Hi I'm Kevin Hicks, welcome to my YouTube
channel the History Squad. Now this is part two of our spin-off series for the Hundred Years
War and we're going to take a look at food, you know victuals, how did they feed a medieval army
now if you've missed any of my previous videos yeah, then you can find them in the playlist
in the description so without further ado. A human being, me, I'll consume between two
and four pound of food a day apparently, so I'm told. So if you have an army of seven
thousand men, eight thousand, that's a lot of food isn't it. But actually it's nothing until
you come to a horse right? A horse every day needs between five and ten gallons of water well that's
fine, you find a river yeah? But then he eats 20 pounds of food a day so if that's 2,000
horses that's 40,000 pound of food a day. So you can imagine just feeding an army is blows
your mind yeah? But before I can even continue, I've got to explain to you the weights and
measures of the day. Things were measured in a quart, and a quart is a London quart, and what
it means is it's a volume. It's a quarter of a ton barrel yeah? So if you've got wheat and it fills a
quarter of a ton barrel that's a quart, if you've got a quart of wine it's the same kind of thing
yeah, so it's done by volume so as we go through this instead of you being confused, you now know
we're talking of a London quart yeah? So feeding an army, now when I was in the British army we had
ration packs or we had the cook house and it was great. A medieval soldier, what would he eat?
For a start off pottage was one of their main foods and it's basically a bubbling
vegetable stew. Oats, peas, beans and barley. You might have fish pottage, you might have bacon
in your pottage or you might have the whole lot in your pottage. Something I learned as a soldier,
as long as you've got oatmeal in it, it basically uh just makes everything, neutralizes a lot of the
flavour yeah? So you have to add to it. So your common or garden bowman yeah, bowl of pottage,
he'd be well happy as long as it's nice and hot, and bread is also important. So I've just got a
table I'm going to read for you about how much food was shipped over from England for various
campaigns. We've got the Gascony campaign of 1347 to 49. There were 12,318 quarts of wheat, 695
quarts of oats, 1,185 quarts of beans and peas, make you go faster yeah? Malt 409 quarts,
2,034 tons, so that's the full barrel of flour and carcasses, meat carcasses yeah for
Gascony campaign 936. Now your meat carcasses were salted down yeah, so you can have salt beef,
salt pork, your fish can be smoked or even pickled yeah? Or if you're lucky and you you're
serving near a river or the ocean you might just get fresh fish yeah. Now for the Brittany
campaign, uh 5,336 quarts of wheat and it goes on and on but I just want to show you for the
Crecy campaign here uh 8,027 quarts of wheat, 3,085 quarts of oats, uh 824 full barrels of
flour and then for the for the meat side 2,670 carcasses of meat, because soldiers have
to be fed well. And this is an interesting thing about the medieval times if you're a
civilian you're going to have meagre rations, you'll get up in the morning and you'll have
what's left from the night before. In the evening you will have your bowl of pottage you might be
lucky to have bread. Don't forget in those days bread went off very quickly you didn't have
all of the preservatives yeah? So bread can be used as a thickening once it's gone off,
there's lots of things to this but the main important thing is a soldier needs those calories.
He's got to march and of course he's got to fight. A modern soldier apparently needs 4,000 calories
a day during combat. Nobody ever told me that but apparently he gets just over 2 000 calories
a day in his rations so it shows you that uh if you don't feed your soldier eventually
he's going to lose his um his energy isn't it. But it's how on earth did this tiny little
country of England manage to get all of this food across the sea? Well first of all
you have the man in charge of your county the sheriff the shire reeve, he is the guy.
You'll also have commissioners who have been sent by the king and they will tell the sheriff
‘right we need this we need that’. They didn't then go into the countryside like some of your
Hollywood films and they steal all of the food, it's paid for yeah, and it's paid for properly
and it's paid for at the proper price at the time and then it's gathered in that village which
is then moved to the town which will then be moved out to the coast and I'm going to show
you on a map in a moment just how everything radiated out from the different towns and then was
picked up and taken to central areas for supply. So here's a map of England and Wales, there So
collecting victuals, if you've got a farmer up here who's got plenty of sheep and they
go for slaughter let's say in Carlisle, but to get them all the way down England where
there aren't very many roads down to one of the sink ports, as they call them, the meat’d be no
good at all yeah, even though it's salted down. So what happened was it will be taken from the
farmer to the village from the village to the town then across to a harbour where a ship will take
it, and the ship will go to another harbour where beef or lamb or oats yeah, peas all of these
different produce have actually slowly but surely come in from York and then the boats will go
down, stop again, again until eventually these full boats are coming all the way to Sandwich
here, and that's where things were gathered. Once the boats are full then they can go across to
France. It was such a fantastic system, it meant that a farmer here yeah or even in Wales could
actually get his supplies to a coastal town. They didn't go this way, apparently it was too long
so it was better to take the roadway across the country and then by sea. So it was well organized
and it was honourable to gather all that food for the armies was fantastic and I've read where
um noblemen knew that their comrades across the sea in France, Gascony would be running short of
food and they ensured that ships were ready and on their way so their friends didn't starve to death
it all worked and interestingly if a farmer sent food and it was delayed and came all the way down
England there was a problem, it was then looked at and gauged. If they figured that it wasn't going
to make the journey the voyage, it will go rotten, they would then sell the food for consumption to
the locals at a reduced price. This whole thing, it amazes me the more I read about it the more
amazed I actually was how complicated it was, but hey was it that Frenchman or was he a
Corsican who said an army marches on its stomach? Well I hope you enjoyed our film if you
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