Everyday life in early modern Europe:
The case of food
European World, 22 October 2013
Michael Bycroft
There is another, shadowy zone, often hard to see for lack of
adequate historical documents, lying underneath the market
economy: this is that elementary basic activity which went on
everywhere and the volume of which is truly fantastic. That
rich zone, like a layer covering the earth, I have called for want
of a better expression material life or material civilization
-- Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life (1979)
It is quite easy to imagine being transported to, say,
Voltaire’s house at Ferney, and talking to him for a long
time without being too surprised.
But if he invited us to stay with him for a few days, the
details of his everyday life…would greatly shock us.
Between his world and ours, a great gulf would open
up: lighting at night, heating, transport, food, illness,
medicine….
1. Food as a necessity
2. Food as a luxury
Daily wages of
unskilled labourers,
1400-2000
(Scholliers, 2003)
Daily wages of
unskilled labourers,
1400-2000
(Scholliers, 2003)
In my father’s time, we ate meat every day, dishes
were abundant, we gulped down wine as if it were
water. Today, everything has truly changed –
Norman gentleman, 1560
100g of meat a day, 1480-1454
50g of meat a day, 1582
– agricultural labourers in Narbonne (S France)
Number of butchers in Montepezat (France)
18 in 1550….1 in 1763
William Hogarth, O the Roast Beef of Old England or
Calais Gate (1748)
French v British meat consumption
The nobility of England do most exceed…they have not only beef, mutton,
veal, lamb, kid, pork, cony, capon, pig, deer…beside a great variety of wild
foul
– William Harrison, Description of England, 1577
3 lb/day for a group of harvest workers in 1706, 1 lb/day for self-employed
farm labourer in Lancashire in 1735…
‘in nine tenths of France, the poor and the small farmers eat meat, and only
salt meat at that, no more than once a week’
– 1829 French writer
Output per worker in
agriculture
England in 1500 set to 1
(Allen, 2003)
Some causes of the agricultural revolution in England,
1600-1750
 Land enclosure
 Draining land for cultivation
 Adding more fertilisers to soil
 More ploughings
 Greater use of horse power
 more food produced per worker, and (in long term) smaller
proportion of population working the land
-- Craig Muldrew, Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness (2011)
Some causes of the agricultural revolution in England,
1600-1750
 Land enclosure  planting hedges, building fences
 Draining land for cultivation  digging, hauling mud, slates, wood
 Adding more fertilisers to soil  carting, spreading, digging over
 Greater use of horse power  loading carts, looking after horse
 more food produced per worker, and (in long term) smaller
proportion of population working the land
in the short term, more food needed to fuel the workers
Food for ‘poor commoners’ includes ‘melons,
pumpkins, gourds, cucumbers, radishes, skirrets,
parsnips, carrots, cabbages, navews, turnips, and
all kinds of salad herbs’
-- William Harrison, Description of England, 1577
6 ounces of veges per day per London inhabitant
= amount arriving in London by water and by cart from market
gardens in 1680s, calculated by Gregory King, a contemporary
Aniseed, Dill, Fennel-seed, Alcost, Commen,
Carawayes, Clary, Corianders, dried Mints, dried
Nep, dried Origanum, Parsley-seed, dried Gillyflowers, roots of Galinga and Orris, Rosemary,
Saffron, Sage, Oke of Jerusalem, Bay-berries,
Juniper-berries, Sothernwood, Tansie, Tamarisk,
Time, dried Wal-flowers, Violets, Varvein,
Wintersavory, Wormwood, and suchlike…
-- Thomas Moffet, Health’s Improvement (1655)
‘The staff of life’, ‘our daily bread’
 cheap energy: 11x less per calorie than meat, 3x less than butter…
 most consumed locally – on farm, or sold within 20 or 30km of
cultivation
 remotely consumed wheat about 1% of Europe’s total production
 but large for time, eg. Florentine merchants handled 5,000 tons of
Sicilian grain a year in 14th century
 sea routes, eg. from Baltic sea to Mediterranean, England to Med…
The trinity of grain, flour, bread is to be found everywhere in the history
of Europe – Braudel
Kinds of bread and grain
 soft white bread with milk, aka ‘Queen’s bread’
 white bread, ie. made with wheat, bran and germ removed
 wheat bread, bran and germ included
 rye bread
 barley bread
 gruel ie. grain or dried bread boiled with water or milk
 roots and acorns
[in bad years the poor eat] bread made either of beans, peas, or oats,
or of all together and some acorns among, of which scourge the
poorest soonest taste, sith they are least able to provide themselves of
better
-- William Harrison, Description of England
Eg. in England, poor harvests in 1596-7, 1697, 1709, 1740
Meal of gruel of
peasant family in
Holland
(A. Van Ostade, 1653)
Paolo Veronese, The Marriage of Cana (1563)
Joachim Beuckelaer (Flemish), 1566
Late 16th-century engraving of ‘sugar collation’ on
Erasmus of Rotterdam, De civilitate
morum puerilium (1530)
[A Little Book of Good Manners of
Children]
This was also the golden age of the diet book – the book that told
you how to eat correctly.
As Ken Albala has shown, these books poured off the presses
throughout the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth.
They were similar to today’s books on diet in the sense that they
were based on the cutting-edge science of the day – in the
Renaissance that meant the physiology of the ancient Roman writer
Galen.
They differed from today’s books in the sense that they were not
just concerned with keeping the body healthy.
They were also about having a healthy mind,
and about combining foods in the most harmonious manner.
In other words, they were at once medical, moralistic, and culinary –
a kind of all-purpose self-help book.
Table laid for 12-15 places
Vincent la Chapelle,
Le cuisinier moderne (1742)
Contributing causes
 decline of humoreal theory
 William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood casts doubt on
Galen’s physiology
 sequence of rival theories of health and physiology, esp. acid-alkali theories
and mechanical theories
 French aristocrats discover the countryside
 Paris ‘suburbs’ crowded, drawing wealthy citizens to country houses
 rhetoric of ‘simplicity’ and ‘authenticity’
 recoil from increasingly common ‘exotica’
 sugar, spice and turkey no longer serve as marks of distinction
 distinction now lies in high-quality ingredients and refined taste
Populuxe food (and drink)
‘Tea and tea paraphernalia are wholly absent from all households [in
Antwerp] in 1680
are universal among the rich and present in 58 percent of the poorest
households (those living in a single room) by 1730
and are universal among all classes in 1780’
-- quoted in Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution (2008)
Daily wages of
unskilled labourers,
1400-2000
(Scholliers, 2003)
Tips
Variations eg. over centuries, between nations, between foodstuffs,
between social groups
Causes eg. population growth, agricultural change, voyages of
discovery, science and medicine
Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, chapters 2-3