SC - trencher history guesses

[Decker, Terry D.]

> Hello!  Wasn't this 2 pounds of bread per day plus a gallon of beer part
> of
> a workman's *wages*, and therefore expected to be taken home & shared with
> his family?  Also, was not the beer more than likely small beer?
> 
> Cindy
> 
"Recent historians have found enough data to let them estimate the usual
consumption of bread in the late Middle Ages, and their figures for various
countries are surprisingly similar.  In lordly English households at this
time, for instance, a standard daily food ration allowed every individual
between roughly two and three pounds of bread and about a gallon of ale.
Interestingly, the same allowance applied in the provisioning of castle
garrisons and for inmates in hospitals.  In France for each of the 3500
residents of Chambery the amount of wheat that entered the town - to be
consumed ultimately and mainly, we have to assume, in the form of bread -
was 24 litres per month, that is to say approximately .8 litres of wheat
(enough for a two-pound loaf of bread) per citizen per day.  Florentines of
the fourteenth century likewise averaged about two pounds of bread per day.
Francoise Desportes has found that even by the beginning of the thirteenth
century Paris had seventy water mills alone, without counting the windmills
sited on the summits of its hills!  Such figures as these support the
observation that bread was the basis of the medieval diet."

- -- Terence Scully, The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages, Boydell paperback
edition, 1997, pg. 36-37.

The information about meals as part of wages I've seen does not include
quantities.

Steve Pursley (Barat FitzWalter Reynolds) whose Mead Page you reference in a
link from your webpage, produced a period small beer from German monestary
records.  I don't think I could survive a quart of it, much less a gallon a
day.

Bear  
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