The Birth of an Industry
From about AD 1000, changes in the political, economic, and cultural landscapes of Europe brought about significant shifts in the social position of alcohol and in drinking cultures. After the four or five centuries of turmoil that followed the migrations of easterners into western Europe and the disintegration of the Roman Empire, there was a period of relative peace and political stability. Both fostered economic development and the growth of trade. Europe’s population began to increase steadily, doubling from about 40 to 80 million between 1000 and 1300, and there was a burst of urbanization in northern Europe and the north of Italy. These cities (such as Antwerp, Bruges, Florence, and Milan) embodied new cultures and markets for alcohol, and their merchants, professionals, and artisans developed new ways of doing business—including the business of alcohol. Such social and economic developments, together with the arrival of a warmer phase in Europe’s climate that stimulated agriculture and made viticulture viable in more northerly regions, had profound and lasting influences on patterns of alcohol consumption and on the organization of the alcohol industry. It might seem inappropriate to think of an “alcohol industry” this early, but significant changes in the organization of ale and wine production and trade appear to justify it.
Right through the Middle Ages, ale was brewed in households in rural areas, although even in these places there was likely some commercial production. Making ale took time and required equipment, and integrating brewing into the daily agricultural work was not always easy, especially during periods (such as harvesttime) when all hands were needed in the fields. The result was that many peasants purchased or bartered goods and produce for ale. In addition, some religious houses in rural areas made far more ale than their members consumed, and large landowners also made ale for sale to their tenants.
The conditions in the cities that began to appear and grow from the eleventh century onward worked against small-scale ale production and made commercial brewing more practical. The single most important development was the creation of a concentrated market of urban consumers. City dwellers were less and less likely to grow or otherwise produce their own food and drink, and retailers—bakers, butchers, and vendors of fresh produce and cooked food—began to crowd urban centers. As far as brewing was concerned, most of the urban population, the poor and workers, lived in cramped conditions with no room for the equipment and barrels that were needed for brewing, even if they could have afforded them. These people, many of whom were migrants from the countryside, ceased being producers and consumers of ale and became exclusively consumers.
While brewing continued in the large urban and rural houses of the well-off, where ale was produced for family and servants, more and more common people purchased ale made in the commercial breweries that grew in number and size during the Middle Ages. These breweries appeared in response to the growing demand for ale, and their appearance, growth, and distribution were fostered by a number of other conditions, apart from the simple economies of scale from which they benefited. As city administrations became more active in regulating economic life, they began to intervene in many aspects of brewing. The risk of fire, which devastated numerous towns in this period, led some municipalities to require brewers to use wood for their fires rather than the traditional straw and stubble that tended to produce clouds of dangerous sparks. To reduce fire hazards even more, some cities stipulated that breweries should be built of stone rather than wood.1 In the Netherlands, urban governments controlled the sale of gruit (the herbs used for bittering and flavoring ale), which they sold at inflated prices. There were savings in bulk purchases, but only commercial brewers could take advantage of them. Good ale also needed plenty of fresh, clean water, but brewers also polluted water with their refuse, to the extent that some English towns (like London, Bristol, and Coventry) forbade brewers access to sources of public drinking water.2Regulations such as these, many imposing considerable costs on brewers, made the survival of small-scale, domestic brewing in the medieval city increasingly difficult.
There was also a major, expensive technological innovation: the gradual replacement by copper kettles of the pottery vessels that were used for boiling the wort.3 Copper kettles used heat more efficiently and were reputed to make better ale, and they could also be made in much larger sizes. While pottery vessels were limited to about 150 liters, copper kettles holding 1,000 liters were in use by the late 1200s, and by the 1400s, some held as much as 4,000 liters of ale. Needless to say, these new kettles, even the smaller ones, required significant capital investment and contributed to the forces that, over time, pushed small-scale urban operators out of business.
Some cities got ahead of this trend and banned domestic ale production outright—Utrecht did so by 1493—while others gradually created a network of regulations whose complexity strangled small-scale brewers. Some cities required brewers to have a license. In Hamburg, for example, the municipal government established a licensing system by 1381, demonstrating that brewing was a privilege (an activity that had to be explicitly permitted) and not a right. By the middle of the fifteenth century, Hamburg (an important brewing center) had virtually outlawed brewing in private households. Other centers set out rules governing the entire brewing process. From the early 1300s, Nuremberg’s city administration regulated the composition of ale, the brewing time, the locations and hours, and in what volume ale could be served. In places as diverse as England, Austria and Nuremberg, the price of ale was fixed, first locally and then regionally.4 In England, the first national regulations date from 1267, when the Assize of Bread and Ale set the price of beer at 2 gallons for a penny in the cities and 3 gallons for a penny in the country. Higher prices could be charged when grain prices rose, but beer was always to be less expensive in the country, close to the source of cereals and where the costs of doing business were lower. Finally, even though the retail sale of ale was not always the direct concern of brewers (although some taverns were connected to breweries), the hours and other conditions of sale often fell under municipal regulations. Taverns were licensed in London as early as 1189, and in the early 1300s their hours of business were established by law.
In these myriad ways, the organization of beer production in the city evolved as urban centers became more populous and their organizations more complex. Regulations governing production and sale were not peculiar to the brewing industry, and they reflected the spread and intensification of municipal control over many dimensions of the economy and society. In rural areas, where the great bulk of the medieval population continued to live, brewing tended to be more dispersed, the concentration of ownership and production took place more slowly, and the larger breweries did not have the same scale as their urban counterparts. In the town of Exeter, in southwest England, 75 percent of households brewed and sold ale at least once between 1365 and 1393, but only 29 percent did so ten or more times.5 At the very most, only a quarter of these households could be called regular brewers in that they made and sold beer an average of three times a year—and brewing three times a year sets the definition of “regular” very low.
One notable effect of the shift to commercial brewing was the decline of women’s participation. When brewing was a household task, it was carried out by women (called “alewives” or “brewsters”) for whom it was an integral part of the domestic responsibilities of cooking, baking, and household management for which women were responsible. On the manor of Brigstock, in Northamptonshire, more than 300 women—a third of all the women who lived there—brewed ale for sale in the decades preceding the Black Death. In the early 1300s, there were about 115 brewsters in Oxford, which had a population of about 10,000, while 250 brewsters made ale for Norwich’s 17,000 inhabitants.6 Most brewsters were married, and many brewed ale occasionally rather than on a regular and full-time basis. But while most brewed in limited volumes, some brewsters operated on a more commercial basis. In 1301–2, Maud Elias of Hull, in Yorkshire, sold 100 gallons of ale to the household of King Edward I.
Yet even this, a substantial volume for a brewster, was dwarfed by the commercial operations that measured production in tens of thousands of gallons. This scale of brewing was dominated by men, and as the number and size of these breweries rose, the participation of women declined correspondingly. There were 137 brewsters in Oxford in 1311, but the number fell steadily until in 1348, just as the Black Death arrived, there were about 83.7 Throughout England, nearly all the commercial brewing was done by brewsters before the Black Death in the late 1340s, but by the end of the 1500s scarcely any women were involved, and most of those were widows of brewers, women who were permitted to continue in the profession under their dead husband’s name.
The Black Death seems to have marked a sudden change in both the brewing and consumption of ale in England. Not only were fewer women involved in production after the worst of the plague had receded, but there is some evidence that the consumption of ale rose; more people were drinking more ale,8 such that the population losses due to plague were not reflected in demand for ale. A buoyant market, combined with the technological and commercial changes (and later the introduction of hops), made brewing increasingly profitable, and it attracted men of means who had eschewed small-scale brewing with its corresponding small-scale revenues. These men were more familiar with the urban world of commerce and its methods of investment and systems of distribution. Women were not excluded by law (although they were denied some of the privileges of membership in the English brewers’ guilds), but they experienced gradual exclusion, as men progressively monopolized brewing and its institutions.
Judith Bennett, the foremost historian of this process, explains the virtual disappearance of women’s brewing as the result of a culture of misogyny that took various forms.9 Perhaps the most striking was the identification of brewsters with ale, the traditional drink flavored with gruit, and male brewers with beer, the new beverage made with hops. (This is explained below.) Although ale continued to be made (and although there is a lot of fluidity between the two words “beer” and “ale”), it was portrayed in this time of transition as a beverage that was on its way out. Moreover, new images of women brewers as dishonest, unhygienic, and immoral began to appear. In short, there emerged during the 1400s and 1500s a new culture, as well as an economy, of male commercial brewing. In the 1500s, this shift took institutional forms, as various authorities began to exclude women from all aspects of the brewing industry, whether as producers or retailers. The result was that, whether by ambient cultural forces or by explicit legal instruments, women were excluded from the new beer-brewing industry. Instead of being able to use it as a means of enriching themselves and gaining social status, they remained participants in the less prestigious occupations of the late medieval economy, although as we shall see, women did participate in the small-scale phase of distilling that emerged from the 1500s onward.
The urban production of beer for local sale was one thing, but this period also saw the beginning of a substantial beer trade, another facet of the maturing industry. Until this phase of the Middle Ages, beer (unlike wine) had generally found only local markets, whether in country or city, because beer remained in good condition for a matter of days or a few weeks at most—too short a time to be shipped to any distant market and to be sold in good condition. There was some trade in ale over relatively short distances, as between England and Flanders, but only on a limited scale. What changed the picture was the replacement of gruit, an herb mixture used for bittering and flavoring beer, by hops, a plant that had sporadically been used for making beer in some monasteries since the ninth century. Hops are a preservative; they kill certain bacteria and give beer longevity, enabling it to be transported for longer periods of time and therefore over longer distances. Before hops were used, higher levels of alcohol were sometimes used to keep bacteria at bay, so the introduction of hops meant that lower-alcohol beer could be made. Hopped beer was also less sweet than unhopped ale, so the introduction of hops involved a shift in the style and flavor of beer—a shift that was welcomed more readily in some markets than in others.
Hops began to be used regularly in brewing from about 1200 in northern Germany, and port cities like Hamburg soon became centers of a vibrant export trade in beer. Ports dominated the beer trade (and other commerce) because waterborne shipping was far less expensive than land transportation. Medieval roads were rudimentary, and liquids easily leaked from barrels when transportation across rough terrain on carts with wooden wheels dislodged the staves. Moreover, the costs of land transport, together with taxes added as goods crossed national and provincial frontiers, could increase the price of commodities to the point that they were no longer competitive on the destination market. One estimate is that the price at origin increased by 25 to 70 percent for every 100 kilometers that beer had to travel over land.10 Coastal shipping was a far safer and cheaper means, and during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, German Baltic ports like Bremen, Hamburg, and Wismar established a profitable beer trade with the Low Countries. Even over shorter distances, waterborne transport was cheaper. In 1308–9, wine sent from Bristol to the bishop of Coventry and Lichfield’s residence in Lichfield used both the Severn River and an overland route. The cost per barrel-mile was 0.4 pence for the water portion but 2.5 pence, six times more, for the land portion of the trip.11
Hamburg dominated the beer export trade along Europe’s north coasts to the point that “Hamburg beer” became the generic name for beer from northern Germany. Amsterdam imposed an import duty on Hamburg beer from the early 1300s, but it did not blunt demand; annual shipments by the 1360s averaged more than 5 million liters, a volume that represented about a fifth of Hamburg’s total beer production.12 From this same period, Germany’s brewers began to extend their exports throughout the Baltic area and into Scandinavia. In all these export markets, the Germans were successful not because there was no local beer, but because local brewers were technologically less advanced. To this extent, the dominance of the north German brewers on the northern European markets persisted only as long as they held the technological advantage, and that gap narrowed significantly, especially in the Low Countries, toward the end of the 1400s.
Like that of beer, the production and distribution of wine evolved in the later Middle Ages. Although there are few useful statistics on wine production in this period, it clearly increased dramatically to serve the growing markets, particularly the swelling urban markets of northern Europe. There was a burst of vine planting from 1000 to 1200, mostly stimulated by the increase in population and aided by warmer climatic conditions that created new regions where grapes could be grown. French landowners cleared forests and drained marshes to plant vines and converted poor arable land to viticulture. In Germany, vines flourished in the Rhineland, Swabia, Franconia, and Thuringia. By the early 1300s, vines were planted as far east as the farthest frontiers of Hungary, including the Tokay region, which would later produce an iconic sweet wine. In England, the Domesday Book, an agricultural census taken in 1086, listed only 42 vineyards, but two centuries later there were more than 1,300. In some areas, such as northern Italy, vineyards increased to provide wine for the burgeoning cities nearby: Venice, Milan, Florence, and Genoa. Similarly, the growth of Paris’s population stimulated viticulture along the Rivers Seine, Marne, and Yonne. Meanwhile, expanding cities that lacked adequate sources of wine nearby, like London in England; Ghent, Bruges, and Brussels in the Low Countries; and cities on the Baltic coast, spurred growth in the vine-growing regions they imported wine from, especially the Rhine Valley in Germany and in southwestern France.
Several major wine routes were established in medieval Europe. One was anchored in present-day Bordeaux, thanks largely to a dynastic link forged between Aquitaine (the Bordeaux region) and England by the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry, Duke of Normandy, who became Henry II of England. With Aquitaine and England under the same crown, wine began to flow from southwestern France to the relatively prosperous merchants of England’s commercial cities, and by the 1200s, Gascon wine, much of it from the modern southwestern region that lies inland from the vineyards of present-day Bordeaux, had stormed the English market. This was young wine, what today might be called “nouveau,” because it was shipped only weeks after the harvest and soon after fermentation was complete. Every October, hundreds of ships set sail from Bordeaux on the minimum weeklong voyage to England. Smaller fleets would sail from Nantes and La Rochelle with wine from the Loire Valley in northwest France. At a time when wine was unstable and scarcely lasted a year, this new wine was highly prized and fetched good prices. Further shipments were made the following spring, when weather permitted; but the older wine, although only six or eight months old, was considered inferior, and it sold for less. Most of this wine was red (it was called “claret” because of its light color), but some was white: Scottish financial records from 1460 show receipt of “five pipes of Gascon wine, one white and four red.”13
Toward the end of summer, as this French wine was starting to fade in availability or quality or both, wine arrived in England from the Mediterranean: from Cyprus, Corfu, Greece, and Italy. These were sweeter and much higher in alcohol than the French wines, making them more durable and giving them the stamina to survive the long summer voyage across the Mediterranean, through the Straits of Gibraltar, and up the Atlantic coast to England and also to northern Europe. It was a grueling voyage that could take as long as three months, and it was accomplished sometimes by sailing ships and sometimes by galleys, with merchants themselves occasionally at the oars. But the effort was worthwhile. The more flavorsome and substantial Mediterranean wines fetched wholesale prices up to twice those of Gascon wines, and demand was further piqued because only three of London’s taverns were licensed to sell them on a retail basis.
The limited Mediterranean wine trade served a small, wealthy market in England, but Bordeaux’s exports were massive, especially in the early 1300s. In the three years 1305–6, 1306–7, and 1308–9, exports averaged 98,000 barrels a year, more than 900 million liters. The English kings were regular and mostly loyal clients. In 1243 alone, Henry III bought 1,445 casks, or about 1,400,000 liters, of Gascon wine. Production always depended on weather, of course—the 1310 harvest was only half that of the previous few years—and exports were also affected by political events. Exports declined dramatically when France and England went to war in 1324 and again from the 1330s when the Hundred Years War broke out.
Wine from Bordeaux was also exported to other important urban markets in northern Europe and to towns on the Baltic Sea. These population centers were also supplied by a wine trade route than ran down the Rhine to the North Sea and served northern Germany, the Low Countries, England, Scandinavia, and the Baltic Sea area. In eastern Europe, Cracow, a Polish city home to a royal court and a wealthy merchant elite, became not only a good market for wine but also an ideal transshipment point. Wine from many parts of the Mediterranean region, and often shipped by Italian merchants, arrived there for forwarding to other markets in eastern Europe, Russia, and around the Baltic Sea.14
Like the long-distance beer trade that emerged in northern Europe in the 1400s, the trade in wine was an important aspect of the development of Europe’s alcohol industry. Institutions and codes of practice developed, with guilds of vintners (wine merchants) beginning to assume positions of importance in many cities. As early as the first decades of the thirteenth century, more than a third of London’s aldermen (city councillors) were vintners, as was the mayor who represented the city at the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. All over Europe, wine was taxed in money or kind by authorities as diverse as monarchs, dukes, and municipal authorities. English wine-shippers had to pay “prisage,” the right of the king to take two barrels of wine from every shipment of more than twenty-one barrels, and one barrel from every shipment smaller than that. The authorities in Paris taxed wine as it passed through the gates in the city walls, while the municipality of Cracow taxed all wine traded by the city’s merchants.15 Such payments produced revenues that their beneficiaries were reluctant to surrender. In the 1340s, the king of England took more than 200 casks of wine (180,000 liters) as prisage. During the same period, 88 percent of the city revenues in Bruges, in Flanders, came from taxes on wine and beer.16 The largest single source of funds to support the Dutch revolt against Spain (1566–1648) was the tax on beer, such that it might be argued that “beer created Belgium.”17
Even granting that wine merchants must often have successfully evaded the taxes on wine, the income must have increased steadily from AD 1000, as Europe’s populations grew and the better-off wine-drinking sections of the population expanded. More land was planted with vines, and production must have increased steadily to keep up with demand. There was probably a broad continuity of church and secular ownership of vineyards, but many religious houses produced only enough wine for their own needs. These varied from order to order, but consumption could be significant. At the monastery of Cluny, in Burgundy, a small meal called the mixtum, consisting of bread and a glass of wine, was available to start the day, and main meals (including meals during times of penance) were served with a half-pint of undiluted wine. On feast days, pigmentum—warm wine flavored with honey, pepper, and cinnamon—was served.18
If many monastic wineries produced exclusively for their own use, the general rise in production must have involved an extraordinary increase in the output of wineries owned by private individuals. However, just as in the early Middle Ages, so in this period many secular owners transferred vineyards to the church in the expectation of tangible or intangible benefits. From the twelfth century, the Crusades proved to be a real boon to monasteries because many knights gave land to the church for prayers to be said for their souls in case they died while away. Almost every house in the important Cistercian order received at least one vineyard during the 1100s. In 1157, for example, a widow and her six sons gave a Cistercian house about four acres of vines so that the monks would pray for their dead husband and father.19
Dozens of such gifts to the Cistercians’ founding abbey in Cîteaux, in Burgundy, meant that by the mid-fourteenth century the order had accumulated hundreds of hectares of vineyards in what are now some of the most prestigious communes of the region—Beaune, Pommard, Vosne, Nuits, and Corton among them. By 1336, the Cistercians owned 50 hectares of vines in the commune of Vougeot, at the time the largest single parcel of vineyards in Burgundy. The Cistercians developed a reputation for fastidious work in the vineyards and the cellar, and they gained not only land but fame and privileges. In 1171, Pope Alexander III exempted them from paying the tithe (a church tax) on their vineyards and later threatened to excommunicate anyone who challenged the exemption, which suggests that other wine producers might have objected to the favorable treatment the Cistercians received. The same year, the Duke of Burgundy freed the Cistercians from paying any of the dues that would normally be levied on the transportation and sale of their produce.20
This sort of encouragement led the Cistercians to expand rapidly—there was a veritable empire of 400 abbeys within fifty years of the order’s founding—and the monks planted vineyards in all their locations, even though many made only the wine they needed for their own communions and consumption. Yet others, like the founding house in Cîteaux, became significant commercial producers. Another was Kloster Eberbach, in the Rhine district, founded by monks from Burgundy who discovered that the Rhine Valley’s climate was exceptionally suitable for white wine production. By 1500, Kloster Eberbach owned nearly 700 hectares of vines, the largest vineyard estate in Europe, and the entrepreneurial monks also owned a fleet of ships that ferried the wine down the Rhine to Cologne.
Examples of massive wine production, such as Kloster Eberbach’s, were rare, but they reflected a broad trend: an increase in the production of wine from about 1000. Even so, the increase was anything but linear and steady. Production fell from 1350 to 1400, when the Black Death reduced the population of Europe by as much as a third. Big towns and cities that had seen their populations swell for two or three centuries saw them decline dramatically in a few years as their inhabitants died or fled from the plague. As population fell, so did the market for wine. In the vineyards, there was a shortage of skilled workers, and many vineyards in the worst-affected regions were simply abandoned.
By the Middle Ages, wine and beer were staples of the European diet, but other alcoholic beverages were also available. Mead (fermented diluted honey) was drunk in small volumes in many regions. Cider, fermented apple juice, was popular where apples grew easily, as in Normandy and Brittany. The Normans are thought to have introduced cider to England in the eleventh century, and an industry was established in the southwest. Finally, the science of distilling fermented drinks to make much stronger alcoholic beverages began to spread through Europe from the thirteenth century. But until the 1500s (see Chapter 6), distilling (usually producing brandy from wine) was largely confined to religious houses, and the spirits were used almost exclusively for medical purposes.
Although beer and ale were in plentiful supply, there must have been many poor people who could afford neither and who drank only water, much of which was polluted and unsafe to consume. This practice (together with a generally meager and unhealthy diet and poor living conditions), must have contributed to the low life expectancy of the period. There is a strong suggestion of water-drinking in the allegation, during the Black Death, that Jews had poisoned wells in order to cause the fatal outbreaks of the plague.21In parts of Germany and France, Jews were killed in order to eliminate the supposed source of the problem. The episode speaks not only to the virulence of anti-Semitism in medieval Europe but also to both the continuing suspicion and consumption of water. Jews, we might note, were not accused of poisoning barrels of beer or wine.
For the most part, the diets of the homeless, the transient, and even the stable working poor are lost to us, but there is occasional, if uneven, evidence for the strata above them. In the village of Montaillou, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, peasants drank wine as part of the daily diet. The 250 inhabitants supported a wine-seller who made rounds of the houses selling wine brought by mule from Tarascon and Pamiers; but shepherds drank only sour wine and some milk on a daily basis, and good wine was reserved for festive occasions.22 Farther east and north, in wine-producing Lorraine, wine was consumed in households as grand as that of the Duke of Lorraine and as modest as those of peasants who made it for their own consumption. In the late 1400s, the duke’s household went through 7,000 liters of wine a month, or the equivalent of about 300 standard bottles a day, but we do not know how many people shared them or how the volume was distributed. When the duke traveled, he provided 2 or 3 liters of wine a day for each person in his retinue. The duke’s kitchen also used wine in the preparation of food, and in 1481 alone, some 468 liters were designated “for cooking his lordship’s fish.”23
The royal courts of England and Scotland also helped boost demand for wine, especially from Gascony. In 1243, Henry III of England spent more than £2,300 on 1,445 casks of wine, about a third of a million gallons. Some was poor quality, but more than two-thirds was considered high standard and cost more than £2 a barrel. When Henry’s daughter Margaret married Alexander III of Scotland in 1251, the guests went through 25,000 gallons of wine. It washed down the 1,300 deer, 7,000 hens, 170 boars, 60,000 herrings, and 68,500 loaves of bread that the wedding party and their guests consumed.24 In one year, Alexander III had to pledge all his revenues from the port of Berwick to guarantee payment of the £2,197 he owed a Bordeaux merchant for more than 100,000 liters of wine.25
The medieval nobility also supported the alcohol trade. The Earl of Northumberland’s household consumed 27,500 gallons of ale and 1,600 gallons of wine in one year, although we do not know the number of the earl’s family and staff. In 1419, Dame Alice de Bryene’s household, which brewed its own ale for domestic consumption, also took care of 262 gallons of red wine and 105 gallons of white. On the clerical side of the social ledger, the installation of the archbishop of York in 1464 was celebrated by the consumption of 100 casks of wine.26
Lower down the social scale, people received alcohol as gifts and as part of their wages and pensions. In 1499 the nursing sisters of Nancy were given 1,874 liters of red wine, and in 1502 the Minor Brothers received 2,342 liters of red wine “to assist them to live.” Wine was included in the annuities provided by the dukes of Lorraine to reward men and women for their services in positions as varied as valets, falconers, trumpeters, and midwives. Meanwhile, all kinds of artisans—masons, carpenters, and cartwrights among them—received wine, beer, and other foodstuffs as part of their wages. Elsewhere, when the belfry of the church in Bonlieu-en-Forez was being built, the workers were provided with eggs, meat, rye bread, beans for soup, and “plenty of wine.”27 The same was true of beer, which was provided as part of the wages in many regions of Europe, as well as off the shores of Europe: beer provided a significant proportion of the daily calories of seamen while they were at sea.28
Ale was commonly part of the diet that harvest workers were fed in England during the Middle Ages, and it seems that, as time went on, greater volumes of ale were provided. Between 1256 and 1326, ale made up less than 20 percent of the value of meals served to harvest workers in Norfolk, but from 1341 to 1424, it was never less than 20 percent and rose as high as 41 percent. On a per capita basis, the actual volume of ale provided to harvesters more than doubled, rising from 2.83 pints (1.61 liters) in 1256 to 6.36 pints (3.61 liters) in 1424.29 There was no tension between working and drinking alcohol, as there is today, because most workers consumed alcohol periodically throughout the day in order to hydrate themselves.
Nor was there any perceived problem in supplying soldiers with alcohol while they were on duty or in battle. The Bayeux Tapestry, depicting the Norman conquest of England in 1066, shows a wagon loaded with a cask of wine—“carrum cum vino,” explains the text—among the military and other supplies the Norman army brought ashore. We might assume that the wine was destined for consumption by Duke William or, more cynically, that it was used to bolster the fighting spirit of the soldiers (as rum was in the British army during the First World War). But we also know that rations of alcohol (wine and ale) were regularly supplied to French and other soldiers at this time. During 1406, the six men responsible for guarding the Château de Custines were supplied with 2 liters of wine a day—more than might be thought desirable, perhaps, for men whose main job was to keep a sharp lookout for intruders. In 1316, Edward II of England ordered 4,000 barrels of wine for his army in action in Scotland, and a French plan of campaign from 1327 provided about a tenth of a gallon of wine a day for ordinary soldiers.30 Alcohol was especially useful when armies were marching and fighting and when water supplies were contaminated, as they frequently were at siege sites. At the forty-day siege of Dover Castle in 1216, the 1,000 soldiers went through 600 gallons of wine and more than 20,000 gallons of ale.31 Adding wine to water (another way of looking at diluting wine) was a means of killing some harmful bacteria and staving off sickness among soldiers. It is known, for example, that the microbes that carry typhoid fever die when they are immersed in wine.32
Examples of alcohol consumption like these can be multiplied many times over from across Europe and throughout the period 1000–1500. They can only be impressionistic, as they are too scattered geographically and over time to allow us to develop any sense of patterns and trends. Nonetheless, we should expect alcohol consumption to have been higher in the upper social and political strata than the lower, and greater among men than among women. There is plenty of evidence of male anxiety about women drinking alcohol, and although this need not mean that women did drink less than men, it is reasonable to assume that, on average, women did drink less.
More generalized rates of consumption of ale and wine in the Middle Ages must remain uncertain, although in regions like England the volume of ale consumed must have been much greater, in absolute terms, than wine, which was higher in both price and alcohol content. In fourteenth-century England, ale cost a penny for 2 gallons in the city and a penny for 3 gallons in the country. The price of Gascon or Spanish wine was about 6 pence a gallon, making wine twelve to twenty-four times the price of ale per unit of volume,33 although only about four to eight times more expensive in terms of pure alcohol delivered by each beverage. One estimate of per capita ale consumption in northern Europe from the late fourteenth to the end of the fifteenth century shows a range of 177 to 310 liters a year, a fairly modest one-half to two-thirds of a liter a day. The author’s conclusion reflects the uncertainty of such figures: “A general estimate for medieval England of between four and five liters each day is reasonable but perhaps too high. More sensible and likely is an estimate of some 1.1 liters each day for each person.” He goes on to propose that members of better-off farm families might have consumed as little as half a liter of ale a day, while aristocratic families consumed between 1.5 and 2 liters.34
As for wine, one compilation of estimates of per capita consumption in France shows a range from 183 to 781 liters a year, or from half a liter to just over 2 liters a day. The low volume was for a monk in the early fourteenth century (with an added liter on feast days), and the high figure was for the six soldiers on sentry duty at the Château de Custines, who received this very generous wine allowance even though they were expected to remain awake and alert. Between the extremes in this compilation of statistics we find such rates as 220 liters a year (half a liter a day) for students at a papal school and 365 liters a year (a liter a day) for a chambermaid in Vernines.35 Quite clearly, there is no such thing as a general per capita consumption rate of ale or wine in medieval Europe. If the individual cases are correct, there was a very wide variation in volumes consumed, and there seems to have been no evident correlation with gender, class, occupation, or context. Although it is disappointing to reach the very vague conclusion that many medieval people drank a lot of alcohol and that per capita consumption was almost certainly much higher than it is today, it might be the best we can do.36
The volumes of alcohol downed on a daily basis in the Middle Ages were probably substantial, and most involved a liter of ale and/or the equivalent of a bottle or two of wine. But volumes were sometimes well below what was necessary for rehydration, especially when we consider that many people in the Middle Ages did hard physical work from sunrise to sunset. The findings raise the question of where they were getting their additional water from. The water in gruel and soups must have been an important source, but we must consider it probable that considerable numbers of Europeans drank water at this time for lack of other than alcoholic beverages. Even if they were concerned about the safety of water, the poor had no alternatives. In England, the price of beer and ale was fixed by law, and under the regulations of 1283, 4 liters of ale—a reasonable daily allowance for two adults—would have cost a craftsman a third of his daily wages and a laborer about two-thirds. Women, who were paid about two-thirds the male wage, were that much less likely to be able to buy ale or beer. This is another case where we need to draw a careful distinction between social prescription, which warned against drinking water, and practice, which reflected material conditions that must have allowed no alternative to it.
The upper classes might have drunk more alcoholic beverages, but did they drink better? One of the trends that emerged in the Middle Ages was a sense of connoisseurship, meaning that certain products began to acquire a degree of cultural cachet for their perceived quality. Applied to alcohol, this was not entirely new; we have seen that both Greek and Roman writers drew up lists of wines they considered a cut above the rest. We might expect wine to have attracted this sort of differentiation earlier than beer: until the later Middle Ages, people had a limited range of beers to choose from, as they were not transported over significant distances and people drank what was brewed locally. Even then, there were very likely preferred brewers, especially in larger towns where numerous brewers competed with one another. But the development of a longer-distance beer trade brought new products to a number of markets, and as we have seen, beer imported from Hamburg became more popular than local products in parts of the Low Countries and Scandinavia.
Better-off wine-consumers in key markets such as London, Antwerp, and Paris were even more fortunate, for they could regularly choose among wines from many parts of Europe and the Mediterranean region. Connoisseurship of wine seems to have become more systematic in the Middle Ages. English consumers gave high marks to the body and light color of the Bordeaux they consumed in such vast volumes. They called it “claret” for its color, and the name was commonly used to refer to red wine from Bordeaux until the late twentieth century. In Italy, wealthier wine consumers made a quality distinction between wines made from common grape varieties (which they called “Latin wine”) and wines made from newer varieties (like white wine made from vernaccia grapes in the area around San Gimignano, in Tuscany) and from some other parts of Europe. The late thirteenth-century poet Cecco Angiolieri put it this way:
And I want only Greek and Vernaccia,
For Latin wine is more distasteful
Than my woman, when she nags me.37
In France, a ranking of European wines by quality resulted from a fictitious “Battle of the Wines,” which was the subject of two poems in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Each gave an account of a wine-tasting—essentially a forerunner of modern wine competitions—organized by King Philip Augustus of France. As if to emphasize the association between wine and the church, the king was said to have nominated an English priest to judge the wines. This priest donned his stole as he tasted the wines so that he could “excommunicate” any that he found unacceptable. The wines judged to be the best were to be given not medals, as they are today, but ecclesiastical and secular titles, ranging from pope to peers.38
In the earlier of the two poems, the wines were predominantly white and predominantly French (particularly from the north of France, where white wine was and is more common than red), although there were some representatives of other parts of Europe and the Mediterranean area. Of the 70 wines mentioned by name, only 2 were from the Bordeaux region, 6 from Anjou-Poitou, 2 from Burgundy, and 4 from Languedoc. The handful from outside France included wines from Alsace, Mosel, and Spain and also a wine from Cyprus, which the priest judged the best of all:
The king crowned the wines judged good
To each with a title he honoured
A pope he made of the Cypriot wine
For like a star in the heavens it shone.39
In all, twenty wines were honored for their quality. The runner-up was named a cardinal, while others were named kings, counts, and peers. Eight wines, all from the north of France, were “excommunicated.”
As wine became more and more closely associated with its region of origin, it was subjected to tighter regulations. Some were designed to control quality at the point of production, like regulations dealing with pruning, vine care, and harvesting in Burgundy. A council of city representatives and vine-growers also decreed the date (called the ban de vendange) when the Burgundy harvest could begin, a measure that ensured that grapes were picked when they were ripe and also stopped vine owners from entering the vineyards and stealing grapes from vines they did not own. Other regulations tried to prevent adulteration by merchants and retailers. Bad wine was sometimes mixed with good, and multiregional blends were passed off as coming from a place whose wines commanded higher prices. In his Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer had the Pardoner warn of the counterfeit wine for sale in London:
Keep clear of wine, I tell you, white or red,
Especially Spanish wines which they provide
And have on sale in Fish Street and Cheapside.
That wine mysteriously finds its way
To mix itself with others—shall we say
Spontaneously?—that grow in neighboring regions.40
Chaucer knew what he was talking about: his family had been in the wine and tavern business for generations, and he grew up living above the cellars.
In addition to counterfeit wine, customers had to be careful they were not buying “corrected” wine—wine that had spoiled and then been treated with additives to conceal the telltale odors and flavors. Stored in barrels where it was exposed to increasing volumes of air as it was drawn off and sold, wine must often have oxidized. Moreover, the state of barrel hygiene in the Middle Ages must have meant that many casks were infected with brettanomyces, a yeast that gives wine flavors that today are described variously as “smoked meat,” “mousy,” and even “rotting corpses.” Because wines with an unappealing smell and flavor must have been fairly common—and this at a period when a host of ambient smells were unattractive—many books gave advice on correcting wine. The frequency of such advice in the medieval and early modern periods suggests that few people were willing to throw away wine that had spoiled and would do almost anything to make it palatable again. Perhaps the wealthy and sensitive of palate would dispose of it—the Earl of Northumberland had his “brokyn” wine made into vinegar—but most people probably tried, literally, to make the best of it.
One widely distributed late fourteenth-century work, Le Ménagier de Paris, possibly written by a knight in the service of the Duke of Berry, purports to advise a young wife on such diverse and useful subjects as obedience to her husband, hiring servants, training dogs, and ridding hawks of lice. It also describes ways of fixing spoiled wine. Wine that had gone sour could be made drinkable by adding a basket of fresh grapes to the barrel; wine that smelled bad could be improved by the addition of elder wood and powdered cardamom; muddy wine could be clarified by hanging in it bags containing the whites of eggs that had been boiled and then fried; unwanted color in white wine could be removed by adding holly leaves to the barrel; bitter wine could be softened by adding hot boiled corn or, if that failed, a basketful of sand that had been well washed in water drawn from the River Seine.41 Some of these remedies might have worked. Egg whites (raw, not cooked) are still sometimes used for fining (clarifying) wine. As for the rest, their effectiveness is a matter of conjecture.
Even though private individuals might have used such methods to correct their wine, retailers and merchants were not permitted to. In fact, they were not permitted to tamper with wine in any way. In London, cellars in taverns had to be visible to customers so that they could see their wine being drawn, although some tavern keepers put up curtains to conceal their illicit activities. Additives known to have been used to “improve” the smell and flavor of wine included pitch, wax, gum, and powdered bay, while turnsole (a purple dye) was used to deepen color. A 1306 statute in Frankfurt banned the addition of distilled spirits, and a 1371 Würzburg law forbade the use of spirits, alum, ground glass, chalk, and iron slag in wine.42 When one London tavern keeper, John Penrose, was found to have adulterated some of his wine, he was condemned to drink some of the concoction and throw away the rest and was banned from selling wine for five years.43 In 1456, when it was discovered that Lombard wine merchants had added substances to their sweet wine, the lord mayor of London ordered 150 barrels of the wine to be staved in. The wine ran through the streets, a slightly ambiguous account read, “like a stream of rainwater in the sight of all the people, from whence there issued a most loathsome savour.”44
Regulations also controlled the quality of ale and beer. In eleventh-century England, “ale-conners” (literally, “ale-knowers”) were appointed to certify that ale was properly made and priced. But they could still be deceived by brewers. A 1369 court record noted that all the brewers of Thornbury, near Bristol, “each time they brew, and before the tasters arrive, put aside the third best part of the brew and store it in a lower room. It is sold to no one outside the house but only by the mug to those frequenting the house as a tavern, the price being at least one penny per quarter-gallon. The rest is sold outside the house at two-and-a-half pence or threepence per gallon, to the grave damage of the whole neighbourhood of the town.”45
Despite the evidently poor quality of much of the wine and ale on offer and the suspicion that adulteration was common, Europeans downed vast quantities of it. There seems to have been an increase in anxiety about drunkenness from the later 1300s, following the Black Death. This might have reflected a rise in sensibility on the part of commentators, but it is equally conceivable that it reflected an actual increase in heavy drinking, perhaps as a collective response to the widespread, catastrophic mortality. Some series of estimates of per capita alcohol consumption suggest that there was a slight increase in northern Europe, but statistics such as these are inconclusive. The relationship between drinking alcoholic beverages and drunkenness is mediated by many factors, including the volume consumed, the alcohol content of the beverage, the physical characteristics of the consumer, and the patterns of consumption—whether the alcohol was drunk in small, regular volumes or episodes of heavy consumption. Put simply, we cannot infer a higher incidence of drunkenness from nothing more than an increase in per capita consumption.
Even so, commentators on tendencies in drunkenness picked up the pace of criticism, to the level of what one historian calls “a drastic escalation in preachments” against “overindulgence in drink.”46 Some of the comments on intoxication are no more or less remarkable than those in other periods; they restate the point that drunkenness is a poor choice and that it has negative consequences for the drinker and society more broadly. In The Canterbury Tales, the Pardoner (who some commentators contend was drunk throughout his recitation) commented to his fellow travelers,
Witness the Bible, which is most express
That lust is bred of wine and drunkenness.
Look how the drunken and unnatural Lot
Lay with his daughters, though he knew it not;
He was too drunk to know what he was doing . . .
But seriously, my lords, attention, pray!
All the most notable acts, I dare to say,
And victories in the Old Testament,
Won under God, who is omnipotent,
Were won in abstinence, were won in prayer.
Look in the Bible, you will find it there.47
This might have been a call to total abstinence, but that is unlikely. It was probably a warning about drunkenness generally and advice to avoid being under the influence of alcohol when making critical decisions.
The Pardoner might well have directed his words to his clerical colleagues, for the clergy are well represented in the medieval accounts of drunkenness. On a thirteenth-century visitation to parts of northern France, church officials found many priests in breach of the rules governing alcohol. The priest in St. Rémy was said to be notorious for drunkenness and for frequenting the local tavern, where he had got into fights on several occasions; the priest at Gilemerville had occasionally lost his clothes in taverns (possibly by gambling, or perhaps in other circumstances); the priest in Pierrepoint was habitually drunk; the priest in Grandcourt was notorious for his excessive drinking; the priest in Panlieu not only was well-known as a drunk but also sold wine and often got his parishioners drunk.48
As these examples suggest, taverns became implicated in episodes of drunkenness (this is a long way from the modern legal requirement of refusing service to intoxicated patrons), and we see more and more condemnations of public drinking places as sites of gambling, prostitution, and other forms of poorly regarded behavior. The setting easily reinforced the historically persistent notion that drinking alcohol gave rise to all other forms of immorality. In response, authorities in many places attempted to rein in unacceptable behavior with regulations on drinking. Some tried to limit drinking hours, like the 1350 royal decree requiring Paris innkeepers not to allow new customers into their inns after the bells of Notre Dame Cathedral had rung out the curfew hour.
Yet for all the concern about heavy drinking and drunkenness, medieval doctors continued to praise the curative and health-giving properties of beer and wine, drawing on Greek and Arabic traditions that employed alcohol to treat a wide range of illnesses and conditions. Henri de Mondeville, a fourteenth-century French surgeon, stressed the benefit of wine for the blood, although he pointed out that it should be the best wine one could find—light, white, or rosé, with a good aroma and pleasant flavor. In a secular restatement of the doctrine of transubstantiation, de Mondeville wrote that wine was the best beverage for generating blood, for it entered the bloodstream directly and was immediately transformed into blood. But he added that he could also see the benefits of drinking both wine and milk: people who drank only wine had a reddish complexion, while those who drank only milk were pale. A proper balance of the two beverages made for the ideal, a pale complexion with rosy cheeks.49
According to some medieval advice, wine consumption could not start too soon. A German physician recommended in 1493 that children should be weaned from wine (an interesting notion in itself) at about eighteen months old and given water or honey to drink instead. But if the wet-nurse was unable to get the child off wine, “she should give him wine that is white, light, and well-diluted.”50 Although they countered classical advice not to feed children wine, various physicians in Germany, Italy, and France suggested giving babies wine along with breast milk or as part of a soft pap with bread, honey, and milk.51
The growth of urban administrations, the consolidation of church power, and changes in the economic and commercial structures of Europe between 1000 and 1500 combined to bring about many important changes in the place of alcohol in European society and culture. Among the most significant were the origins of what we might fairly call an alcohol industry, with the beginnings of concentration of ownership in brewing and long-distance trade in both beer and wine. Overall production increased, and the commentaries on excessive drinking might lead us to believe that consumption increased, too. But although the church seems to have adopted a more rigorous tone toward excessive drinking by the clergy and laypeople, it would be criticized in the sixteenth century for being lax and permissive where alcohol was concerned.