Medieval England – Beer
The word food suggests something solid. However, human beings also need liquid, and liquids have always formed part of our diet. For centuries, beer was prominent in the English diet. The beer of the Anglo-Saxons was a sweet, heavy and dark-coloured drink without hops as a flavouring, also known as ale. When hops were introduced in the fifteenth century, ousting other complex herbal flavourings, beer came to mean specifically the bitter substance they flavoured, with ale retained as a broader category.
Beer was consumed at every meal; Elizabeth I drank it for breakfast, and the Earl of Northumberland and his wife drank two pints of beer and wine every day at their first meal. Even the Earl’s two young sons were allowed two quarts of beer, though no wine, while his children in the nursery received one quart each. A maid of honour at Henry VIlI’s court received eight pints of ale at breakfast, dinner and supper every day. It has been suggested that it’s impossible to consume this much beer, but there is no evidence that it was wasted.
The beer and the ale would have been very alcoholic, much like artisanal beer today; when we think of medieval and early modern foods, it’s important to remember that these would have been taken at meals alongside the strong, treacly, and sometimes bitter or sour flavour of real ale. Such tastes primed the nation to enjoy the equally deep and dark flavours of game. Sometimes, ale or beer might be warmed with spices, including sugar. In apple-growing areas, cider too played a role, but this remained mainly local.
Consumption was not moderate; under Edward I, a statute required London taverns to close by curfew, and under the Tudors, increased fears of unrest led in 1552 to the first licensing act (although drunkenness was blamed on riotous soldiers returning from wars in the Low Countries). A visitor to England in 1598 reported that ‘beer is the general drink and excellently well tasted, but strong and what soon fuddles. Many devout Puritans felt that ale distracted people from what really mattered: in 1617, Thomas Young complained angrily about those who ‘go 10 times to an alehouse, before they go once to a church’
Ale played a surprisingly large role in the life of medieval parishes.
Instead of having cake sales, parishes raised money through ale sales; like the cakes, the ale was made by the wives of the parish for feast days, which were called church ales. It was these to which later Puritans objected. In general, however, ale-making was a surprisingly respectable way for women to earn a living; because the mastery of ale-making was a key part of the housewife’s role, it could be continued into commerce without violating ideas about women’s place. As this implies, most ale was made at home, and consumed at home even if purchased elsewhere. There were pubs, but in medieval England these were not as prominent as they were later to become. The Tabard Inn in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a novelty to the pilgrims; it was more usual for pilgrims to take advantage of monastic obligations to provide hospitality, and of churches church ales. The alehouse and its predominance are products of the Reformation. Because the monasteries were destroyed, and because church ales were abandoned in many areas due to Puritan opposition, the public house came into existence to replace both, offering accommodation and conviviality in place of the monasteries, and ale in place of church ale sales.”
But the heyday of the pub was brief. In the post-Restoration world, it was challenged by other kinds of liquids sold in other kinds of places. In one of the largest changes ever to take place in the English diet, beer was replaced – with remarkable rapidity – by coffee, tea, hot chocolate – and the joker in the pack, gin. Not only was this, in the case of tea and coffee, a shift to a range of stimulants whose principal appeal lay in the caffeine they contained and the sugar used to sweeten them, it was also a shift from local grain to exotic imported substances.
Not one of the new beverages was an English invention, not even gin; all of them, however, became essential elements of the English diet, reflecting the growth of England’s mercantile trading empire and the criticality of its trade routes.
Source ~ ‘English Food a People’s History’ by Diane Purkiss
Image📸 Eduard von Grützner – ‘Three Monks Drinking Beer’
