Life in a Medieval Village - Frances Gies [38]
Stronger or weaker, more flavorful or blander, the pottage kettle supplied many village families with their chief sustenance. If possible, every meal including breakfast was washed down with weak ale, home-brewed or purchased from a neighbor, but water often had to serve. The most serious shortage was protein. Some supplement for the incomplete protein of beans and peas was available from eggs, little from meat or cheese, though the wealthier villagers fared better than the poor or middling. E. A.
Gathering fruit. British Library, Luttrell Psalter, Ms. Add. 42130, f. 196v.
Kosminsky believed that the virgater and half-virgater could have “made ends meet without great difficulty, had it not been for the weight of feudal exploitation”—that is, the labor services and other villein obligations—but that a quarter virgate (five to eight acres) did not suffice even in the absence of servile dues.20 H. S. Bennett calculated the subsistence level as lying between five and ten acres, “probably nearer ten than five.” The most recent scholarly estimate, by H. E. Hallam (1988), is that twelve acres was needed for a statistical family of 4.75. J. Z. Titow pointed out that more acreage was needed per family in a two-field system than a three-field system, since more of each holding was lying fallow. Cicely Howell, studying data from the Midland village of Kibworth Harcourt, concluded that not until the mid-sixteenth century could the half-virgater provide his family with more than eight bushels of grain a year per person from his own land. Poor families survived only by their varied activities as day laborers.21
Besides the shortage of protein, medieval diets were often lacking in lipids, calcium, and vitamins A, C, and D.22 They were also often low in calories, making the inclusion of ale a benefit on grounds of health as well as recreation. Two positive aspects of the villagers’ austere regimen—its low protein and low fat content—gave it some of the virtues of the modern “heartsmart” diet, and its high fiber was a cancer preventative.
A middling family like that of Alexander atte Cross or Henry Abovebrook probably owned a cow or two or a few ewes, to provide an intermittent supply of milk, cheese, and butter. Most households kept chickens and pigs to furnish eggs and occasional meat, but animals, like wheat, were often needed for cash sales to pay the rent or other charges. Salted and dried fish were available for a price, as were eels, which also might be fished from the Nene or poached from the millpond.
Medieval literature voiced the popular hunger for protein and fat. A twelfth-century Irish poet describes a dream in which a coracle “built of lard/ Swam a sweet milk sea,” and out of a lake rose a castle reached by a bridge of butter and surrounded by a palisade of bacon, with doorposts of whey curds, columns of
Men fishing with nets. British Library, Queen Mary’s Psalter, Ms. Royal 2B VII, f. 73.
aged cheese, and pillars of pork. Across a moat of spicy broth covered with fat, guards welcomed the dreamer to the castle with coils of fat sausages.23
It was a hungry world, made hungrier by intermittent crop failures, one series of which in the early fourteenth century brought widespread famine in England and northwest Europe. The later, even more devastating cataclysm of the Black Death so reduced the European population