Staging a Medieval Wedding Feast (or Funeral)
Staging a proper medieval feast — whether a wedding, a funeral, or simply a grand annual dinner — meant coordinating a genuinely enormous supporting cast, and the detailed notes one elderly Parisian husband left for his very young bride give an almost step-by-step blueprint for exactly how it was done.
Known to English readers today simply as “the Goodman of Paris,” he explained that a host with the right money and connections could hire virtually anything needed for a big event — even the venue itself, renting a grander house than his own from some absent nobleman for the occasion. A cook could be engaged complete with his own crew, responsible in turn for hiring the porters, water-carriers, and even security to keep out gate-crashers. A separate, trusted household officer went shopping alongside the cook specifically to prevent the two of them colluding to pad the bills — a genuine, recognised risk the Goodman warns about repeatedly, citing real cases of dishonest servants who inflated prices and pocketed the difference. Decorations, sauces, and sweets could all be ordered ready-made from specialists: candied orange peel and rose sugar from the spicer, garlands from a professional chaplet-maker, even cheese wafers bought in ready-baked rather than made at home.
One small, thrifty detail rounds out the picture nicely: leftover candle stubs from the feast were carefully collected and returned to the wax chandler afterward, who melted them down into fresh candles and knocked a little off the price of the next order in exchange — proof that even the most lavishly staged medieval feast still kept half an eye on the household accounts the morning after.
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