers and has a few lines about various trades in Bruges in the 14th century. It's a book in both French and Flemish to teach people the other language. It has relatively mundane conversations but they offer a great glimpse in medieval city life in Bruges.

http://www.vogala.org/tekst/brugge-ambachten

[Jean Henri Chandler]

Fascinating, and hilarious. So lets put griffons in the standard burgher diet then, unless you aren't feeling well....

Very interesting primary source stuff there. I'm off to get some pork with onion sauce..

Jean

[Pieter B.]

[Jean Henri Chandler]

Love this.. .keep them coming. My friend mentioned something about a sword and buckler injury in that book?

J

[Pieter B.]

The 'peasants song', a song written for Burghers and Nobles after a peasant uprising.

[Jean Henri Chandler]

No I don't think they did, if it was up to a lot of the 1st estate, the peasants would all starve. Or at least periodically. And the towns would pay everything they had in fees and taxes and tolls.

But the nobility didn't run everything - their power was far from absolute, in fact it was very limited in many cases, nor was the first estate united as a class (or more accurately for the period, an estate). Particularly in places like Flanders. Charles the Bold himself was killed by peasants.

And anyway at least they get plenty of cheese....

J

[Randall Moffett]

I agree. This is hardly representative. The song as most protest songs tend to focus and exaggerate the problem. Sure the nobles had more but one could sing a very similar song in many times and still have the same meaning and not be 100% accurate either.

Revolution was something the monarchs and kings took serious as they could be a rather uncontrollable group.

I agree that to us it would be indeed a stark lifestyle change and they had it far harder than most of us in the present but just pointing out the likelihood that exaggeration, hyperbole and stereotypes play a part in this.

RPM