All Things Medieval

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.

In the medieval Europe of popular comic portrayal, everything is dirty and nothing is accurate. But real medieval Europe was obsessed with the regulation of weights and measurements. Almost everything was regulated, partly so that somebody could extract a fee from the process. Fees, tolls, fines and licenses: now we’re at the heart of the true medieval landscape.

Medieval commerce took place in towns that had been granted self-governing charters by the feudal lord. Both buyers and sellers in each town were fiercely jealous about false measurements that might cheat the buyer. While some sellers didn’t mind cheating, the other sellers and artisans in town did not want stories of being cheated to make the rounds by word of mouth. Even one false measure could lead to rumors that lasted for generations. So merchants and artisans policed commercial measurement strictly.

Guilds were the first line in enforcing accurate measurements. Each artisan was required to mark his products with his unique symbol (his trademark). If any consumer complained to the guild, they would know which artisan to prosecute. Guilds also carried out random inspections.

The coopers guild, like others, required every barrel to be branded with the cooper’s mark. Only guild-approved barrels could be used in trade there. Unmarked barrels were by definition illegal. Buckets and tubs were not as important in measurement terms, but they were also branded for other quality purposes.

Towns, too, regulated measurements. Town governments had central offices of weights and measures; in some places it became customary to give this job to an official’s widow. It was a genteel way of supporting herself, since she just needed to certify that a guild’s or merchant’s set of weights and measures was accurate to the town’s official set. As central governments grew during the period, one of the chief roles at the king’s palace was to choose a standard for weights and measures. The king’s officers carried out random inspections of town measurement standards, just as the town inspected the guilds and the guilds inspected the merchants.

Each region or country had a set of standard barrel sizes to measure liquids. The archaic words for barrels, which to us seem interchangeable, were actually measurement labels: barrels, hogsheads, kegs, butts, pipes, firkins, casks, tuns, and kilderkins. The volume of each might be slightly different in England and France, but differences like these were well known to international merchants. (Here are some modern barrel conventions, provided by Wikipedia.)

Each industry for producing drinks or other liquids had traditional barrel sizes. Ale was sold in 30-gallon barrels, but beer came in 36-gallon barrels. Sweet wine (often from the Mediterranean region) came in butts, which held 18.5 modern gallons. Wholesale wine often came in tuns, the largest barrel size. Coopers in regions that produced more wine than ale could specialize in tuns, while the coopers in hopped-ale regions (the Rhine Valley) could focus on 36-gallon kegs. Perhaps sweet wine came in smaller barrels partly due to its Mediterranean origin, since trees were generally smaller.

We know from village and county magistrate records that one of the most commonly prosecuted offenses in medieval England was using ale pitchers that were a little bit too small. Ale was sold out of private houses for most of this period, and it was harder to regulate. Local officials took complaints seriously; alewives were fined on almost a daily basis for claiming one volume while actually selling a smaller one. The simplest way to create this cheat was to get a local cooper to use fresh oak when making your gallons and firkins. They appeared to be certified and correct, but over the course of a year, the wood shrank and allowed the alewife to skim profits. Towns and guilds both made it illegal for coopers to use green wood.

Barrels intended for wine and beer needed to be strong enough to hold an expanding volume and higher pressure. The way to make wood strong enough is to put it under pressure of its own. (Is there a moral here?)

First step for wet coopers: use only oak. The oak must be thicker than the wood used for dry barrels or buckets. The expense of the wood alone was greater for these barrels, but on the other side, they were expected to last at least 50 years.

The oak staves were angled, but they were also carved to taper at both ends. The middle of the stave was wider, so the middle of the barrel was wider. This is all very well, if only thick oaken staves bent easily, like plastic or even metal. They don’t bend easily at all, of course. When the staves were forced to bend, they would always be under pressure to bend back straight. This pressure pushed back against the expanding alcohol that would fill each cask.

Wet coopers used large vats of boiling water to soften the pre-carved staves. Sometimes steam was enough, other times the wood itself had to be boiled. The barrel was assembled first at the bottom; an iron hoop held them in place without much difficulty. Then the cooper pounded a larger hoop into the center of the staves, at the widest point. So far, the wood hadn’t been put under too much stress.

The real trick of barrels came next. Anyone who’s ever dealt with wood furniture whose sides are exposed to different humidity knows what happens: one side expands, the other shrinks. The wood warps. Controlled warping was exactly what the cooper now wanted, so he put an iron fire basket into the bottom of the barrel. Its heat dried the inside of the staves, while the outsides were still wet. As this happened, the cooper and his assistants bent the staves inward until they could fit the end hoop. If the staves were not chosen, carved and softened correctly, at this point there was a loud snap and one of the staves broke.

When things went well, the staves gradually bent inward and the hoops were hammered into place. The cooper then used curved planes to make the inside of the barrel perfectly smooth. Rough wood harbored harmful bacteria that could spoil the wine or ale. The cooper also made the flat, round ends, called heads. Their edges were tapered to fit into the barrel perfectly, right where notches had been cut into the staves. By the time the barrel’s staves were perfectly dry, the wood could not completely straighten, so they could hammer the end hoops into a looser position, opening the barrel enough to fit each head into place.

Germany led the barrel industry. German coopers made watertight “dry barrels” for salted herring caught in the North Sea by the Hanseatic League. When hopped ale (beer) became an export to other parts of Europe, there was a huge need for wet barrels. Beginning in the 13th century, German coopers began formally competing to see who could make the largest barrel. The record was pushed upward and upward, to ridiculously unwieldy sizes, until the last record was set in Heidelberg, in 1751. This famous barrel is called the Heidelberg Tun. It used more than 100 oak trees and was never anything but a tourist attraction.

next: measuring liquids in barrels

In the Mediterranean regions of Europe, large kiln-fired pottery jars had always been, and continued to be, the standard for storing just about anything. But when the northern regions were settled during the Middle Ages, kiln technology was almost non-existent. It seems that early Germanic pottery was just buried in a fire’s ashes, which was only sufficient to make small jugs or bowls.

However, the continent was thickly covered with oak trees. Before the Christian era, Frankish, Danish and Swedish carpenters had learned to make straight oak staves into round, water-tight containers. Some ship burials have small barrels or buckets dating back to 500 and 600 AD.

Barrels were made from straight or curved staves. Straight staves could make an open barrel, in other words a bucket or tub. They could also make a barrel that was closed on both ends, but only to contain things that were not going to exert any pressure on the walls. Alcoholic drinks like wine and ale would break the staves of an ordinary straight barrel.

Straight staves had to be fitted into a circle, with their edges tapered so that they naturally formed a circle when tightly put together. Carving these staves was not very difficult or time-consuming. The earliest straight-stave barrels and buckets used flexible wooden bands to hold the staves together. Iron technology became developed in medieval Europe, so most medieval barrels used iron hoops to hold the staves in place. The cooper slipped the hoop over the narrower end of a bucket or tub, then hammered it toward the wider part until it fitted too tightly to budge.

Because barrels with straight staves couldn’t be used for alcohol, their makers were known as “dry coopers.” Dry coopers made casks to ship everything from soap, flour, fish, salt, newly-minted coins, and eventually gunpowder. Soap and fish were not entirely dry, so their barrels had to be made with some care not to leak. But many other dry barrels were made of cheap, thin wood. They were expected to last through more than one shipping voyage; coopers were permitted to re-use barrels as long as they had not held soap, tar, or oil. But nobody expected these dry kegs to last more than a few years.

“White coopers” made buckets and tubs used widely in dairy. Wooden milking buckets used straight staves and iron (or wooden hoops); traditionally, one stave stuck up higher than the others to use as a handle. Buckets intended for water usually had two staves standing higher, with holes drilled, so that shoulder yokes could be attached. Cheese-making tubs, cheese molds and butter churns were all modified straight-stave barrels.

Dry coopers made barrels to exact sizes; their Coopers Guild brands certified that the barrels were not slightly smaller than the standard. It was illegal to use a commercial barrel that was not branded by its maker, since then nobody could certify the size. White coopers, on the other hand, did not have to meet regulations in the same way. Their buckets and churns could be traditional or convenient sizes. Some coopers made tubs as large as they could manage, since commercial baths bought these huge tubs for several people to bathe in at once. Tubs didn’t need to be precise in size, but they definitely required two higher staves with holes, so that several men could carry the huge, heavy tub on a pole through the streets.

next: wet coopers

Even more than tournaments, taxes, tolls, fees and fines characterized daily life in medieval Europe. One method of levying taxes and fees was by regulating the size of containers. Containers that didn’t define the amount of something purchased didn’t have to be regulated, so not all containers were policed.

Of course, medieval Europe had no synthetic materials like plastic. Paper was a new technology, reserved for keeping records and making books; it wasn’t used to wrap the butcher’s meat. Metal was very expensive, while the production needs of iron drove up the cost of wood. Woven fabric was produced as rapidly as the materials could be grown.

So during a typical day in a large town, what types of materials contained liquids, food or other possessions? When were containers regulated and how? I’ll try to sketch some answers as completely as I can.