All Things Medieval

So far, I’ve been talking about containers for food. But we do need containers for some other things, things that aren’t wet, things we won’t eat or cook. What did they use in medieval Europe to store “stuff” in general?

Let’s look first at what they typically stored. Most homes did not have books, musical instruments, or anything that we’d consider for hobby use. Some middle-class children had a few toys, and adults owned tools for spinning, sewing, gardening, and basic repairs. Some people owned board games or dice. Most people owned no more than two sets of clothing, but some owned more. Most people owned some blankets or winter coats, whether they were thick and adequate or not so much. Shoes were worn until they could not be repaired and then replaced, so shoes were not stored. Candles made of wax or tallow needed to be stored, being made or purchased in bulk.

So the typical medieval home needed to put away some winter gear during the summer, and keep a best coat or dress clean and safe. They needed some places to keep things like candles, things that did not perish but would be used within a few months. Some homes had pillows and extra blankets to store. Wealthy places, such as castles, manors and abbeys, always kept extra bedding for guests, as well as a much greater supply of things like candles. Grand houses that put on feasts needed to keep extra table linen for those occasions. (Middle-class families that might only put on a single wedding feast in their lifetime could rent such things.)

Medieval houses never had built-in storage the way modern homes do. Instead, large chests lined the walls of their chief (or only) rooms. We sometimes use chests like this, often called Hope Chests, but we depend on cardboard boxes and closets much more. In a medieval house, pretty much everything was stored in a chest. In Beowulf, servants take extra pillows and blankets out of chests, turning benches into beds.

Some herbs were known to discourage moths, but the first defense against losing all of your stored wool (or furs, if you were that posh) to worms was weekly cleaning. It was a routine chore to take out wool blankets and clothes and brush them thoroughly. This physically dislodged worms.

Chests must have ranged from very primitive ones made of rough boards to the painted, perhaps gilded, storage boxes of the rich. Not many medieval storage chests have survived, since wood could be repurposed in another generation—and never survived a house fire. Here are two storage chests; the second one is from an English church. (For more images, most of them from late or post-medieval, see this woodworker historical website.)

Most chests were locked. While one chest might hold supplies that the household would need to access frequently, most of them were for long-term holding. Everything had value, even woolen rags, so nothing could be left out to tempt visitors, poor relations or servants. It was even more important to have locks on smaller chests made for holding valuables. Caskets for valuables had to be made of very thick wood and were often reinforced with metal. They had to be too large and heavy to be hustled out under a coat, and too stoutly made to be easily split with a light ax. Getting into a casket without using the key was possible but it was not convenient; it would leave a telltale mess and make noise.

What might be stored in a locked casket? Right away, we’re not talking about working-class homes. Guild officers, merchants and aristocrats needed caskets to keep jewels, money and ceremonial items like silver cups or candlesticks. Aristocratic households whose ladies kept busy with silk embroidery probably kept their silk thread supplies in a locked casket, since it had pretty good street value to tempt thieving servants.

Caskets weren’t owned by the poor, so their construction was often ornate. The most ornate caskets were reliquaries, which I’ll consider separately. But even wooden caskets could be ornately carved. This one, pictured, may have held chess pieces, but it might have been for jewels, money, and any other valuables. Medieval decoration often depicted scenes from daily life: people playing, dancing, sewing, and working. Here is another ornately-carved casket.

next: medieval locks and keys

Baskets, of course, were the cheapest universal carrying container. We still use the standard English basket size that emerged from medieval measuring: the bushel.

Bushels started as the typical size that a merchant could load onto a pack mule. During most of the Middle Ages, Europe’s roads were barely good enough for wheeled vehicles to travel on. Two-wheeled carts could negotiate bad roads more easily than four-wheeled wagons. Horses and mules with packs could navigate any kind of road, including a track going through the hills. So while two-wheeled carts carried most goods in town, pack animals carried most goods out into the countryside and sometimes from town to town.

So the bushel didn’t start out as defined by so many pints, pecks, or pounds. It started out as a bushel: the right size to properly load on a mule’s pannier harness. Of course, merchants who purchased by the bushel wanted to standardize the size. During the medieval period, it was divided into gallons and pints. Each town had its standard bushel, probably made from copper or brass instead of basketweaving. As with other measures, by the end of the period, the king’s office of weights and measures had owned a royal bushel by which the legal volume was determined. When bushels of grain were measured out in the Port of London, the measuring team had leveling rods to make sure each bushel was exactly right, no more. (Merchants carried away the measured goods in their own basket-bushels.)

Four pecks were in a bushel, and so were eight gallons. These, too, had official volume measures in town. Eight bushels, together, made a “quarter,” though I’m not sure what the volume was a quarter of. It probably referred to the size of the two-wheeled cart used to move it around in town. One of the items sold by the quarter was charcoal.

Carts and wagons had standard sizes too, since they could be containers. It’s possible that “quarter” referred to the cart being one-quarter the size of a standard wagon. Wagons always required teams of oxen or horses to pull them. They were used to move the king’s furniture from manor to manor (some kings traveled almost constantly), and they were used for very large loads, like hay. Two-wheeled carts, on the other hand, could be pulled by a laborer or a single animal. Towns were filled with constant cart traffic as nearly every raw material was delivered this way.

I want to touch on measurement by length, although it’s off the subject of containers. The two important length measurements were for land and for cloth. Land was traditionally measured by how much a man with an ox could plow in one day. This measure, the acre, was divided into furlongs, which were envisioned as the strip that the plow made before it had to turn around and go back. It was something less than 1/8 of a modern mile, and the acre was defined as one furlong long, by 4 rods wide—the rod being 1/40th of a furlong. Square acres made no sense to medieval plowmen, since it was much more convenient to turn the ox and plow as seldom as possible.

Cloth measurement was highly local and regional, but since the highest volume of cloth was sold in the international fairs of Champagne, the Champagne measurements gradually became dominant. Even so, the measurements were very different from place to place. In Troyes, a bolt of cloth was 28 ells (the ell was roughly our yard, but it varied a lot). In Ypres, the bolt was only legal if it measured 29 ells. At Provins, they didn’t sell it by bolts at all, but by cords and lengths. A cord was 12 ells, and a length was 12 cords (144 ells).

The Champagne fairs also standardized the foot, since some materials were sold in much shorter lengths. Each fair had an official iron ruler with feet and inches–and the inches were also split into 12, each one called a line. Merchants at the fair were required to have wooden rulers that precisely matched the fair’s standard. (Every fair had its own justice system, too.) When sovereignty over Champagne came to the French crown, the king over-taxed the fairs and killed them entirely. They never got to work out a truly standard measurement of length.

In shops, merchants used the pan balance to weigh out goods for customers. It had two pans hung from a centrally-balanced arm; the merchant owned a set of iron or brass weights to set on the empty pan until the two balanced. The size of the balance and its pans depended on the type of things the merchant sold.

Goldsmiths and apothecaries used very tiny, precise balances. Spices, the medieval raw materials of medicine, had to be weighed in small and very precise amounts using ounces and drams. There were at least two different measurement systems for spices; the alternative to the royal system was the “Troy weight” system. It was developed in the huge fair at Troyes, in Champagne. The Troy system counted 12, not 16, ounces in a pound.

Goldsmiths’ scales had to be most accurate of all because they could check the value of coins. (“Goldsmith” included those who worked in silver, too.)  Their balances were themselves products of careful goldsmith work, except for some rare fine balances carved from ivory. Gold was measured out in grains; the first weight used to counter-balance a “grain” of gold was the seed (grain) of a carob plant. The carob seed (not an accurate measure!) led to the standardized “carat” measurement of traditional gold work.

On the other side of the size scale, wholesale goods were weighed using a steelyard balance. The Hanseatic League, Europe’s first cartel, controlled the sale of salt, which came in huge amounts. So the League developed a standardized large balance, based on a concept that had been in use since Roman times. The League’s port in London was nicknamed “Steelyard,” which lent its name to the style of balance.

The steelyard balance does not use pans set at equal distances from the fulcrum. Instead, the fulcrum is very close to one end, the end that has a hook for weighed goods to hang. Since the remaining arm is so much longer, it acts as a lever to weigh objects that are actually much heavier than the available iron weights. The doctors’ scales that we all grew up with (before digital) worked on this principle. The beam where the weights hang is calibrated to tell its operators how much to multiply the hanging weights in order to know the object’s true weight, based on how far the weights are from the fulcrum. (Which is why those dinky little metal slides could balance against our bodies.)

The Port of London had its own regulatory team to oversee everything unloaded from ships. Customs officials employed men and horses to roll or carry casks, sacks, and crates to weighing stations. The Port oversaw dividing these goods among the waiting local merchants. Measuring teams worked on grain, salt, and other things separately. After the importing ship paid its customs dues, the local merchants paid each measuring team for its services.

next: measuring dry volume and length

Today’s marketplace is all about packaging. Modern packages assure us that the product is clean, sterile if that’s an issue, properly measured and not going to spill on the way home. We buy produce without packaging, but what’s the first thing we do? We put it into a plastic bag. Meat can be displayed without packaging, but if so, the butcher wraps it up in paper. It’s hard to think of anything we buy that doesn’t have a wrapper or container.

In medieval Europe, liquids came in barrels if you were buying it in large quantities, an entire keg or cask at a time (or larger—some casks had to be rolled down the street by six men). Many dry goods came in barrels too, the expense of even a cheap barrel meant that only large quantities came that way. If you were the household manager who bought food for many people, you’d be bringing back barrels of salted fish or flour in a two-wheeled cart. If you were a professional baker, you certainly bought flour in the largest barrels or sacks possible.

But if you lived in town and shopped for smaller quantities, a barrel was probably more than you’d ever need. Home cooks didn’t bake bread, so they didn’t need a barrel of flour. What sort of packaging was available for small market shoppers?

Ale was bought from a neighbor’s house; the procedure was to measure out the quart or gallon in a guaranteed measuring cup and then pour it into your own bucket or pitcher, carried over from home. Bring Your Own Bottle, literally. This was the general understanding of how packaging worked: bring your own. Only wholesalers felt responsible for putting beans or flour into barrels or sacks.

Shoppers carried their food home in wicker baskets. Every household had a variety of baskets, which were made locally and cheaply. Vegetables purchased at the market could go straight into the basket as they were, no further package needed. For meat, here I’m just using some reasoning since we don’t really know. Meat is messy and you’d want to wrap it in something. But most people never bought meat; it was too expensive.

Cooks in really large households may have had their meat butchered on the premises and delivered straight to the kitchen; so the people who bought cuts of pork, mutton or beef at a town butchery were well-to-do, but not lavishly so. By definition, their household had rags. Rags weren’t something to take for granted; if you had rags, it meant that you had worn-out clothes no longer in use. The poor kept wearing their rags. It seems logical to a certainty that upper middle class households buying meat brought some linen or wool rags along in the basket to wrap up their purchases.

For things like dried beans and peas, rough linen burlap was probably in use. Linen was Europe’s native fiber and it held up well in rough, primitive washing with boiling water, scrubbing, and harsh soap. Linen could be spun very finely, but it could also be spun quickly and poorly. Low-grade linen would have been the cheapest container for things that didn’t need to be kept watertight, just held from spilling on the way home.

Paper was a new technology during the Middle Ages. It didn’t become cheap enough for normal use even in writing letters until the 15th century. Cotton, too, was a new technology; its growing popularity created a cotton rag industry that fed right into paper. Neither of these materials were suitable for containers until much later.

During the Dark Ages, the Franks had some rudimentary glass-making skills. Of course, the Mediterranean regions continued to make glass as the Romans had done, and during the Islamic era new glass techniques came from the East. Eastern glass was most commonly found as small, thick vials for perfume (here’s another), cosmetics, or medicine.

The Franks used glass mainly for drinking cups in a style that we call beakers. The glass itself was not very clear and usually greenish. Because horns had been their traditional cups at feasts, many glassmakers imitated horns, adding feet so that the horns stood on the table. They also made wider cups with stands, perhaps used as bowls.

The Franks added decorations to the beakers by sticking small lumps of hot glass onto the outside of the vessel, then pulling them outward and down into claws. (Pinterest collection of images) By the close of what we call the Dark Ages, they were able to make red and blue glass, and sometimes mixed the colors in a streaked decorative way. However, there’s no denying that Northern European glassmaking was very primitive compared to what was being made at the same time in Persia and Egypt.

Fine glassmaking stayed in the Muslim countries and in Constantinople for several medieval centuries. They blew glass in molds, created colored layers to carve as cameos, and kiln-fired silver and gold enamel onto glass. These wares were rare in Europe until after Venice asked the Fourth Crusade to sack Constantinople in payment of shipping debts.

Venetians literally kidnapped glassmakers and other artisans, who had been kept from leaving Constantinople in order to maintain trade secrets. The glassmakers were installed on the island of Murano and provided with anything they needed. Boats brought firewood daily, as well as shipments of broken glass to be melted down, sand from the Ticino River, and imported barilla soda ash from Syria. This ash came from burning plants that grew in a salty environment, and it contained lime. Glass made with Syrian barilla was superior to all other. Now that Venice controlled Constantinople and its former trade routes, Murano glass became the standard.

Medieval standards did not at first match ours. We value glass for complete clarity and delicacy; they liked thick, colored glass with bright designs. But by the late Middle Ages, fine drinking glasses could be perfectly transparent. Venetian glassmakers then added crushed quartz to create milky-white glass.

Venetian secrets, stolen from Constantinople, gradually leaked out; beautiful glass could be made in Northern Europe as well. Bohemia had recently discovered a vein of silver, which made it newly affluent. Now they started to make fine glass, too.

But right when it looked as though glassmaking would spread the way papermaking and tin-glazed pottery had done, the plague struck. Many industries were disrupted, and the more dependent they were on very high-level training, the more they were disrupted. Glassmaking did not recover until the Renaissance years, about a century later. In fact, the close of the medieval period saw Northern Europeans making greenish beakers with claws, just as they had done before.

Glass never became an ordinary piece of tableware until much later. By the end of the Middle Ages, drinking glasses could be used by wealthy merchants in towns, but through most of the period, it was found only in castles and wealthy monasteries.

In Northern Europe, wood was the basis for most containers, at first. Wood could be carved into bowls, which served as cups. Sometimes they really did use hollowed-out horns as cups, but these may have always been ceremonial. Horns can’t be set down unless they have been fitted with stands. At Dark Ages feasts, cups were passed hand to hand as a bonding ceremony, so using a horn was less of a problem.

The parts of Europe that had been colonized by Rome were still making pottery with the methods Rome had taught them. It could be glazed or unglazed; glazed was much preferred for a drinking vessel. Unfortunately, the glaze that Rome left behind was made of powdered lead. When the pottery was fired, the lead chemically combined with minerals in the clay. It changed color depending on what was in the clay. Some came out yellowy, some greenish, some yellowy-brown or greenish-brown. Here is a picture of some medieval English pottery with the full range of lead-based color options.

For much of the Middle Ages, this is what sat on tables and shelves around Northern Europe. Its technology was cheap and well known. The poorest families drank from wooden bowls, while the lower middle class used lead-glazed pitchers.

A new kind of pottery look came from Spain. I’ve already written about the development of tin glazing in the Middle East and Spanish Andalusia. The island of Majorca and city of Barcelona were major shipping ports for Andalusian wares, so Northern Europe first knew white pottery with blue, green or black designs as “majolica.” (alt. spelling maiolica)

Upper middle class families used majolica all over Europe. Once the tin-glazing secret leaked from the Muslim world, Italians picked it up.  Each city had its own type of design (grapes, flowers, leaves) and color. Cobalt powder created blue, but copper-green was favored by many Italian artisans. One of these cities, Faenza, became the common name for the Italian style: faience.

Naturally with an expanding market, artisans farther and farther north picked up the technique. Clay was abundant in the Lowlands region; most houses, even castles, were made of brick. During the 13th century, potters there produced red and white pitchers and tiles, due to the discovery of a deposit of naturally-red clay. When the faience/maiolica style arrived at the end of the Middle Ages, Dutch sailors were making the voyage to the Far East. So tin-glazing, invented in Baghdad to compete with Chinese porcelain, arrived in Holland just in time for sailors to unpack imported Chinese porcelain…so that Dutch artisans could compete with it. In the 16th and 17th centuries, “Delftware” became the common term for white and blue pottery.

There was another, unrelated, development in pottery. In the Rhine Valley, potters developed a way raise kiln temperature much higher than previously possible. When unglazed pottery went into the kiln with a pile of salt next to it, the salt vaporized and then joined chemically with the clay. The pottery came out of the kiln glazed. Salt-glazed pottery varied in color, depending on how it reacted with minerals in the clay. Aachen’s clay turned reddish-brown, while Siegburg’s clay was white.

Salt-glazed pottery was at first decorated by pressing molds onto the surface. Then they began to combine cobalt blue and other mineral colors as decorations on the natural white or tan of the clay. The styles we know as German came out of these late medieval experiments. Beer steins started here, too.