How Much Booze Did Medieval People Really Drink?

it's no secret that medieval people drank a lot we have made a lot of myths about why it was that medieval people drink so much and all of them tend to conform to our own biases about the medieval period we think about it as a time that's very dirty when no one had any fun but in actuality the reason that people Drank in the medieval period is they liked it today we're going to be discussing medieval alcohol and we'll see that whether you're a Wine Drinker or an ale Drinker a member of the laity or the clergy or even a pub versus party person there are a lot of reasons to drink just like we do today so cheers [Music] [Music] what did Medieval Europeans drink well there's a couple of Staples probably the most popular is ale and I say ale specifically here because beer doesn't actually come in until sort of the late medieval period in early modern period it's not until hops are added to Ale that something becomes beer they also drink a lot of wine your wine consumption is also going to vary with where you live in Europe if you live in Italy or Spain say you're much more likely to be drinking wine regularly than you are if you live here in York they also occasionally drink Mead not as much as you would think it certainly does come up it's a gorgeous honey alcohol and it is around but it's not something that you would be expecting to drink day to day in certain places like the West country you might also drink cider or Perry it's difficult for us to tell how much cider people Drank in the medieval period because the words wine and cider are almost interchangeable for them if you're making alcohol out of fruit it just kind of is a wine so we have to look out for clues about which fruit is being used in order to know whether they're drinking cider or they're drinking what we would call Wine you might notice that conspicuously absent from this list are harder forms of alcohol and especially here in England you won't see that come in until about the 17th century with the introduction of gin so a lot of drinking options but probably no cocktails foreign to festivals there are plenty of places where people could wet their whistle perhaps the most iconic of all is still a quintessential part of British culture even today I mean of course the humble Pub and I've come to one of London's oldest pubs to enjoy a drink or two with an expert on everything to do with pubs and Pints author and Pub expert Pete Brown thank you so much for coming down to meet me in uh one of my favorite pubs in London and it's also one of the oldest pubs in London but technically it's not in London is it no one in Cambridge here I saw sometimes when I come here in Narnia you know you got this lovely little Alleyway and you're in this Pub which is technical in Cambridge because it belongs to the bishop of Ely or did the ultimate Bishop really the hints sort of in the name the old miter yes the almighty Bishop's hat this was granted to him by Queen Elizabeth part of a mistake originally serving the estate and then became a public house so you'd have quite sizable businesses just serving their family and it's householders and the servants that was quite a common thing okay so now we call pubs pubs it's a public house but that's not a name that we would see in the medieval period is it we didn't start calling them that until about the 17th 18th century before then there were three entirely separate types of establishment there were taverns which mainly sell wine they go back to the Romans uh became briefly popular again in the Middle Ages when Henry II married Elena of accuratzan their Inns which Origins and now places that are much more catering to Travelers people going on pilgrimages so it's accommodation food as well as drinks so there'd be bigger establishments on main roads that were stabling for the horses they're quite ornate and quite cozy and then the basic one uh the most important one in in fact is the Ale House so people used to brew at home like they used to bake at home uh some people were just better at it than other people so so those people would start selling it and when you had a fresh batch of Ale ready you would put an ale stake up outside your house so that people knew it was ready and this started off life was like being a broom basically and then they became a bit more elaborate they started stretching out into the street and falling off and killing people so the authorities went okay enough of the kind of Big Ale Stakes coming down a painted sign instead because the population were illiterate these signs would be kind of Highly recognizable things before Henry VII split with Rome there was a lot of Pope's heads then after that they became the king's head uh you'd have uh symbols of heraldry like the white hat uh you know the red rose yeah and so this is where all pub names come from they weren't originally named that they were the names of the things that the signs were depicting started off of someone's house there'd be no bar in it uh you'd walk in to buy some beer I'm able to take home but there's just something about a conviviality of beer where it's like actually I'll just have some while I'm here oh and here's Joe from down the street are you gonna have one and so you get the kind of the everydayness of the pub uh we're coming out of the Ale House beer was such an important fact of life it wasn't just a drink at the end of The Working Day in towns and cities where the water sources were polluted beer was was safer than water to drink sometimes people think that the only reason that anybody drinks beer in the Middle Ages is that though the water is polluted and it's like that's not true but in cities and towns yeah it gets it gets a little bit so it's been it's been disproved because it's like there were nice lovely streams in the Middle Ages so you weren't going to drink out of that one of the big ways that we find out about brewing in the medieval period is actually the people who get in trouble so you find out a lot about women especially in the medieval period who get in trouble because they brewed bad ale and it's a big thing they'll be a collective punishment where they have to go sit in a chair outside their house and everyone goes by and they're like hey Mary that was awful ale you made and that will be the literal punishment because it's so embarrassing to have made a really bad batch of Ale yeah because it was so important foreign the art of Brewing was a serious business to find out more about this important craft I'm heading into London's East End I've come to Wild Card Brewery to meet expert Brewster Jaeger wise who using the methods of old has [Music] crash so much for having us here at a wild card I'm absolutely delighted to be here because one of the things that I think it's really important and great about wildcard is that like in the medieval period we got a woman Brewing this is sort of what we would expect to see in commercial Brewing now what's the difference between home brewing and like industrial or commercial Brewing so the four main ingredient to Modern beer is yeast water malted barley and hops and that's quite different ish okay previously so the malted barley the water and the yeast so pretty much the same but hops didn't really come into Brewing until around about the late 15th century right typically you would use kind of herbs you would find out and about okay so this is the ingredients in a modern beer yes but I understand that you have made for us a medieval beer yes I have made a medieval beer and this is it and one of the major differences you may you may know first of all the color yeah it's quite dark yeah so the technology to actually make light pale mold didn't come until considerably later right so a lot of beer would have been quite Brown okay what murky Brown what are the other big differences between medieval brewing and modern Brewing is is hygiene we're very good at sterilizing everything helping to give beer that shelf life flexibility needs yeah so back then that wasn't so much the case so beer likely would have soured quite quickly oh so likely you would have picked up a little bit of tartness one of the other major differences is hops pups have antibacterial properties it's what helps to give beer stability and shelf life right hops were not particularly common in the UK previously to that people would Brew with herbs and spices and herbs and spices that you would find out and about so this is nettle which is what I've made oh excited and mugworts as well so that's nice it's kind of like almost like green tea or something like that exactly exactly it wasn't until really the late 15th century when hops were introduced uh into Kent I think it was it was viewed as foreign right um but I think the Practical properties of long shelf life on a product that you produce cannot be underestimated right it's no surprises yeah that hops took over as the dominant flavoring flower for a bit okay so here's our ingredients how do we take these and make a delicious beer so we start at the very beginning so we have barley so Bali when it grows in the ground is very hard so you have to do something called malts that bar right and it's the process of making the carbohydrates and starches accessible for the Brewer okay in modern day Society there's a whole other industry known as maltes who do that back in the day you'd have to mulch your barley yourself okay so that would mean essentially tricking your barley into growing slightly and breaking down those starches into simpler starches and carbohydrate traits right so the enzymes later can turn those carbohydrates into simple sugars okay it's what we're trying to get right you would largely have to dry your barley at home so you might do that in the air or you might do it over fire right that might lead to number one color okay yeah yeah it's very difficult to produce those lights in color barley yeah you need a lot of equipment for that of course yeah and the second thing is is a smoke so in all likelihood if you're drying barley over oh or a fire you probably would get a slight Smoky flavor to a lot of beer okay so that that's the first major differences between then and now is this we are able to produce this light delicate color right concept of the pale ale next we steep it in hot water and the purpose of that is to break down those carbohydrates into simple sugars right and that process has largely stayed exactly the same and then you would in modern daytime top it so that's when you would add your hops previously that is the time when you would add your herbs right okay yeah yeah but just the very nature of brewing with hops versus brewing with herbaceous material hops in order to get the antibacterial properties you need to boil it for a good hour probably wouldn't have done so if you were using mugwort or nettle or Rosemary or thyme or things that grew locally you probably just boil it maybe for five minutes right okay so that's another major difference in process and then you would put it into a wooden barrel or a wooden bat so in modern Brewing we have lots of stainless steel nice so one of the major differences between stainless steel and wood is you can clean it yeah yeah yeah you can clean it really thoroughly wood Harbors a lot of bacteria there are lots and lots of of different types of yeast that will be present in wood that would give your beer quite a unique flavor so I can imagine that from different Brew houses to brew houses you get very very different flavors depending on the microorganisms that were present in your Brewing vessels right so this concept of Brewing the same thing twice you could have a go okay right yeah yeah there you go but our modern standards of going to the pub and having that exact same pint of Ale every single time right probably it wouldn't be the same right in terms of flavor what would we expect to see a difference between medieval and modern beer one of them would be the color so it would be darker in in color physically the bitterness may be considerably lower because that's what hops does it adds bitterness and you have this kind of like herbaceous note so you'd have that quality to the Beer as well right okay and it's exciting for me as a brewer to be able to recreate some of these uh flavors and some of these and these tastes well you could expect flavors to differ drastically between different houses and locations one thing that remained a constant by law was volume there was certainly no half measures in the Middle Ages because it's here that the iconic pint was born in fact it goes all the way back to Magna Carta in 1215. this celebrated document is more famous for restricting the king's Powers but article 32 deals with other important matters stating there should be a single measure for ale throughout the kingdom serving a full measure was absolutely one of the most serious things in medieval history in the Chester Miracle plays Christ comes back down to earth and pardons all these criminals except the Brewer who serve short pints and they get they get sent to help quite right too quite right too you couldn't actually measure the strength there was no way of doing that back then so you could measure the quantity right and at least try and put some kind of control on it through that what are we serving said pint in we're serving that in tankards uh maybe uh puta ones like this but maybe maybe wooden or Pottery more commonly than that but there's a great story that when you would buy a a pint uh in in something like this that it would have a system of pegs inside uh so that again to chain control drinking right you're only meant to drink down to the next peg in in one Swig so it's helping moderation but of course it was quite difficult to do so you'd you'd kind of miss it and go down to the next one go to the next one uh and there was this thing about being the last person standing uh when you were drinking thing so if you want to teach someone a lesson you'd take them down a peg or two in the in the Pint oh great story it's one of those that I kind of hope is true one of the difficulties of researching the history Urban beer and drinking is that a lot of it was just everyday stuff so it didn't really get written down and recorded and also a lot of the archaeological record is stuff that doesn't last the the history that we do is really similar I'm interested in ordinary people and what they're doing and I think that one of the ways that we really learn about that is through stories like that so not only do you have these great stories that are told in pubs but they're really the foundation of what English literature is in a lot of ways as well because the Canterbury Tales are a series of Tavern stories and they're a series of Tavern stories that starts in an inn right the tabardin in southern the congregation points for the pilgrimage to Canterbury is the start of the Canterbury Tales it's the it's the birth of English literature and it takes place in a pub because you've got the Knight and the wife of bath and and the priest and the pardon and all these people there's nowhere else that you get all those people together in one place apart from and in and the the stories that they tell as they go down you know cancer Patel is just describe them the route from Suffolk to come it was a little bit of land here nice view from it's not that it's the people telling each other stories like you do over a few beers in in an inn and now it's the time I've been waiting for to get a taste of what the medieval Pub goer would have experienced All Those Years Ago by enjoying our very own homemade medieval Brew we begin in a very 21st century non-medieval Way by smelling our ale first I mean the first thing that you notice is it is really multi right so it's really sweet it's really full bodied there but you can taste the herbs coming through and can you smell just that little hint that little hint of tartness in there it does really have that edge that I would expect kind of from a sour or it goes something like that but only incredibly lightly incredibly lightly oh that's really good it's good it's really good yeah and what's what's so interesting about it is you can you why this battle between Hops and between herbs got so intense because it's really good yeah it is and flavors it one of the things I definitely notice here is it is quite malty it's very it is really sweet you've got that nice kind of like rounded complexity and a hint of smoke yeah yeah just a bit yeah and I think a lot of that is largely because the the malts that they would have been using would not have been very well modified yeah it's a modern standard so when I say modified I mean getting those starches and carbohydrates being able to be broken down into simple sugars so because you it's a industry that would largely be done in the home it would have been a bit inefficient right yeah so I think a lot of the beer probably would have been quite sweet right so what sort of alcohol percentage would we expect to see in something like this so in something like this you typically you'd see between probably three and five percent well this is a bit closer to the five percent so that's pretty high so I guess this is something that I would expect to see you know a table for you know a holiday like you're gonna have it at Christmas you're gonna have it at Easter but they're drinking beer like all the time right so what are we having with breakfast in the morning you can pull off something called the first runnings and that's when you take off the sugary most luxurious part of the beer and you can make a beer with that and that beer would be stronger in ABV stronger in flavor more expensive to buy right fancy beer or you can take the the last Runnings which is the opposite of that so it's weaker there's not much sugar left and you can ferment that and you would end up with a beer that's very very low in ABV so the kind of beer that you could drink and you could work or you could get through your day whilst drinking lots of beer this is about what I would expect in terms of effervescence from an ale you know like there is something in there but it's not like petion yeah the process of of conditioning a beer hasn't really changed that much over the years especially in Britain we do we use very traditional methods right so this beer would go into a cask where it would then condition and it would just get a little bit of Fizz but nowhere near the expectation of modern standards of carbonation right this is gorgeous and I absolutely love it but if I was going to go in theory next door in the medieval period would I be presented with something that tastes like this probably not probably not so one of the things that's really interesting is locally to me where I brew we've got more from so Wetlands so here nettle grows easily mug walk grows easily I can leave here and go and fetch some right it's going to very much depend from household to household what grows locally in your area and what you have access to so in all likelihood most households will have different herb mix and different flavor mix so you would get variations in recipe from house to house is it also going to vary in terms of season to season absolutely because different herbs they grow at different times of year currently in season we've got mug water nettle which is why I've chosen these particular herbs right other times of year you'll have Heather you'll have Rosemary you'll have other herbs that you could use in your spice mix yeah thank you so much for having us I'm absolutely delighted to try a medieval beer and I don't suppose I'm ever going to get to drink this down a pub soon am I no cause it's got no shelf size [Music] so one of the things that's nice about being in a nail house is you get great beer it's very convivial it's a real sight of medieval pleasure but you can also have a bit of a game can't you that's one of the things yes I mean this when people sit together drinking there's always an element of competitiveness and so it didn't take long for pubs to become places where where games will be played a bit later than what we're talking about but Henry VII was a great exponent of shuffleboard the other aspects that was really popular was any variation on fighting right within us whether whether that's people fighting like price fighting bare knuckle fighting uh or animals so some of the most popular games in pubs for centuries were were things like cockfighting or bear baiting and and when you look at a lot of the heraldry around pubs the logo of several breweries different Brewers is kind of fighting but yeah anything that involves blood and anything that involves gambling it's only popular in an ale house Ale House Tavern or local Inn would have been an important part of everyday life offering not just a drink but a communal Hub of culture and information right across Britain but this wasn't the only place where you could expect alcohol to be served at some point especially if you are better off you would attend a feast or a banquet a chance to really indulge in the finest food and drink foreign [Music] room here at the barley Hall is a really interesting late medieval building because it's changed hands a few times the way we see it now all set up would be for a very wealthy family having a feast what you might also notice is there are a couple references to the kind of alcohol that you might expect to find at a feast we have these lovely crafts which would be full of wine and this would be a real great way of showing your status as a member of York's Elite you can bring in wine from overseas and give it to everyone at a party like this however you'll also notice we have small casks of Ale on the table so this is a nod to the fact that people always want beer and wine you're never going to have one or the other especially at a party as lavish as this it's not a real big Feast unless you have all of your options covered the pleasure at the center of drinking in the medieval period is of course one of the major factors however people drink for any number of reasons on top of that you might drink with a lot of friends in order to prove that you can afford it laying out a lavish Feast like this including a lot of wine shows that you are in a financial position to do so you might drink as a part of religious sacraments turning wine into the blood of Christ is at the heart of the mass and an important part of everyday life for members of the clergy because of its religious connotations alcohol wasn't just important it was sacred literally and a religious building full of people doing God's work and needed plenty of it especially wine Saint Mary's Abby here in York is a good thing to think about how much booze the clergy would actually need when I say that it's a little bit tongue-in-cheek because there are genuine religious reasons why clergy members need a lot of one thing in particular wine of course at Communion you take Bread and Wine and by the process of transubstantiation they become the body and blood of Christ so you need a lot of wine to turn into blood rich people like kings might import their wine from around Europe but here in England before the little Ice Age which starts in the 14th century the church actually grew a lot of its own wine maybe not here as far north as Yorkshire but certainly down in Kent we can find monks and nuns who are engaging in vinticulture or the process of growing grapes for wine and they make their own wine so that's a job that you would have as a member of the clergy and then that wine will get offered up during communion and you'll all enjoy it but communion doesn't work the same way in the Middle Ages as it does now whilst monks and nuns might be having communion all the time average people don't it becomes a big sticky Point later on when they move into the reformation and away from Catholic practices but actually regular people really want to take communion even when they are offered communion maybe four or five times in their life for really big events they get to take the bread but they're often not offered wine part of the reason that they're not offered the wine is it's just really expensive the clergy doesn't have a lot to go around they're all taking communion out all the time so they can't let regular people indulge in it however there's plenty of leftover wine really and monks and nuns do enjoy that at table with their meals that's in addition to Ale just like every other medieval person is also drinking monks and nuns drink it just as much as the average person and they're drinking it more often than you'd think they'll probably start off in the morning with a small beer something that is really light in alcohol and then work their way up through the day to the heavier alcohols with their dinner in a place like St Mary's where you've got absolutely tons of monks and nuns around the joint that means that you are going to go through a lot of Ale every day and Adel also constantly goes off by its very nature so you're going to have to always be running through the process of making more and more ale for your community but this is not just the sort of work that you have to undertake as drudgery for monks and nuns working in the brewery is also seen as a form of Prayer the idea is because they've left the Ordinary World behind them all the work that they do is for the glory of God so if you're down there Brewing to make sure you have a really nice glass of Ale with your dinner that's actually a form of Prayer [Music] one of the principles of being a a courtly gentleman in the Middle Ages what was being was Hospitality you were a man of standing if you were generous with what you had and when people were traveling there was no Motorway service stations right yeah you know the pub was the the place you knew that there was a kitchen here you knew there was going to be beer here and then became obviously more a commercial imperative as people traveled more and As Cities grew larger to offer that and to make some money from it interesting you mentioned that there's this expectation even between you know commoners or you know members of the peasantry that they really have to have this kind of generosity towards each other but that scales right the way up to even you know the highest echelons of society now absolutely and as you know the Royal Court would often too around the country and so if you were a man of some standing with a decent sized State you might get notification one day that the queen was coming to stay with her 200 strong retinue and she was going to camp out in your garden and use your facilities for as long as she felt like Queen Elizabeth had a particular reputation for enjoying her beer and so whenever you got the notice that that she was coming you got to send around to all the local Brewers to get some beer in and there's one quote that her beer was was so strong that not any man could touch it a woman after my own heart if alcohol was a way of displaying wealth then the lavish lifestyles of the Royal Court give us an idea about how much booze people would have had access to find out more I'm eating food historian Richard Fitch in the Royal Wine Cellars of Hampton Court Palace home to one of history's most indulgent monarchs Henry VIII [Music] we are here in The Wine Cellar at Hampton Court Palace it is a wine cellar literally Fit For A King what kind of wine are we expecting to see on an English kings table on an English kings table Forum so all around the Mediterranean pretty much where we get wine from today it's all about the status of being able to afford to import importation the first time something comes from the more it's going to cost so the further you can bring it the more of a status symbol that you're providing I didn't get something like this in here by boat by barge up the river that's one of the principal reasons built next to a Waterway if you were really in a bad state by Road on wagons but then it's very much rolling so the thing to remember with that is of course that you're just churning that wine up so our modern notion of what is a good wine versus what a historic notion of a good wine is completely different clearly someone's job is to look after this right so the department is the seller and that's overseen by the Clark of the celery and then he has within his Department a sergeant and grooms I think there are two sergeants and two Grooms who work for the household and they Supply the wine and bail for the household and then there's a the equivalent of that position of the mouth and they are the people that provide direct for the monarchs medieval people like to Simply throw some spice in something is that true from an early modern sense as well would you sweeten wine or add clothes absolutely change the taste that's part of the the skill of the the sellers department and the serving to people of status is understanding their their temperament what their health is does their food and drink need modifying to deal with that what mood they're in uh what are they trying to represent from that meal do they want to show that the spices they've obtained do they want to modify the flavor and then modify that accordingly and that's the skill that you as an employer are paying for for that person how much wine would we expect a royal household to go through in say a month a hundreds of thousands you're looking at people being supplied somewhere around two to three gallons a day as their allowance that doesn't mean that's what they consume but it's part of their Bush of court so they're allowance for actually being a courtier is they have wine they can then give that on to other people but that process happens whether they drink it or not and the other thing you have to remember is once The Cask has been opened it has to be drunk they can't be made re-air tight so you have to process the whole lot or turn it into vinegar in general if you work within the court and you remember the household then you are given wine or ale daily even in a Cellar at this size as well would there be uh gradations of wine so a monarch is more likely to drink something than say you know a lower member of the Court doesn't seem to work that way what they seem to do is just Supply wine and it's what they can get seasonally what's available uh what quantities there are and there doesn't seem to be that much of a differentiation between quality of wine it's what they serve it with how much they serve of it and whether or not it's watered down yeah it's all about the money it's all about the status of seeing that your employer the Monarch in this case has the ability to provide that is an expectation that you have of them the 1521 field of the cloth of gold meeting between King Henry VII and Francis the first of France has gone down in history as one of the most Shameless displays of wealth and opulence it featured every medieval pleasure you could think of including the great wine Fountain and this painting captures the downside of Drake Too puking and fighting aren't far from the boozing I know that there are things for example of having wine found at court to just really show how much you have to show off clearly that is going to be at sort of some sort of Festival but how often would those large displays happen they seem to be focused on on the very very specific so we know that there are table fountains from the continent that are later early modern so late 16th early 17th century and they seem to be around four or five foot tall um what we're more used to in thinking in terms of scale for for England is converting conduits uh in the the larger cities like London and Beric is another big one so that when the Monarch changes or for Henry VII when his uh various wives change they convert the the conduits for water supply to wine supply for this it is I want to know where this is happening for me now the Jubilee is coming up absolutely free running wine here at Hampton Court Palace we've got a representation of a wine fountain in our base court and that's based on the image that is shown from the painting of a field of a cloth of gold from the 1520s so you've got beer and wine fountains in a field do we know how they did that unfortunately not I'm suspecting some form of siphon system but it's a pure guess we've made a model out of one in the past to try it out and it works through a siphon and we know that the 17th century table fountains use a siphon system but they run for a fixed amount of time and all of the records show that these fountains ran constantly I suppose that it's theoretically possible to just have again a bunch of manual labor but yeah absolutely Labor's cheap so everything [Music] there were a lot of different ways that people enjoyed alcohol in the medieval period it might just be a quick drink before you go out to work in the fields it might be at a festival or a tournament like this might be after a long hard day of work but one thing is for sure people had all different kinds of reasons to enjoy booze because of the pre-industrial process of making alcohol medieval people were actually a little more connected to what booze they were drinking and why it wasn't just about the process of baking alcohol it was about the pleasure and alcohol played an intrinsic part of pleasure in the medieval period in our next episode we'll be looking at some of the places that medieval people like to enjoy booze specifically we'll be talking about sport in our next episode it's time to work off the excesses of all this alcohol with a bit of healthy sport next up Falcons Knights at a spot of Royal tennis [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: History Hit

Views: 1,143,961

Keywords: history hit, history hit youtube, middle ages, medieval history, medieval beer, medieval life, medieval times, medieval ale, history hit medieval, history hit tv, history hit documentary, history hits youtube, history hit tv documentary, history hit eleanor janega, history hit medieval alcohol, eleanor janega history hit, eleanor janega medieval, medieval pleasures alcohol, medieval pleasures booze, medieval pleasures history hit, medieval pleasures eleanor janega

Id: 5SJgcy_Zong

Length: 34min 44sec (2084 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 19 2022