What They Wore and What They Ate
What people wore and ate is where medieval fiction most often gets it wrong: they all look like they’ve just come off the Renaissance fair’s main street, and everyone eats with a knife, fork, and spoon. Let’s fix both mistakes.
Clothing was, first and foremost, a class marker: male landholders, lesser clergy, and farmers all wore roughly similar simple tunics and leggings, made of wool or linen; women wore roughly similar wool or linen dresses. Silk, imported from Byzantium and later Italy, was reserved for the wealthiest clothing and church vestments—not that a small manor’s landholder could afford enough of the stuff to bother with the sumptuary laws designed to prevent the cities’ nouveau riche from ostentatiously flaunting their wealth. Jewellery, where it existed, was investment and collateral: gems were regarded as an adornment and a portable, saleable asset, which is a far more pragmatic relationship with diamonds than most of us have today.
Diet was the same, mostly, in quantity rather than in kind: a 13th century peasant family of four ate about six quarters (48 bushels) of grain a year, plus two flitches of bacon, garden produce, milk, cheese, and barley ale, with pottage of beans, peas, and oatmeal as the daily staple. Bread, being made with enough grit from the milling process to visibly wear down a peasant’s teeth over a lifetime, was a genuinely unglamorous detail rarely included in modern fantasy banquets, but a landholder might eat two to three pounds of meat or fish a day and get roughly 4,000 to 5,000 calories—a noticeable amount of game since they were the ones with hunting rights, and far more refined than the gritty oatcakes, since their flour wasn’t mixed in with chestnuts or acorns.
Ale and cider were the drinks everyone, rich and poor, drank, made from the farm’s own crops, arguably medieval England’s one genuinely universal foodstuff, class differences aside.
Browse all historical mystery titles by M. J. Westerbone at westerbone.com/books.