by Sharon Ruth Hill

Created on: April 20, 2009   Last Updated: June 06, 2009

The next time you don't feel like going to the grocery store just take a moment to consider just how lucky we are to live in an age of easy abundance. After learning about the toil and strife of gathering food in Medieval England, heretofore I will be counting my blessings as I make an easy drive to fill up the shopping cart. As a peasant of the modern age, I will gladly clip coupons, look for sales, and barter the best deals as I make my way through numerous aisle with countless choices and a multitude of wonderful variety.

The dinner meal was eaten between 11am and 12 noon but no need to stop working when you can have a ploughman's lunch, a piece of dark bread and a bit of mystery cheese, while continuing to work the field. All the better when washed down with the homemade dark ale from your own flask. Water may have been readily available, even in the close proximity of a river or stream, but probably not a potable source.

Bread, the very staff of life but for English peasants it meant pot luck in the truest sense of the term. White bread made from wheat flour was almost unknown to the lower classes since growing wheat required rich, fertile soil made possible by good manure and generous tilling. Instead, the peasantry existed on dark, heavy breads made with rye and barley. More often than not, a poor harvest of rye or barley caused further substitutions when peas, beans, and acorns became the foundation for the loosely described flour to make this bread. Since most Lords of the Manor banned peasants the ability to make bread in their homes on his land, the peasants suffered the additional financial burden of being forced to bake their bread in the lord's oven and pay for the privilege.

Suffices to say Medieval English peasants were not vegetarians but did love meat. They mainly relied on pigs to keep them in meat since pigs were good foragers in all seasons of the year. Sometimes they might be allowed, with the permission of the lord, to hunt squirrel or hedgehogs on the land but certainly not deer, boar, or rabbits and the penalty for doing so would be swift and severe as in possibly having your hands cut off.

The other food staple for these peasants, besides dark bread, was a sort of stew or soup with an oat base called pottage. The ingredients in the recipe depended upon the availability of food resources. Sometimes the ingredients were turnips, parsnips and other vegetables coinciding with the harvest or what they might be able to barter. Unlike our enlightened and health conscious modern society, vegetables were considered mostly as food for the poor and lower classes. Maybe that gives the peasants a sort of last laugh because their lives were so very difficult and tumultuous with an incredibly short life span for all their hard work.

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