6 ms·
The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)
- resolutebat 2y agoI'm not entirely sure I buy this argument. There are vast swathes of the world today where drinking tap water will likely make you sick, and in all these countries it is standard procedure to boil tap water before drinking it. In fact, in eg China & Indonesia, cold water (even if clean) is believed to be bad for you and drinking still warm boiled water or weak tea instead is very common. Was medieval England really an exception?
- deepsun 2y agoAnd in all of those places you'd usually noted how bad is the taste of water, so many people knew it's unsafe not just from tradition, but also from the bad taste. The difference between now and medieval England is that we know taste is not everything, that even "sweet water" can be dangerous unboiled.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> And in all of those places you'd usually noted how bad is the taste of water, so many people knew it's unsafe not just from tradition, but also from the bad taste. Considering the strength of the Chinese taboo on cold water, I find that fairly unlikely.
- schmidt_fifty 2y agoMy understanding is this is rooted in the perception of hot water as a luxury—it's not like we have any shortage of evidence from chinese texts that people have always drank cold water. The idea that most people even could avoid cold water is an artifact of the last two centuries. Even where boiling water was necessary water was boiled and stored (that's not specific to my knowledge of China, that's just an observation from multiple different places and times). Of course I'm open to be demonstrated wrong.
- kergonath 2y agoWe often say that the US are not the world and that we should not assume that something is natural just because American do it. Well, it’s also true for China and overall people in a specific place having a specific taboo tells us very little about human health or their understanding of it. So no, a Chinese taboo on cold water does not tell us anything about a human tendency to drink water any more that a people’s taboo about pork is any indication that pork is unsafe (yes, this also is an urban legend).
- thaumasiotes 2y agoPeople in a specific place having a specific taboo can tell us a lot about how likely they are to engage in the tabooed behavior. The argument was that people in China would have noted the bad taste of their raw water. In order to do that, they would have had to drink it, which I find unlikely.
- hnlmorg 2y agoYou’re comparing England from ~800 years ago to modern day countries. That hardly seems fair. There’s a lot of knowledge we take for granted that simply hadn’t been discovered yet in medieval times.
- refactor_master 2y agoBut humans have been cooking stuff for thousands and thousands of years to improve nutritional value and kill off bacteria. Why would water be an exception?
- anthk 2y agoWater evaporates and people would think twice before 'losing' it.
- hnlmorg 2y agoBacteria wasn’t known about thousand of years ago. Nor were nutrients (in the sense that we know it now). There are a plethora of other reasons food might have been cooked, not least of all being flavour. The fact that it also killed bacteria would have been an accidental benefit. Also a lot of food actually loses nutrients when cooked.
- rrr_oh_man 2y agoI think you're underestimating humans who for hundreds of thousands (!) of years have been as smart as you and I.
- hnlmorg 2y agoIt’s pretty well documented during the Middle Ages that people thought it was the smell that made them ill and not any bacteria
- neuronerdgirl 2y agoAnd smell and bacterial levels are absolutely correlated
- legitster 2y agoI feel like some of these debunkings need debunking! I don't think anyone is truly arguing that medieval people never drank water. But they did drink beer in quantities that would be untenable today. The author is also muddling points - medieval people didn't have to understand microbiology to know that beer was safer to drink. And it was! Not only would the brewer have access to better water, it would be boiled as part of the process. (And aromatics like hops acted as mild antiseptics - the beer would be safe to drink for as long as it tasted well). To review: - It was tasty - It was convenient - People you knew who drink it had the trots less often - It was cheap enough - It made you feel good during long days of arduous labor - There was no social stigma so long as you don't get drunk And it makes plenty of reason that brewers would be incentivised to keep ABV low so people could drink it all day if they could. Even going into the US prohibition, I think people would be astonished by how much the typical worker drank (usually cider in the US). With workplaces themselves providing it by the truckload. Yes, people drank water. But (especially in urban settings) they drank A LOT of low abv drinks.
- fuzztester 2y ago>With workplaces themselves providing it by the truckload. Also probably doing that to keep them working there longer too.
- legitster 2y agoStill a tradition in some parts of the world! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kvass_barrel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kvass_barrel
- schmidt_fifty 2y ago[dead]
- card_zero 2y agoYou're just shoehorning in the assumption that people had diarrhea a lot, because that's the trope about medieval Europe. But if everybody lives in a well-established traditional way (and there's no current war or plague in the area) then they will also know by tradition the springs, streams and wells that yield clean water. In Georgian times, around 1800, coal-based industry gets under way, there's a population explosion, and many cities have properly horrific slums, latrine courtyards ankle deep, families living with pigs in wet cellars, graveyards overflowing ex-human slurry into the street. This is also when we invent bottled water, and if you can't get that, beer is a good option for safety reasons. But in calmer medieval times, avoiding the local water can't have been so crucial, because the locals probably knew where to get the clean-ish stuff (however harmlessly brown or wriggling).
- schmidt_fifty 2y ago> Again, this was not a disease control issue, as there was no notion of separating wastewater from spring water for health reasons — it was simply a matter of taste. The idea that "there was no notion of separating wastewater from spring water for health reasons" is complete bullshit. The dirtier the water, the more need to boil the water. Boiling the water would not have significantly improved the taste. Some streams were known to be unhealthy despite not appearing dirty and locals knew to boil this too. Springs and deep wells were so highly valued in part because these were known to be safe to drink without any processing. European records are full of people being prosecuted or just directly murdered for messing with spring or fountain water. The idea people would not connect the taste of the water (which was quite well observed) with health is not born out by records of the time. Laws on the books dictated where one might bathe, wash clothing, rinse unhealthy flesh, and especially where one might piss or shit, specifically concerned with causing widespread disease. In siena in 1262 a woman was flayed alive after she was accused of poisoning fountain water—not dirtying it, but specifically destroying its safety. The reason people drank beer is the same as today: it's tasty, it makes you feel good, you get some calories, and water is "boring" unless you're really thirsty. Plus it was "packaged" and ready to drink in town
- ggm 2y ago"12 years in a monastery" (1897) by Joseph McCabe mentions the astronomical amount of beer drunk by monks, as a matter of routine (albiet in the late 19th century) He was one, before he went over the wall and became a proto socialist free thinker philosopher.
- AnthonBerg 2y agoWent to take a look; There’s beauty in it. Thank you! Here, for others’ convenience: https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Twelve_Years_in_a_Monastery https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Twelve_Years_in_a_Monastery
- fuzztester 2y agoReminds me of Trappist monk beers, that I have read about, but not tried.
- namaria 2y agoI don't understand this type if historiography where "medieval" is an adjective used as if it refers to a very well defined time and place. Anything medieval can refer to up to a thousand years of history and several dozen polities.
- snowpid 2y agoyes i does say lots about the audience where we discuss mostly England as an example.
- coldtea 2y ago>As it happens, drinking water was commonplace throughout history. We have to remember that the notion that water could carry diseases is a fairly modern one No, it's anything but new. People in the past might not know about viruses and bacteria and such, but they very well knew about clean vs dirty water, the dangers of some animal corpse upstream, and many other such things... Ancient people had knowledge from experience of far more intricate subjects than "polluted water can kill you", without having to know the mechanisms involved.
- rabbits_2002 2y ago[flagged]
- haunter 2y agoAgreed. That’s why I started using flags more liberally.
- bananenpubs 2y ago[dead]
- frereubu 2y agoThis is a great podcast about how Victorian London built a huge sewer system to deal with the vast amount of human waste generated by one of the biggest cities in the world: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001gjcm https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001gjcm I was reminded of it by the mention of people who collected the waste from cess pits, which is also in the podcast - it was transported outside the city and used for fertiliser.
- vram22 2y agoOnly partly related (London), but reminds of that striking image called Gin Lane, by Hogarth. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Street_and_Gin_Lane https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Street_and_Gin_Lane
- rrr_oh_man 2y agoBourbon street, 10pm vs 2:30am
- larsga 2y agoThis article is right, but also misleading. Yes, people did drink water. But they preferred to drink beer, and basically they drank beer for thirst if they could. And they did this not just in the Middle Ages, but into the 20th century. I wrote [a blog post](https://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/433.html https://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/433.html) that goes into this in more detail.
- cardanome 2y agoYour blog posts doesn't discuss the medieval era at all though. You are strictly talking about modernity. The medieval period ends around 1500 AD. A time where the vast majority of people lived in small villages. This is when population density was very low and the industrialization hasn't happened yet. Cholera is a modern problem. Water pollution is a mostly modern problem. So yes, you are right that water safety was an huge issues in the modern era (end still is is in many regions of the world). Not sure about always preferring beer as I haven't looked deeper at the evidence but it is hell more plausible than for the medieval period.
- doingtheiroming 2y agoThere’s a line in one of the Aubury Maturin books, Clarissa Oaks when pumping the ship bilges, a sailor remarks, “she flows as clear and sweet as Hobson’s conduit”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson's_Conduit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson's_Conduit Fresh water was consumed in prodigious quantities in the Royal Navy, not least for watering down grog but also for extracting the salt from salted meats.
- pjlegato 2y agoOther way around -- grog wasn't so much diluted with water as the grog was applied TO the fresh water as an antiseptic. Fresh water on ships had typically been sealed inside a barrel for months or even years before it was consumed, growing all manner of unhealthy pathogens. Pre-germ theory people read this as "it smells and tastes bad," which is a pretty good first-order approximation of germ theory. When you cut that contaminated water with alcohol, that greatly reduces illnesses from drinking it, especially in those whose GI systems are already somewhat adapted to tolerate the pathogens. Strong spices in grog such as cloves also helped mask the taste of drinking years-old barrel water.
- schmidt_fifty 2y ago[dead]
- im3w1l 2y agoSo it sounds to me like they knew: 1. Various contiminants make water taste bad. 2. Bad tasting water is unhealthy. It's not a full theory of microbiology of course, but it's something.
- mattclarkdotnet 2y agoOK this one I do know about, as the school I went to in London was founded in 1619. The “poor scholars” who were the original pupils had a ration of 5 pints of ale per day - one with breakfast, two with lunch and two with dinner. This is all recorded in the accounts from the time. It was presumably very weak
- bluGill 2y agoCitation needed. Too much that sounds good but could just be cherry picking.it also seems like there should be better evidence in various records. of coures the claim they drank small beer alse needs citation.
- nuriri 2y ago[dead]
- nevinera 2y agoThese types of posts are .. well thought-out, and usually posted by someone with relevant education. But they are not reviewed documents or journal articles, and you can _tell_ when someone is mixing in a lot of their own educated guessing with the research they've done. Which is the case here. He probably wasn't intending it to be taken as authoritative source, but that's how most people will _read_ something like this after running into it on the front page of HN. And most of this is just.. guesswork.
- legitster 2y agoThe author is presenting a plausible enough theory without any evidence that it is actually more accurate than the actual historical texts. As one example, the author goes on and on about the importance of the conduits into London - but here's how actual documents from the time describe them: "A certain conduit was built in the midst of the City of London, so that the rich and middling persons therein might there have water for preparing their food, and the poor for their drink" Kind of an important bit of context to leave out!