> personal servants in medieval monasteries. So, my question to the
> list is: were medieval monks sloshed the whole time?
> Jim Bugslag
Barbara Harvey deals carefully with the issue in Living and Dying in
England 1100-1540 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), mainly from
Westminster Abbey sources; see esp. 56-59:
"Every monk received an allowance of a gallon [of best ale] per day, and
this was but the basic ration. On most occasions of drinking outside the
normal pattern of meals, he could expect an extra pint or two, and if his
duties were of an unusually thirst-producing kind, his daily allowance
was increased: hence the special ration for the precentor when he sang
the long office of a feast day. Moreover, ale was much used in cooking...
Nor was ale the only alcoholic beverage of a monk of Westminster at this
time: on solemn vigils and feast days, and on all other occasions of
conviviality which have already been mentioned, he drank wine, sometimes
in generous measure: on a well-endowed anniversary, for example, the
individual ration might be a quart. On an average day, alcohol in the
strict sense--the ethanol in the ale and wine--probably supplied 19 per
cent of the whole energy value of a monk's diet--a figure contrasting in
a remarkable way with the probable contribution of alcohol to the average
diet today: this is five per cent" [58].
She thinks the ale must have been weak by modern standards. A gallon a day
"was probably a common ration for high and middle ranking personnel in
great households of the period, whether ecclesiastical or secular. Nor is
it difficult to believe that many workers in late medieval England--as,
for example, agricultural workers in the harvest season--could actually
dispatch this quantity of ale day by day. It is as an allowance for
religious occupied, as a whole in light work, that a gallon a day attracts
attention: the allowance seems to indicate a level of consumption several
times higher than that of the vast majority of male adults in England and
Wales today" [65].
Harvey is aware that monastic food provisions were calculated wastefully
to create surpluses for servants, dependents and the poor, but concludes
that the high-protein diet and heavy alcohol consumption must have
produced obesity and liver and kidney problems. I don't recall that she
says anything about drunkenness, though there's something about the
difficulty of getting a monk to turn up in church for the midnight office
if he had been tippling with his mates till long after bed-time (which of
course was early).
I heartily recommend the book.
--
Paul Chandler || Yarra Theological Union
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