Charlemagne the Farmer: Pt. 1

Posted on April 5, 2013 by Ruth

The earliest detailed document we have about food in Dark Ages Europe is the set of regulations that Emperor Charlemagne imposed on his archipelago of manor farms. A king’s court was too large to stay in one place for long, and it was part of a king’s method of control to travel frequently to different parts of his territory. Medieval kings tended to own many properties, and additionally they often imposed their presence on barons or abbots for a few days. Charlemagne was concerned about good property management; the first section of Capitulare de Villis describes the types of corruption he won’t put up with, including “our people” (the serfs) bribing the stewards (who could be hired and fired) with any gift bigger than a chicken or a bottle of wine.

So while the document is really an outline of what each manor’s steward must do in order to keep his job, some of the later sections discuss the king’s expectations about home-grown food to be available when he shows up with his court. His regulations are very detailed and they constitute a detailed record of which foods were known at that time and in that climate. In a few cases, he gives some hints about how the food should be prepared.

Wine shows up first in the regulations. Charlemagne expected that every manor would keep a vineyard and stock barrels of wine for when his court came around. Additionally, his stewards are instructed to regulate the quantity. If there’s a bad year, they’re supposed to buy extra; if the wine comes out to a surplus, the thrifty king wanted it sold at a profit.

Three of the regulations aren’t about food directly, but stipulate how the king’s horse breeding program should be organized. Around the year 800, Europe did not have many horses, so the king wanted special care paid to counting and culling the stallions, rotating them to different mares, and organizing the colts and fillies into new herds. The king apparently had a special “winter farm” set aside for weaned foals, perhaps in a place where the winter was less severe, and all foals were supposed to arrive there by early November.

Every manor farm had a watermill, and every mill was directed to keep geese on its pond. Large farms were directed not to let the flocks fall below 30 geese and 100 chickens (who lived in barns, not on the millpond); smaller farms had to keep at least 50 chickens and 12 geese. It seems likely that the Emperor’s chief cooks were consulted about these numbers: if the entourage showed up for three days, how many eggs and roast geese would be required, and how big should the flock be in order not to deplete it too badly? In addition to the geese on the millpond, the estate was supposed to develop a fishpond if at all possible, and keep it stocked. When the king’s entourage was not in residence, fish should be sold in order to keep up a stream of revenue.

Beekeeping was required; the king had no intention of going without sweets. The steward was to appoint “as many men as he has estates in his district,” which sounds like one full-time beekeeper per manor farm. In an entry soon, I’ll discuss the state of beekeeping at this time.

Every manor farm was directed to be as heavily stocked with cattle, horses, sheep, goats and pigs as possible. The king mentioned that they should never be afflicted with mange, either. (One line makes it rather unclear if the horses being free of mange had something to do with having roasted horse at banquets—the taboo against eating horses was still in process at this time.) The farms were supposed to keep enough cattle and horses on hand that even when they were eaten, there were always plenty of plow teams on hand for spring.

Foresters were supposed to keep the woods always ready for hunting wild game, including having trained dogs and falcons on hand. Pigs were permitted to forage in the woods, as part of their role on the farm, but not to do any serious damage. Every winter, the pigs were rounded up into barns, and the stewards had to make sure pig food was on hand for the winter.

All this food had to be processed: smoked, churned, salted, fermented, and brewed. Charlemagne made a point of stipulating that all food workers must keep everything very clean.

The manor farms were clearly used as craft workshops, too. Stewards had to make sure that “the women” had on hand whatever they needed for cloth production. Cloth production was probably not yet a specialized craft, but even if it was beginning to move out of home production in larger towns, a king’s manor functioned as its own self-sustaining town. Spinning, dyeing, weaving, and sewing all took place in dedicated workshops to keep the farm’s workers decently dressed.

The manor farms were supposed to ship some of their products to the king’s main palace at Aachen. He lists wax and soap in particular; additionally, every farm had to keep a few fattened cows just for tallow, to make cheaper candles. Every farm was also supposed to churn out saddles, harness, carts and wagons (including extra-watertight ones, equipped with minimal weapons, for the army), barrels, rope, lumber, hay, leather, shields, shoes, and iron. A certain amount went straight to Aachen for the army; the rest was to be sold, which was basically the king’s main income. Every Christmas, he wanted a full accounting from each steward about exactly what each farm had sold: young animals, excess wine or soap, timber, iron, and so on.

In Pt. 2 of Charlemagne’s farming exploits, we’ll look at the lists of known vegetables of the time.

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Medieval farming takes on horses

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Ruth

The new iron-shod moldboard plow could open up fields on land that had looked off limits, and it doubled grain yield per acre. Every 50 years, some higher altitude lands were a few degrees warmer, so farming spread upward, away from the coastal plains. Soon after the new plow, someone invented the harrow, a wide rake with iron teeth that leveled the furrows and buried the seeds. Grain farming became more profitable; around this time, the medieval farmer could expect to get back four times as much grain as he planted, which allowed for feeding his family, paying tithe and rent, and saving seed for the next planting.

The year 800 is the time of Charlemagne; we’ll talk more about his influence on European diet, but in this context he was also the most enthusiastic promoter of horse breeding. Charlemagne’s warriors rode horses, and the church had just declared horses unfit to eat, since they were noble like knights. Only the wealthy could ride horses or use them to pull wagons; most people walked on their own feet and used cattle to pull carts. So horses had no place on the farm, at first.

Horses had three specific drawbacks, to their one advantage of speed. Their hoofs, adapted to grasslands, swelled and split in wet farm work. This problem was solved fairly early in the Dark Ages by using early iron smelting to make horseshoes. Cattle had bony shoulders that fitted into wooden yokes, but horses did not; so they were generally harnessed with a strap directly around their chests. As soon as they tried to pull a heavy load (like a plow), the strap cut off their ability to breathe. The padded horse collar (made of leather, stuffed with horsehair) made its way from China to Europe during Charlemagne’s time. It fitted a horse’s shoulders, leaving the chest free to breathe. But there was one more drawback: the horse consumed more protein than cud-chewing cattle and sheep. Grass wasn’t enough for keeping horses; farmer had to grow food not only for human use, but to feed the horses.

When the last farming innovation of the time fell into place, the use of horses expanded rapidly. This last innovation was creating an extra farm season by using a fall-planted crop of oats for the horses, ready to harvest about the time that wheat for humans needed to be sown. And instead of leaving the field fallow (unplanted) for a whole year, planting legumes to restore nitrogen allowed the fallow season to be relatively short. The fields were growing something productive more of the time than before; they could grow just as much human food and still fit in a horse-food crop.

Horses first pulled the relatively light harrows, while oxen still sweated the plows. But a team of horses, once fitted to plow work with shoes and collars, could pull the plow much faster than the oxen. On days when they weren’t plowing or resting, they could pull two-wheeled carts several miles to a town, fast enough to get back before dark.

The more work horses could do, the less the cattle had to do. Horses weren’t being eaten (at least nobody would admit to it if they did), but when cattle could fatten up, cows’ milk and beef both became food options. Before this, most cheese was made from sheep or goat milk. Who could afford to keep a dairy cow in milk when its greatest value was as ox #5 in the 8-ox plow team?

Horses sped up the farm work, allowing for yet more acres in wheat, rye and barley. They sped up transportation; it now made sense to plant a nice strip of wheat just for sale in town. Peasants still had to pay in-kind rent to the landowner, in either/both grain and work days, but if they could get ahead, the landowner didn’t care if they took extra grain for sale in town.

And so horses on the farm pushed the economy one more step toward cash and markets, while allowing hungry farmers to start eyeing their “oxen” in a new way. It took years for beef to catch on as a popular table meat, but cow’s milk for cheese and butter improved country life quickly.

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Dark Ages grain farming

Posted on April 3, 2013 by Ruth

Dark Ages farming in Europe had to adapt Mediterranean Roman techniques to a different climate and soil. At first, fields were planted one year and left fallow the next, to avoid exhausting the soil. Roman farmers had discovered crop rotation to replenish soil nutrients, and gradually these methods came to Northern Europe. But the soil was wetter and heavier in the north, and the traditional Mediterranean plow was too shallow.

A new plow came into use during the Dark Ages, apparently invented in Eastern Europe. Instead of cutting a line in the soil, it cut into the earth, sliced off the grass roots, and flipped the slice over. The furrow it cut was much deeper, and the plow itself was much heavier. It had to rest on wheels, with handles to allow the ploughman to steer or force the blade into the earth deeper. The whole thing was so heavy that at least two oxen, and usually more, were required to pull it. As use of the new moldboard plow spread, the standard model generally required eight oxen. This reorganized farming so that groups of farmer teamed their oxen together to plow everyone’s land at the same time; it was more convenient to own long strips of land that ran parallel to other strips, than to own separate squares as we do today.

Seed was sown by hand, so it did not grow in rows. It was rarely pure. We can talk about a Dark Ages farmer sowing wheat or rye, but in reality, the seeds in his bag may have included wheat, rye, barley and millet. A poorer farmer with worse soil grew more barley, rye and millet. When they harvested, the grains were all cut and milled together. The resulting flour, called maslin, made coarse, heavy bread.

Mills tended to be small and local. The simplest mill was built on a wooden bridge over a fast creek; a sideways paddlewheel at the end of a pole was let down into the water. It directly turned the millstones. Small mills like this could even be maintained by the community for self-serve use; larger ones were run by millers. It depended on how settled an area was, how much grain was grown, and how much the resulting grain might be sold at market, as opposed to just feeding one’s own family.

All bread was sourdough, started with a soured lump of old dough in water. Actual loaves of bread also depended on village organization, since baking ovens required some investment. Isolated home bakers made some version of the small or flat bread we find all over the world, baked on a hot stone or in a clay pot buried in ashes. But a real village baking oven had a large, insulated chamber in which the baker built a roaring fire while preparing dough. He raked out all the coals very quickly, put the loaves in, and closed it up before the oven cooled. The baker’s oven could be used as a service, like a laundromat: bring your dough, let the baker cut a piece off, and take home a baked loaf. The baker added your dough to his own supply and sold bread to those with more money and less grain of their own.

A lot of grain never made it into flour, but instead was boiled up as pottage, what we’d call hot cereal. The advantage of pottage is that it could be kept overnight and have more material added the next day, whether it was the same stuff or not. Pottage changed its taste and composition from day to day. As long as it came to a boil each day, the food didn’t spoil, and the pot didn’t have to be cleaned. Some days it was more like soup, some more like stew; some pottage got thick and could be eaten off a trencher. It was the universal fall-back food of early Europe. It might be a stretch to call it “comfort food,” but in early Europe, the idea of “comfort food” was redundant, like “hot fire.” Food was comfort, as opposed to starving. Pottage went nicely with some wild game roasted next to it, or stewed in it.

Barley also turned into ale. The barley seeds soaked until they began to sprout, then were dried. The half-sprouted grain, now dry and ground, was called malt. The malt soaked in hot water so that its carbohydrates leached into the water. The solids, called mash, got strained off and fed to animals, while the liquid, called wort, was boiled with herbs and then allowed to ferment into alcohol. This was the daily drink of most of Europe throughout the Middle Ages.

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Dark Ages animals

Posted on April 3, 2013 by Ruth

So we travel back to the Dark Ages, the early medieval years when constant migration of barbarians kept civilization to a lower level than Rome had reached. Most of Europe is heavily forested. Settlement tends to be along rivers and the sea coast, and travel, too, is restricted to coastal and river sailing.

Let’s take note, first, of what wild animals are already living in Europe. Wolves are everywhere, but they are food only for the truly starving. Medieval people thought that wolves were poisonous, both their bite and their meat. Wolf fur could be used, but it had a bad smell.

Bears, deer, boars and mountain goats were the large game animals. Fallow deer were native to the Mediterranean; larger red and roe deer were further north and in the British isles. During the Dark Ages, bears were hunted to extinction; boars were hunted as enthusiastically but somehow survived much longer, remaining popular hunting targets all through the Middle Ages. Foxes, otters, hares and beavers were the main mid-sized game.

In the 7th century, Northern Europe had no rabbits or cats (apart from thinning numbers of lynx in the mountains). Rabbits were native to North Africa and Spain, though they were carried north by Romans—and eventually they became an established wild animal. In the 7th century, some places would have had rabbit warrens, others not yet. Rabbits can be domesticated, where hares cannot.

There were more donkeys than horses, and horses were not very big. Oxen were smaller than today’s cattle, nor were they distinct breeds. In fact, sheep were more often milked than cows; cattle were the main animals for pulling carts and plows.

Pigs were kept half wild; they foraged in the woods during summer and had to be rounded up for winter. Pigs were omnivores on the farm, so with sheep, they were Europe’s most numerous farm animals. Farm fowl included chickens, but geese and ducks were more common and also closer to wild.

One great thing about the Dark Ages: the water was teeming with fish. Every pond was full of eels, every river was still unpolluted and filled with fish, and you didn’t have to go very far out into an ocean bay to start hauling in the big stuff. Early European diet, based on the river and sea shores, can be presumed to consist very largely of fish, with an infusion of stewed hare, boiled eggs and roast boar.

Edible plants were the long-term problem that the Dark Ages farmers set out to solve…

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New series: medieval food

Posted on April 3, 2013 by Ruth

If I start a series on food in the Middle Ages, I’ll take my time and meander through time and region. I’m one of those “begin at the beginning” fanatics. So I’m thinking I’d start with what Europe had as raw materials for food around 600 AD, then move forward.

600 is a nice starting point because we’ve got the heartland of Europe basically settled by the folks who put down permanent roots: the Franks are in France and Germany, the Anglo-Saxons are in England, and although the Goths and Visigoths have intermarried in Italy and Spain, the Muslim expansion hasn’t yet begun. Plows haven’t been improved and horses are not farm animals. Invasive animals aren’t arriving yet.

600 also catches Europe at the upward swing of the Medieval Warm Period. Nobody considered it a bad thing; sure, the ocean crept upward on the shore, but they hadn’t built as seriously and expensively at the water’s edge as we have now. The north seas had smaller ice packs. Mountain-slope land opened up for farming and prehistoric copper mines were rediscovered as glaciers melted.

The story of medieval food in Europe follows a typical story plot outline: man meets land, man loses land, man kills for land, man settles land; land get warmer and warmer and man has more and more babies (boy meets girl, too); then, a crisis: land gets too wet and cold, man can’t find better land, babies die; in the happy ending, man adapts. Man drinks beer, eats hearty meals of meat and bread, and builds well-fed cities right down to the shoreline.

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Medieval Easter

Posted on March 31, 2013 by Ruth

On Saturday night before Easter, with all fires extinguished at the church, the priest started a new fire and the villagers came to light lamps and candles to take the holy flame home.

Medieval Easter began very early at the church, because a superstition had developed that if you could catch a glimpse of the sacristan taking the cross or carved figure of Jesus out of its “coffin” (box, niche, hole, whatever they use for a sepulcher), you would be sure not to die that year. The priests disliked this type of thing and tried to get the job done so early that nobody had time to sneak in. Any time after the midnight Mass or the 3 am. prayer hour might have been about right; the job was definitely done before dawn.

At dawn, the main contingent of priests, monks, nuns and choir boys (depending on what sort of church it was: monastic, cathedral, or country parish) came to the sepulcher, acting out the role of the women in the Gospels. They removed the host, the wafer of bread that had been placed into the sepulcher with the cross or figure. The wafer, now representing the risen Christ, was carried in procession back to the church.

Bells pealed, welcoming the lay people to come to the dawn Easter Mass. Again, many of these services including simple play-acting of the roles in the story: women (or monks) going to the sepulcher and finding it empty with only a cloth left behind; monks standing by as the angels singing “He is risen!” Sometimes, the choir sang a triumphal song while monks and nuns came pouring out of an inner room, symbolizing souls released from hell. Although the words were entirely in Latin, the people knew the general story and could follow the action.

Medieval Easter dinner was a feast of all the forbidden animal products that had been saved up for weeks: meat, eggs, cheese, milk, and eggs.

Easter eggs, dyed with herbal and vegetable dyes, were called Pace Eggs in English, after Pesach (Hebrew) and Pascha (Greek). Eggs were traded, used to pay feast performers, tapped against other eggs in greeting, and rolled in games. Seems hard to believe they didn’t also hide and find them, but the whole “bunny” part had not yet evolved.

In England, there was a traditional Easter cake flavored with the spring herb tansy. It was bitter, not sweet, but its flavor was enjoyed at that time. Do we have a similar bitter treat today, besides coffee? Maybe coffee has taken up that role in the palate, leaving tansy behind.

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Re-enacting the death of Jesus: medieval Good Friday

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Ruth

Medieval churches tried to dramatize the death of Jesus; their idea of re-enactment was liturgical, symbolic, and heavily loaded with music. In Biblical dramas staged publicly during the summer, an actor might play the role of Jesus, tied and faux-nailed to a cross, but in the church at Easter season, the drama was not literal.

A typical small cathedral or large monastery had enough monks, priests and choir boys to act out several of the parts of the story. As the narrative was read or sung in Latin, actors might walk down the aisle or take the roles of asking or answering questions. One specific example I found in my research was that some choir boys might be assigned to take the altar cloths away when the story said that the soldiers cast lots for Jesus’ robe. Candles or other fires were put out when, in the story, Jesus died.

If you listen to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, which was composed around 1743, you can hear the later development of the medieval dramatic tradition. The choir often divides in two parts, asking and answering questions. One singer is the narrator, while another always sings the words of Jesus. When the narrative arrives at a dramatic moment, such as when the disciples all ask, “Is it I, Lord?” (that is, who will be the traitor), the music amplifies the drama by echoing the question eleven times. In this duet, Bach’s chorus interrupts the singers, demanding of the soldiers who have arrested Jesus, “let him go!” and later asks why thunder and lightning aren’t falling on the world for what is happening. The music becomes emotional and dramatic. While the medieval tradition was not as fully developed as Bach’s masterpiece, we know that they were using the harmony available to attempt a similar level of drama.

In the Depositio ceremony, the priests acted out Jesus’ burial. Some churches had a cross with a removable Jesus figure; in Germany, they were sometimes life-size. When a carved figure of Jesus was used, it was often symbolically washed with water and wine, just as if it were a real dead body. Sometimes they used a coffin, palls, and other real funeral trappings. Other (perhaps most) churches just buried a cross, as a symbol. They always included a piece of the wafer, the “host,” used in Mass. Since church doctrine stated that this bit of bread became a piece of Jesus’ body in a mystical way, it made sense to use the host literally as a bit of Jesus to bury.

They didn’t have to dig a hole or anything. Medieval churches had some kind of niche, box, or small closet that was the Easter sepulcher. The carved figure or cross, and the piece of host, were placed into the sepulcher in a solemn ceremony. Curtains were drawn across the niche, or the closet was closed; the burial was complete. The process was treated like a real funeral; the sepulcher had to be surrounded by candles, and monks began an all-night prayer vigil, just as they did when one of their brothers died.

The vigil continued all through Saturday. The church was dark, lit only by natural light from its windows. Lay people could come into the church and witness the constant prayer and singing. The priests hoped that their illiterate congregations would understand the story by experiencing the intensity of this dramatized death.

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Maundy Thursday

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Ruth

Maundy Thursday, in the Middle Ages, was a day for charitable acts. Some kings made a practice of washing the feet of beggars. Louix IX of France, later St. Louis, washed the feet of lepers. In more ordinary aristocratic and wealthy households, the almoner oversaw the day’s charities. The poor were brought into the house and received a new piece of clothing and a sum of money, sometimes one penny for every year of the lord’s age. They were given a Lenten meal of fish and pottage.

In church, one light was left burning on the altar, but other lights were put out in preparation for the official day of grief, Good Friday.

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Easter season

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Ruth

By the week leading up to Easter, medieval people were certainly tired of the Lenten fast. Milk could be turned into cheese, but nobody was allowed to eat it; they only had butter if their region had a papal indulgence. It’s likely that they were hard-boiling their eggs for a few weeks ahead, if the hens were still laying. Near the start of Lent, there was no use for eggs if people weren’t cheating on the fast. But near the end, perhaps the eggs would stay fresh in a cold cellar. In the late Middle Ages, there’s some evidence that the surfeit of hard-boiled eggs were dyed or used in games on Easter day.

But although the Easter feast was among the grandest, the season was not about games or fun. It was a solemn week that used a lot of drama. The church was always aware that most of its members were illiterate; the earliest medieval churches had wall murals to teach Bible stories. Many Romanesque churches were covered with story paintings to rival Kat Von D’s back. But by the 11th century, churches also tried to act out some stories during the worship service.

Palm Sunday began with a procession of palm leaves to re-enact the entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem. Most parts of Northern Europe had no palms, so they used local substitutes. They didn’t take the re-enactment literally, but rather liturgically. The priest led a procession into the church and there were special songs. While miracle and mystery plays (staged outside) tried to use costumes and dialogue to tell the story, church drama did not aim at realism.

There’s no doubt that, in parallel, the country people also had traditions about spring left from pagan times. Less is known, since we have only some written records of what they did. Although the church accepted some pagan customs blended into the Christmas feast, priests were strict about keeping them out of the Resurrection story. With one striking exception: the name “Easter” itself. Eostre was a pagan goddess whose special season was co-opted by Latin missionaries during the Dark Ages. By the Middle Ages proper, nobody remembered or cared.

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Royal burials

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Ruth

Some of the normal rules, such as masses said and bells rung, applied. But there are some pretty bizarre exceptions among royal medieval burial stories.

Chiefly, any European tradition of embalming comes straight from them. Lacking Lenin-type methods, they just leaned on the super expensive spices from Indonesia. In general, the earlier in the Middle Ages that we see spices in use, the more exotic the cost.

King Charlemagne, who in 800 was crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor in a long time, was Europe’s first monarch on really grand scale. His burial couldn’t come close to rivaling the Chinese emperors or the pharaohs, of course. But he was buried in a room-sized tomb, dressed in his royal robes, seated in his chair. His body and tomb were packed with exceptionally costly spices; this was before the Crusader kingdom had established a decent trade route for Europe. It is said that 100 years later, his descendant King Otto reopened the tomb and found the old man still sitting there, pretty well preserved, gold teeth and all. Otto was freaked out, as anyone would be.

Embalming had two practical uses for royalty. One was legal proof of death, and the other was how to handle being buried far away from the place of death.

Legal proof of death was a serious matter. Uncertainty about who was the monarch led to uprisings that were mercilessly put down; stable government benefited everyone, even when the monarch was low quality. So kings went on public display for up to three months, to take into account travel time. (King Edward I of England stayed on display for a record four months.) It wasn’t as bad as embalming Hugo Chavez or Chairman Mao for posterity, but it was a pretty big deal.

Monarchs and people in the ruling ranks of aristocracy (dukes, earls, counts) often wanted to be buried in a place other than where they died. The problem first came up in the Crusades, when most of the rulers of England and France rode through Turkey and Syria, or sailed the Mediterranean into Egypt’s ports. Death came in many forms, not just in battle; King Louis (the saint) suffered a long, dangerous bout of illness in Egypt. He died of dysentery in Tunis. Dynastic traditions required rulers to be buried in their family tombs back at home, often in the cathedrals they had endowed.

King (formerly Count) Baldwin of Jerusalem (formerly of Edessa, formerly of Verdun, born in Boulogne) was one of the first monarchs to face this problem. He left a will with directions for his cook to remove his internal organs and preserve his body with salt and spices. He was rolled up in a thick shroud and conveyed back to Boulogne. Others in the same situation sent home their head or heart in a lead-lined jar or box. King Louis IX, dying in Tunis, was actually boiled so that his cleaned-off bones could be sent home to the cathedral in Paris. His internal organs were buried in Tunis.

Monarchs and upper aristocracy who died at home chose to be carved up, too. They had multiple homes, and they had special saints’ shrines they had endowed. Pieces of them could be buried at each of these places. Pope Boniface VIII condemned this as barbaric, but later popes sold indulgences (certificates of forgiveness) to royals who wanted to be cut up.

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