What Medieval Peasants Actually Ate

June 1319. Alice lifts the lid of the grain bin and she can see the bottom. The new harvest is still weeks away. It's called the hungry gap. One summer of food in a medieval English peasant family: dark bread and pottage, ale (and the "nobody drank water" myth), the family cow and her cheese, bacon instead of beef, salt fish on fast days, the long wait for Lammas, harvest meals, and the cattle plague that started in 1319. Most hard diet numbers come from harvest workers fed by their lords, who ate better than most peasants, so we say so on screen. Tom and his family are fictional; their food and their world come from the records, and the sources are below. Episode 2 of Tom's life (Season 1). Watch the whole season in order:    • Tom's Life: A Medieval Peasant (Season 1)   Chapters 0:00 Intro 0:46 The loaf 1:30 The pot 2:17 Ale 3:13 White meats 3:42 Meat 4:22 Fish days 4:43 The hungry gap 5:46 Harvest 6:47 When food failed 7:20 A good year Sources Dyer (1988), Changes in Diet in the Late Middle Ages: the Case of Harvest Workers, Agricultural History Review 36 Dyer (1989), Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages Campbell (2009), Four famines and a pestilence Trokelowe, Annales (1315), via Fordham Medieval Sourcebook Piers Plowman, B-text Passus VI (Piers Plowman Electronic Archive) Wroxhill custumal 1252-3 (Bedfordshire Archives); Alwalton 1279 (Fordham) Bennett and Dyer on alewives, via JSTOR Daily Etymonline (Lammas, white meat); Langland studies on the hungry gap Freedman, The Medieval Taste for Spices (Wilson Quarterly summary) Albarella (2005), Meat consumption and production in town and country Music Angevin - Thatched Villagers by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-... Artist: http://incompetech.com/ Journey in the New World by Twin Musicom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Source: http://www.twinmusicom.org/song/258/j... Artist: http://www.twinmusicom.org Subscribe to follow Tom's family, generation by generation. #medievalhistory #history #middleages