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The answer to this question is, as always, it depends. It -really- depends. The European Middle Ages encompass a thousands years or so (depending on how you define them) from Portugal to Poland and beyond. Over this period of time and space, there are pretty big differences in economic and agriculture systems, patterns of landholding, and levels of population, all of which effect diet for everyone, but especially the laboring classes. Moreover, what a peasant is depends - in some places and times (generally the high middle ages in Western Europe and the later Middle Ages and later in Eastern Europe), they are serfs or veilleins, bound to the lands and responsible for performing labor for their lord. Or they may be tenant farmers, who owe rent but no labor to a landlord (the system that becomes dominant in the later middle ages in much of Western Europe and continues into the modern period, more or less). Or they might be modest free-holders who own a small amount of land of their own but not enough to be part of the elite. What peasants are -not- is urban dwellers, even very modest ones, and generally they're not going to be full time servants and retainers in noble households, either, though both of these groups might draw from the peasantry. All three types of peasants might live next to each other in the same time and place, and moreover these legal distinctions didn't always correspond to their wealth, which (speaking very crudely) had more to do with how much land they had to farm. Different peasants of different statuses would have very different diets, though we don't neccessarily have a good way of quantifying this without better records.
To make this more concrete, though, let's focus on one place over time - England, from around 1200 to 1520, which is covered in Christopher Dyer's excellent Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages, and is also covered by Barbara Hanawalt's The Ties that Bound (a brilliant study on peasant life based in large part of Coroner's rolls, since what peasants were doing when they died shows what they were doing when they were alive). This answer is drawn largely from these two sources. Looking at England, the 'it depends' answer comes into sharper focus - meat consumption among peasants is lower before 1350 and after 1350 it increases significantly.
First, how do we know this? We have two types of sources on the peasant diet - archeological remains of animal bones, and documentary evidence of what peasants were given to eat in specific circumstances. These documentary sources include both 'maintenance agreements' for older peasants who agreed to give their landholdings to others to farm when they were too old to work, and records of the food provided to harvest workers on other people's lands. In addition, I would add as 'indirect evidence' the food provided to wage-laborers like servants, whose employers would presumably have to offer food at least as good (and probably better) than that which peasants could get for themselves working as agricultural tenants.
And what do these sources tell us?
Maintenance agreements are often grain only, but sometimes include an allowance of bacon or a portion of a hog, or a provision to keep a pig, cow or poultry.
The wages of harvest workers, on the other hand, show a different story. Before 1350, these show large amounts of grain (in the form of bread, with less ale) followed by dairy products (mostly cheese) and a small amount of meat and fish. In value terms, around half of their in-kind food wages were grain in the form of bread or pottage, around 10% was grain in the form of ale, around 25% was dairy, and the rest was meat an fish (often a greater value of fish than meat). In caloric terms, this breaks down to 75% of the meals being bread and pottage, 10-15% being dairy and the rest being fish and meat (10-15%). By 1430, though, only 10% of the value is bread, 30% is ale, 10% is dairy and the remainder is meat and fish - 40% or so. In caloric terms this is 50% of calories from bread and pottage, 20% from ale, 5% from dairy and the rest from fish and meat - around 25%. So the diet of harvest workers includes twice as much meat and fish in 1430 as it did before 1350. There also is a move away from bacon and toward mutton and beef - more expensive, higher-protein meat.
We see this change in the indirect evidence as well. There were efforts by authorities in the later 14th century to prevent providing servants with more than two meals with meat a day. Building workers in the early 15th century had meat as 37% of the their diet by value, while butchers came to outnumber fishmongers in London after 1350. Again, this is indirect evidence but it shows the way that people (who may have been born as peasants) were living in cities, which has -some- relationship to diets in the countryside.
I should also mention fish - as an island nation, the English diet was particularly heavy in fish, and eels in particular were a bit of a national delicacy. Smoked and salted herring was available throughout the country, and fresher fish was available near the coasts, especially in areas like East Anglia and the Fens.
Looking at the archaeological record, we can't tell how much- meat people ate, but we can compare the ratio of different types of bone to determine what kinds of meat they eat, and in what proportion. This is particularly useful if we adjust for the size of the animal. Looking at different sites in England from 1200-1500, sheep bones are the most numerous, cattle bones are a close second, and since cows 10 times as much or more than sheep, looking at animal bones beef made up the majority of the meat consumed. However we also do find a large amount of fish bones, even far inland, indicating that fish was also fairly common.
Indirectly, we can see the effects of this more meat-based diet. English heights dip in the high Middle Ages and then increased again in the Later Middle Ages, as you can see [here](https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-04-18-highs-and-lows-englishman%E2%80%99s-average-height-over-2000-years-0#:\~:text=Average%20heights%20of%20men%20started,start%20of%20the%2020th%20century).
All of these sources require caveats. Maintenance agreements are for older people who aren't working, and so probably don't reflect the diet of working age men and women, nor do they necessarily include all the meat in a diet - while the people provided for by these agreements wouldn't have enough land to plow, they often had a garden, and in a number of cases kept poultry and pigs. Meanwhile, harvest meals may reflect more of a 'special occasion' food for people doing heavy work, and so may be richer than everyday peasant food. Similarly as noted above the wages of servants and other laborers may reflect a need to provide 'competitive' standards of living that would exceed the diet of an independent peasant to make up for the loss of autonomy that one would experience as a household servant or retainer. Meanwhile, not all animal bones preserve equally well, particularly pig bones, so animals with lighter bones or those which were stewed or fed back to pigs or dogs are probably under-represented in the archaeological record.
Moreover, the peasant diet would vary greatly seasonally. Back into Anglo-Saxon times November was 'Blood Month' and Martinmass, November 11th, was the traditional day for slaughtering animals that would not be kept over winter (though while November-October accounts for a majority of animals killed, it doesn't account for all of them), and was also the beginning of a season of feasting that would last until Twelfth Night after Christmas and to an extent until Candlemass, February 2nd. By contrast sprint and early summer would be a leaner period with fewer animals alive and smaller stores of grain, with few fresh vegetables especially in early spring. Harvest time would see feasting but also an incredible amount of hard work.
But with these caveats, the general trend remains.
So if medieval peasants in England after 1350 ate more meat (and more expensive meat) - why? The obvious answer which has probably occurred to most people reading this is the Black Death. It halved the English population in a few years, and in an agricultural economy half as many people had (per person) twice as much land on average. More land was turned over to pasture rather than raising grain, increasing the amount of livestock and thus meat. Seems simple. And the Black Death is definitely a (huge) factor in this story. However, this improved diet takes a number of years to take off - meat consumption for harvest workers goes up gradually until 1400 or so, in parallel with wages overall (this is in part probably because the harvest workers meals were a form of wages). But more than this, meat consumption -stays high- and the population -stays low-. This is one of odd facts of Late Medieval English demography - the population doesn't really start to recover until the later 15th century - for 100+ years it is basically static. Part of this was repeated epidemics of plague and other diseases, especially in urban areas and especially effecting the younger people who hadn't survived the last epidemic. But in addition the choices of peasant households seems to have effected English demography. Peasants didn't start marrying younger and younger with more abundant resources - instead their marriage age is relatively high (for both men and women) - into the 20s for both sexes - and this reduced the number of children per household.
This was probably a way of ensuring that young couples starting a household could maintain the standard of living they had come to expect - young men and women would work as wage laborers or servants for a time (often living with their parents or other relatives) and then marry when they were better established. However this isn't to say peasants were all prudent entrepreneurs - many also seem to have worked only as much as they needed to in order to maintain a given standard of living, and then spent the rest of their time in leisure, much to the anger of their social superiors, who began to pass more and more laws regulating public morality. This could include games like football, drinking, gambling and also many religious and secular festivals - Ronal Hutton referred to this period as 'Merry England' is his seminal study of the English Ritual Year before the Reformation, The Rise and Fall of Merry England. Peasant prosperity is also visible in the extravagance of many English Parish churches, which were rebuilt in the 15th century (especially the Naves, which were the responsibility of the common people). Life expectancy also seems to have increased to around 60 or so for those who survived childhood - note that this doesn't mean that everyone died then, but this is an average that largely reflects deaths due to infectious disease throughout adult life or the health crises of middle age (for instance, heart attacks that today would be minor and survivable).
So to conclude, in the High Middle Ages English peasants ate an overwhemingly grain-based diet with dairy constituting their main source of animal protein. In the late Middle Ages English peasants still ate a diet with a lot of grains but ate significantly larger amounts of meat. They were healthier and lived longer than their great-grandparents, if they were lucky enough to survive the plague.
How does this compare to other times and places? A looking at this [previous answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b52kli/some_media_that_takes_place_during_the_sengoku/) from u/ParallelPain shows that compared to Japanese peasants of the Edo period (which is early-modern, but as argued in the answer probably reflects medieval diets as well), English late medieval peasants ate far more meat.
I think there’s an interesting correlation between the Black Death and societal shift that you’ve touched upon here. If I may be so inclined, I at one point heard an anecdote in regards to the Black Death and the Christian Priesthood; according to them, most priests were infected quite rapidly, leading to a shortage that required a lowering of standards to repopulate the Church. Would you have any literature on such a topic?
Personally, I feel as if the Black Death is an ironically overlooked period of change in Europe. As much as everyone knows what it was and its effects, the societal aftereffects of its destruction are far less understood by the layman.
This is unrelated to the question at hand, of course, but it is an interesting topic nonetheless.
(For reference, much of my academic research is in Medievalism and Medieval Philosophy, particularly Christian Philosophy between 1000-1400).
> Personally, I feel as if the Black Death is an ironically overlooked period of change in Europe. As much as everyone knows what it was and its effects, the societal aftereffects of its destruction are far less understood by the layman.
I am pleased to say that one place it’s not overlooked is the AskHistorians Podcast, where [I talked with James Belich fairly recently about his book The World The Plague Made.](https://askhistorians.libsyn.com/askhistorians-podcast-episode-213-the-world-the-plague-made-with-james-belich) He writes a lot about the sort of standard-of-living changes u/WARitter mentions in the answer above, and connects it further down the line to wide-ranging global issues like the rise of colonialism. Well worth a listen and a read.
I haven't heard about that particular theory. In Medieval social history and economic history the Black Death is pretty central - the main questions being how much, in what way and how directly it effected medieval society and economics, rather than whether it did effect them. The effect is probably starker in England than most other places because the English population remains so low for so long.
I imagine it does take a central theme in those focuses — I touched briefly upon the Chronicle of Giovanni Villani in my studies, and he recounts a plague (unrelated to the Black Death, of course) that ravages the city of Florence. In it, he remarks that “… more than a sixth of the citizenry perished.” What’s more interesting (and more topical) is only half a page below:
“… and with this pestilence there came a new scarcity on top of that of the preceding year and, in spite of the decrease of the population, the statio of grain was sold at thirty soldi. And the price would have risen higher if the commune had not made provision by importing grain by sea …”
To think this was a plague that had less of an effect on their population than that of the Black Death on England, I can only imagine the shift of economics in play. (Although it should be said that my focus was more on Marsilio Ficino in Florence, rather than the city itself).
Nut milk appears as a milk substitute for Lenten meals for elites - it is included in some cookbooks (Lenten food makes an interesting source of historic European vegan/pescatarian recipes). I don't see much sign of it being used by peasants - I haven't seen it referred to outside of this fairly elite context. You are correct that milk doesn't keep well without refrigeration, which is why was generally turned into butter (which was salted to preserve it) and cheese rather than stored as milk.
Just a very small complement on one more recent application of new scientific methods on the food life of medieval (European) people - The analyses of pollen of veggies and eggs and fragmented DNAs of the parasites mainly retrieved from historical latrines.
While these new scientific analyses are generally not so good for the discussion of "how much" things, they sometimes offer valuable insights on "how many/ different species" of food (especially veggies and fruits often not mentioned in written texts).
The shell of pollen is not so fragile, so some of them are still found in the residue of latrine, and they tell us what kind of plant the user of the rest room ate (or possibly found in the original location of the latrine).
On the other hand, while we can't (generally) reconstruct what the people directly based on the analysis of retrieved DNA from the archaeological sites (researchers call it aDNA (ancient DNA)) of animals and fishes, eggs and aDNA (from bodies) of parasites in the residue is easier to trace and to reconstruct, as for the latter, with help of PCR method (do you remember what we repeatedly heard during Covid-19 outbreaks?)
Many parasites have a distinct original host, and historical people ate the host together with the parasite within its meat (and people might have suffered from the parasite infect due to under-cocked meal...). In other words, it is likely that such traces of parasite reflect the change of eating habits on host animals and fishes of the restroom users, and it is also sometimes possible to apply the stratigraphic method as well as dendrochronology (on the building of the restroom) for the better understanding of their chronological change.
To give an example, [Flammer et al. 2018] analyses the contents retrieved from a few latrines in the Hanseatic City Lübeck in northern Germany, and shows that the major composition of parasites found in its historical latrines indeed changed around 1300 CE - before the Black Death. While the amount of the parasite from the freshwater fishes decreased significantly, that of a kind of parasite hosted on ox, *Taenia Saginata* (NSFW: please don't google it if you really wan to know what it looks like) instead increased also in expense of *T. Solium* (hosted in pigs). This result suggests that town dwellers of Lübeck around 1300 CE, at least in the town district in question, had begun to eat beef more often (perhaps since they had accumulated wealth?).
Well, of course, inhabitants of Hanseatic Town Lübeck were not ordinary farmers (so this complement is not so useful directly to offer an answer to OP).
Selected References:
* Banerjea, R. Y., Badura, M., Brown, A., Morandi, L. F., Marcinkowski, M., Valk, H., Ismail-Meyer, K. and Pluskowski, A. “Feeding the Crusades: Archaeobotany, Animal Husbandry and Livestock Alimentation on the Baltic Frontier.” *Environmental Archaeology*, 25-2 (2020): 135-150. https://doi.org/10.1080/14614103.2019.1589924
* Craig-Atkins Elizabeth, Jervis B, Cramp L, Hammann S, Nederbragt AJ, Nicholson E, et al. “The Dietary Impact of the Norman Conquest: A Multiproxy Archaeological Investigation of Oxford, UK.” PLoS ONE 15-7 (2020): e0235005. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235005
* Flammer, P. G. et al. “Molecular Archaeoparasitology Identifies Cultural Changes in the Medieval Hanseatic Trading Centre of Lübeck.” Proc. R. Soc. B 285 (2018): 20180991.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2018.0991
* Halda, Mette M., Betina Magnussen, Liv Appel et al. “Fragments of Meals in Eastern Denmark from the Viking Age to the Renaissance: New Evidence from Organic Remains in Latrines.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 31 (2020) 102361.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2020.102361
* Søe, Martin J., Peter Nejsum, Frederik V. Seersholm & Brian L. Fredensborg et al. “Ancient DNA from Latrines in Northern Europe and the Middle East (500 BC-1700 AD) Reveals Past Parasites and Diet.” PLoS ONE 13-4 (2018): e0195481.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0195481
You said not to Google the tape worm, but I did.
"An adult worm is normally 4 to 10 m in length, but can become very large; specimens over 22 m long are reported. "
Unless you can see (especially when you're eating something) and cite/link its picture directly here, it's generally not so problematic (I hope).
I once had a mini-lecture on this exact topic (medieval food seen though the restroom) in the face-to-face (with the sampling of medieval food), and someone google'd it in spite of my warning (I had omitted its picture from the slides)...
They were! But they don’t show up in our sources because gardens are almost always present next to peasant houses but we don’t have documentary evidence of their contents, as not much other evidence either. We know from elite cookbooks what veggies were eaten by the aristocracy and how but it is harder to tell the same for peasants.
Fruit was also present though the main evidence I have seen in rural areas is the existence of orchards, and apples could be drink as cider, not just eaten fresh.
I heard that in the later middle ages in Cornwall local laws had to be passed that mine workers (tin and lead presumably) weren't to be fed so much Crayfish as part of their ration. Which obviously implies an excess of this sort of protein, if they were complaining about it.
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The answer to this question is, as always, it depends. It -really- depends. The European Middle Ages encompass a thousands years or so (depending on how you define them) from Portugal to Poland and beyond. Over this period of time and space, there are pretty big differences in economic and agriculture systems, patterns of landholding, and levels of population, all of which effect diet for everyone, but especially the laboring classes. Moreover, what a peasant is depends - in some places and times (generally the high middle ages in Western Europe and the later Middle Ages and later in Eastern Europe), they are serfs or veilleins, bound to the lands and responsible for performing labor for their lord. Or they may be tenant farmers, who owe rent but no labor to a landlord (the system that becomes dominant in the later middle ages in much of Western Europe and continues into the modern period, more or less). Or they might be modest free-holders who own a small amount of land of their own but not enough to be part of the elite. What peasants are -not- is urban dwellers, even very modest ones, and generally they're not going to be full time servants and retainers in noble households, either, though both of these groups might draw from the peasantry. All three types of peasants might live next to each other in the same time and place, and moreover these legal distinctions didn't always correspond to their wealth, which (speaking very crudely) had more to do with how much land they had to farm. Different peasants of different statuses would have very different diets, though we don't neccessarily have a good way of quantifying this without better records. To make this more concrete, though, let's focus on one place over time - England, from around 1200 to 1520, which is covered in Christopher Dyer's excellent Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages, and is also covered by Barbara Hanawalt's The Ties that Bound (a brilliant study on peasant life based in large part of Coroner's rolls, since what peasants were doing when they died shows what they were doing when they were alive). This answer is drawn largely from these two sources. Looking at England, the 'it depends' answer comes into sharper focus - meat consumption among peasants is lower before 1350 and after 1350 it increases significantly. First, how do we know this? We have two types of sources on the peasant diet - archeological remains of animal bones, and documentary evidence of what peasants were given to eat in specific circumstances. These documentary sources include both 'maintenance agreements' for older peasants who agreed to give their landholdings to others to farm when they were too old to work, and records of the food provided to harvest workers on other people's lands. In addition, I would add as 'indirect evidence' the food provided to wage-laborers like servants, whose employers would presumably have to offer food at least as good (and probably better) than that which peasants could get for themselves working as agricultural tenants. And what do these sources tell us? Maintenance agreements are often grain only, but sometimes include an allowance of bacon or a portion of a hog, or a provision to keep a pig, cow or poultry. The wages of harvest workers, on the other hand, show a different story. Before 1350, these show large amounts of grain (in the form of bread, with less ale) followed by dairy products (mostly cheese) and a small amount of meat and fish. In value terms, around half of their in-kind food wages were grain in the form of bread or pottage, around 10% was grain in the form of ale, around 25% was dairy, and the rest was meat an fish (often a greater value of fish than meat). In caloric terms, this breaks down to 75% of the meals being bread and pottage, 10-15% being dairy and the rest being fish and meat (10-15%). By 1430, though, only 10% of the value is bread, 30% is ale, 10% is dairy and the remainder is meat and fish - 40% or so. In caloric terms this is 50% of calories from bread and pottage, 20% from ale, 5% from dairy and the rest from fish and meat - around 25%. So the diet of harvest workers includes twice as much meat and fish in 1430 as it did before 1350. There also is a move away from bacon and toward mutton and beef - more expensive, higher-protein meat. We see this change in the indirect evidence as well. There were efforts by authorities in the later 14th century to prevent providing servants with more than two meals with meat a day. Building workers in the early 15th century had meat as 37% of the their diet by value, while butchers came to outnumber fishmongers in London after 1350. Again, this is indirect evidence but it shows the way that people (who may have been born as peasants) were living in cities, which has -some- relationship to diets in the countryside. I should also mention fish - as an island nation, the English diet was particularly heavy in fish, and eels in particular were a bit of a national delicacy. Smoked and salted herring was available throughout the country, and fresher fish was available near the coasts, especially in areas like East Anglia and the Fens. Looking at the archaeological record, we can't tell how much- meat people ate, but we can compare the ratio of different types of bone to determine what kinds of meat they eat, and in what proportion. This is particularly useful if we adjust for the size of the animal. Looking at different sites in England from 1200-1500, sheep bones are the most numerous, cattle bones are a close second, and since cows 10 times as much or more than sheep, looking at animal bones beef made up the majority of the meat consumed. However we also do find a large amount of fish bones, even far inland, indicating that fish was also fairly common. Indirectly, we can see the effects of this more meat-based diet. English heights dip in the high Middle Ages and then increased again in the Later Middle Ages, as you can see [here](https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-04-18-highs-and-lows-englishman%E2%80%99s-average-height-over-2000-years-0#:\~:text=Average%20heights%20of%20men%20started,start%20of%20the%2020th%20century).
All of these sources require caveats. Maintenance agreements are for older people who aren't working, and so probably don't reflect the diet of working age men and women, nor do they necessarily include all the meat in a diet - while the people provided for by these agreements wouldn't have enough land to plow, they often had a garden, and in a number of cases kept poultry and pigs. Meanwhile, harvest meals may reflect more of a 'special occasion' food for people doing heavy work, and so may be richer than everyday peasant food. Similarly as noted above the wages of servants and other laborers may reflect a need to provide 'competitive' standards of living that would exceed the diet of an independent peasant to make up for the loss of autonomy that one would experience as a household servant or retainer. Meanwhile, not all animal bones preserve equally well, particularly pig bones, so animals with lighter bones or those which were stewed or fed back to pigs or dogs are probably under-represented in the archaeological record. Moreover, the peasant diet would vary greatly seasonally. Back into Anglo-Saxon times November was 'Blood Month' and Martinmass, November 11th, was the traditional day for slaughtering animals that would not be kept over winter (though while November-October accounts for a majority of animals killed, it doesn't account for all of them), and was also the beginning of a season of feasting that would last until Twelfth Night after Christmas and to an extent until Candlemass, February 2nd. By contrast sprint and early summer would be a leaner period with fewer animals alive and smaller stores of grain, with few fresh vegetables especially in early spring. Harvest time would see feasting but also an incredible amount of hard work. But with these caveats, the general trend remains. So if medieval peasants in England after 1350 ate more meat (and more expensive meat) - why? The obvious answer which has probably occurred to most people reading this is the Black Death. It halved the English population in a few years, and in an agricultural economy half as many people had (per person) twice as much land on average. More land was turned over to pasture rather than raising grain, increasing the amount of livestock and thus meat. Seems simple. And the Black Death is definitely a (huge) factor in this story. However, this improved diet takes a number of years to take off - meat consumption for harvest workers goes up gradually until 1400 or so, in parallel with wages overall (this is in part probably because the harvest workers meals were a form of wages). But more than this, meat consumption -stays high- and the population -stays low-. This is one of odd facts of Late Medieval English demography - the population doesn't really start to recover until the later 15th century - for 100+ years it is basically static. Part of this was repeated epidemics of plague and other diseases, especially in urban areas and especially effecting the younger people who hadn't survived the last epidemic. But in addition the choices of peasant households seems to have effected English demography. Peasants didn't start marrying younger and younger with more abundant resources - instead their marriage age is relatively high (for both men and women) - into the 20s for both sexes - and this reduced the number of children per household. This was probably a way of ensuring that young couples starting a household could maintain the standard of living they had come to expect - young men and women would work as wage laborers or servants for a time (often living with their parents or other relatives) and then marry when they were better established. However this isn't to say peasants were all prudent entrepreneurs - many also seem to have worked only as much as they needed to in order to maintain a given standard of living, and then spent the rest of their time in leisure, much to the anger of their social superiors, who began to pass more and more laws regulating public morality. This could include games like football, drinking, gambling and also many religious and secular festivals - Ronal Hutton referred to this period as 'Merry England' is his seminal study of the English Ritual Year before the Reformation, The Rise and Fall of Merry England. Peasant prosperity is also visible in the extravagance of many English Parish churches, which were rebuilt in the 15th century (especially the Naves, which were the responsibility of the common people). Life expectancy also seems to have increased to around 60 or so for those who survived childhood - note that this doesn't mean that everyone died then, but this is an average that largely reflects deaths due to infectious disease throughout adult life or the health crises of middle age (for instance, heart attacks that today would be minor and survivable). So to conclude, in the High Middle Ages English peasants ate an overwhemingly grain-based diet with dairy constituting their main source of animal protein. In the late Middle Ages English peasants still ate a diet with a lot of grains but ate significantly larger amounts of meat. They were healthier and lived longer than their great-grandparents, if they were lucky enough to survive the plague.
How does this compare to other times and places? A looking at this [previous answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b52kli/some_media_that_takes_place_during_the_sengoku/) from u/ParallelPain shows that compared to Japanese peasants of the Edo period (which is early-modern, but as argued in the answer probably reflects medieval diets as well), English late medieval peasants ate far more meat.
I think there’s an interesting correlation between the Black Death and societal shift that you’ve touched upon here. If I may be so inclined, I at one point heard an anecdote in regards to the Black Death and the Christian Priesthood; according to them, most priests were infected quite rapidly, leading to a shortage that required a lowering of standards to repopulate the Church. Would you have any literature on such a topic? Personally, I feel as if the Black Death is an ironically overlooked period of change in Europe. As much as everyone knows what it was and its effects, the societal aftereffects of its destruction are far less understood by the layman. This is unrelated to the question at hand, of course, but it is an interesting topic nonetheless. (For reference, much of my academic research is in Medievalism and Medieval Philosophy, particularly Christian Philosophy between 1000-1400).
> Personally, I feel as if the Black Death is an ironically overlooked period of change in Europe. As much as everyone knows what it was and its effects, the societal aftereffects of its destruction are far less understood by the layman. I am pleased to say that one place it’s not overlooked is the AskHistorians Podcast, where [I talked with James Belich fairly recently about his book The World The Plague Made.](https://askhistorians.libsyn.com/askhistorians-podcast-episode-213-the-world-the-plague-made-with-james-belich) He writes a lot about the sort of standard-of-living changes u/WARitter mentions in the answer above, and connects it further down the line to wide-ranging global issues like the rise of colonialism. Well worth a listen and a read.
This was a fantastic suggestion -- I'll listen to it while writing a research paper tonight! Thank you!
I haven't heard about that particular theory. In Medieval social history and economic history the Black Death is pretty central - the main questions being how much, in what way and how directly it effected medieval society and economics, rather than whether it did effect them. The effect is probably starker in England than most other places because the English population remains so low for so long.
I imagine it does take a central theme in those focuses — I touched briefly upon the Chronicle of Giovanni Villani in my studies, and he recounts a plague (unrelated to the Black Death, of course) that ravages the city of Florence. In it, he remarks that “… more than a sixth of the citizenry perished.” What’s more interesting (and more topical) is only half a page below: “… and with this pestilence there came a new scarcity on top of that of the preceding year and, in spite of the decrease of the population, the statio of grain was sold at thirty soldi. And the price would have risen higher if the commune had not made provision by importing grain by sea …” To think this was a plague that had less of an effect on their population than that of the Black Death on England, I can only imagine the shift of economics in play. (Although it should be said that my focus was more on Marsilio Ficino in Florence, rather than the city itself).
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Nut milk appears as a milk substitute for Lenten meals for elites - it is included in some cookbooks (Lenten food makes an interesting source of historic European vegan/pescatarian recipes). I don't see much sign of it being used by peasants - I haven't seen it referred to outside of this fairly elite context. You are correct that milk doesn't keep well without refrigeration, which is why was generally turned into butter (which was salted to preserve it) and cheese rather than stored as milk.
Just a very small complement on one more recent application of new scientific methods on the food life of medieval (European) people - The analyses of pollen of veggies and eggs and fragmented DNAs of the parasites mainly retrieved from historical latrines. While these new scientific analyses are generally not so good for the discussion of "how much" things, they sometimes offer valuable insights on "how many/ different species" of food (especially veggies and fruits often not mentioned in written texts). The shell of pollen is not so fragile, so some of them are still found in the residue of latrine, and they tell us what kind of plant the user of the rest room ate (or possibly found in the original location of the latrine). On the other hand, while we can't (generally) reconstruct what the people directly based on the analysis of retrieved DNA from the archaeological sites (researchers call it aDNA (ancient DNA)) of animals and fishes, eggs and aDNA (from bodies) of parasites in the residue is easier to trace and to reconstruct, as for the latter, with help of PCR method (do you remember what we repeatedly heard during Covid-19 outbreaks?) Many parasites have a distinct original host, and historical people ate the host together with the parasite within its meat (and people might have suffered from the parasite infect due to under-cocked meal...). In other words, it is likely that such traces of parasite reflect the change of eating habits on host animals and fishes of the restroom users, and it is also sometimes possible to apply the stratigraphic method as well as dendrochronology (on the building of the restroom) for the better understanding of their chronological change. To give an example, [Flammer et al. 2018] analyses the contents retrieved from a few latrines in the Hanseatic City Lübeck in northern Germany, and shows that the major composition of parasites found in its historical latrines indeed changed around 1300 CE - before the Black Death. While the amount of the parasite from the freshwater fishes decreased significantly, that of a kind of parasite hosted on ox, *Taenia Saginata* (NSFW: please don't google it if you really wan to know what it looks like) instead increased also in expense of *T. Solium* (hosted in pigs). This result suggests that town dwellers of Lübeck around 1300 CE, at least in the town district in question, had begun to eat beef more often (perhaps since they had accumulated wealth?). Well, of course, inhabitants of Hanseatic Town Lübeck were not ordinary farmers (so this complement is not so useful directly to offer an answer to OP). Selected References: * Banerjea, R. Y., Badura, M., Brown, A., Morandi, L. F., Marcinkowski, M., Valk, H., Ismail-Meyer, K. and Pluskowski, A. “Feeding the Crusades: Archaeobotany, Animal Husbandry and Livestock Alimentation on the Baltic Frontier.” *Environmental Archaeology*, 25-2 (2020): 135-150. https://doi.org/10.1080/14614103.2019.1589924 * Craig-Atkins Elizabeth, Jervis B, Cramp L, Hammann S, Nederbragt AJ, Nicholson E, et al. “The Dietary Impact of the Norman Conquest: A Multiproxy Archaeological Investigation of Oxford, UK.” PLoS ONE 15-7 (2020): e0235005. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235005 * Flammer, P. G. et al. “Molecular Archaeoparasitology Identifies Cultural Changes in the Medieval Hanseatic Trading Centre of Lübeck.” Proc. R. Soc. B 285 (2018): 20180991. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2018.0991 * Halda, Mette M., Betina Magnussen, Liv Appel et al. “Fragments of Meals in Eastern Denmark from the Viking Age to the Renaissance: New Evidence from Organic Remains in Latrines.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 31 (2020) 102361. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2020.102361 * Søe, Martin J., Peter Nejsum, Frederik V. Seersholm & Brian L. Fredensborg et al. “Ancient DNA from Latrines in Northern Europe and the Middle East (500 BC-1700 AD) Reveals Past Parasites and Diet.” PLoS ONE 13-4 (2018): e0195481. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0195481
You said not to Google the tape worm, but I did. "An adult worm is normally 4 to 10 m in length, but can become very large; specimens over 22 m long are reported. "
Unless you can see (especially when you're eating something) and cite/link its picture directly here, it's generally not so problematic (I hope). I once had a mini-lecture on this exact topic (medieval food seen though the restroom) in the face-to-face (with the sampling of medieval food), and someone google'd it in spite of my warning (I had omitted its picture from the slides)...
What about fruits and vegetables? I thought at least veggies were a decent chunk of a peasants diet.
They were! But they don’t show up in our sources because gardens are almost always present next to peasant houses but we don’t have documentary evidence of their contents, as not much other evidence either. We know from elite cookbooks what veggies were eaten by the aristocracy and how but it is harder to tell the same for peasants. Fruit was also present though the main evidence I have seen in rural areas is the existence of orchards, and apples could be drink as cider, not just eaten fresh.
I heard that in the later middle ages in Cornwall local laws had to be passed that mine workers (tin and lead presumably) weren't to be fed so much Crayfish as part of their ration. Which obviously implies an excess of this sort of protein, if they were complaining about it.
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