Nothing that I've actually seen with regards to Medieval diet is as certain or unqualified as what the BBC News article proposes. Each point following a "maybe" or a "perhaps" should be taken with a huge grain of (relatively inexpensive) salt IMO. I suppose news fluff pieces are not designed to be analyzed in detail, but I think the goal of the thing is to make modern people feel uneasy about how lazy they are and how much sugar they eat. The reference of a television show from the get-go was probably a clue as to the intended audience.
Economics & Small Urban Settings
- Thread starter taliesin15
- Start date
Treebore
First Post
I like how they keep forgetting about fowl and their eggs.
I can feed my family of 5 Quiche 3 times per day, 7 days per week. I can feed them spinach Quiche. If I milk my goats (which I do) I can feed them Farmers Cheese Quiche, or cheese and spinach Quiche.
Seeing what I can do on my farm I am pretty sure the "poor farmers" at least ate pretty darn well. Most of the year anyways. I am sure Winters sucked in comparison.
I can feed my family of 5 Quiche 3 times per day, 7 days per week. I can feed them spinach Quiche. If I milk my goats (which I do) I can feed them Farmers Cheese Quiche, or cheese and spinach Quiche.
Seeing what I can do on my farm I am pretty sure the "poor farmers" at least ate pretty darn well. Most of the year anyways. I am sure Winters sucked in comparison.
HeavenShallBurn
First Post
Well, there's a reason censuses and tax rolls were carried out at the beginning of spring. Otherwise your figures were skewed by the winter die-off. As the very old, very young, very poor, or weakened had a significant chance of not making it through.Treebore said:
roguerouge
First Post
Quarterstaves, clubs, and slings with rocks should be within the price range of a commoner: free.
JDJblatherings
First Post
Treebore said:
Very little of the tools needed would be "his" a lot of it would shared with a neighbor, belong to the village or be the property of the local lord.
Andor
First Post
gizmo33 said:
Erm. The important point had more to do with the workload. Farmworkers had to eat well, or they would die. When you're burning a few thousand calories a day in labor you need to eat at least that much or you start starving. While 'starving peasants' is one of those generic mental images of the middle ages it couldn't have been that bad all or even most of the time or there wouldn't have been any peasants after two generations. Starving women do not bear healthy babies.
The urban poor were probably in a worse state. I recall the British army complaining (about the late 19th century) that as more recruits came from the cities instead of the rural farms the size, fitness, and health of the new recruits was in decline.
taliesin15 said:
You're completely misunderstanding what I said. A serf is not a slave, let alone a yeoman farmer or tennant. And even slaves usually owned some property. What I said was that even a peasant who had never touched a coin in his life would have received things like hard goods and cloth as his due from his lord in the two way nature of the feudal contract.
Even if you take the lord out of the equation a small village would often bargin collectively for goods. If you take a look at how some of the old european villages were structured it was similar to a commune with several properties and structures being jointly owned and others being private property. The town council or village elders would bargin with traders or wandering blacksmiths for staples.
Dr. Strangemonkey
First Post
Serfs and peasants would also be making a lot of those goods for themselves.
There's a reason Adam Smith uses the Highland Peasant as his archetypical opponent when he's advocating for increased specialization.
There's a reason Adam Smith uses the Highland Peasant as his archetypical opponent when he's advocating for increased specialization.
Andor said:
That was the point of the BBC article? I thought the point was to make modern people feel guilty about their sugar consumption and sendentary lifestyles by contrast the diet against some over-generalized and unsubstantiated statement about the middle ages. I think the reader was supposed to say "gee - I thought serfs would all be dying of scurvy, but it turns out they're healthier than I am because all I do is eat twinkies" or something like that.
Andor said:
I agree with your general notion here, and population growth statistics would form the evidence for/against this. On the other hand, IMO it's an open question as to whether farm-workers were maintaining the same activity level and calorie requirement year-round (my guess: no). Most books on the subject go into a degree of detail so that I would be reluctant to must make a blanket statement like "every peasant was eating 2 lbs of bread and 8 oz. of meat every day" which is what the BBC article would suggest. How often peasants had nutrition-related diseases, or how their stature contributed to their calorie needs, or what proportion of their calories came from relatively undocumented garden produce, or many other questions are subject to some debate in the sources I've seen and it makes me suspicous of anyone, like the BBC, that makes statements about Medieval diet and lifestyle with such certainty (and of such a blanket nature, irrespective of social class or region).
taliesin15
First Post
gizmo responds to my point about the Domesday Book
We seem to be pretty much in agreement; my point about the Domesday Book is more about how poor the lowest caste really is. Surely the Evil Thorp-raiding PCs aren't after the paltry few coins of these people, I'm just trying to make the argument that the lowest members of even a quasi Medieval England society doesn't own a 5 acre farm, cow, etc. From what I understand, these people would eat gruel and tend to work unskilled jobs like ditch digging and the like. Which does indeed go back to the original point about 900 gp.
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