I 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.
> Yes, people drank water. But (especially in urban settings) they drank A LOT of low abv drinks.
The vast majority of people in the medieval period did NOT live in cities.
Furthermore the cities that did exists where way less densely populated and would more look like bigger villages to the modern eye.
It is the modern world with it's industrialization and high population density that has the problem of getting safe fresh water. People have images of Victorian London in their head not realizing that is way, way past the medieval era and way into our modern era.
The vast majority of people in the medieval period had access to safe drinking water. They also probably met most of their hydration needs from directly consuming safe water sources. While it was common to brew your own beer and people did so a lot, I think the economics required for everyone to be able to consume multiple liters of beer every day would have been a bit too much.
As for did medieval people prefer drinking beer when given the choice? Many people today would rather drink soft-drinks or a beer even when having access to perfectly safe tab water. So I agree that might be more plausible.
While cities were smaller, I think people forget the inverse, which is that rural areas were much more densely populated. The farms were very small, required lots of labor, and were always close to the manor of a lord or parish. Which almost invariably had a bakery, brewery, and a well present. These services were very convenient to the average peasant, and I was surprised to learn how few medieval homes even had a hearth or oven for baking.
Even in the preindustrial days, you could not just grab water from any old surface stream and drink it raw without some risk (as any avid hiker could tell you). Even the most crystal clear stream will have some sort of wild animal refuse in it that could leave you sick for days.
We know that early settlers in America basically refused to drink the local water except when forced. Even going back to the Roman period, where they were obsessive about fresh water, even then the average peasant might be drinking posca (vinegar water) all day instead of water. Roman troops would make and haul the stuff around with them rather than risk local water on the march. So I think it would be weird to assume there was a middle medieval period where the water was always pristine and everyone drank it.
> Many people today would rather drink soft-drinks or a beer even when having access to perfectly safe tab water.
I mean, if you went to a jobsite today, I would not be shocked if less than a third of what people drink during the course of the day is tap water. But if I may posit something - the average person's distaste for drinking plain water is somewhat universal across time and cultures and might very well be a human adaptation.
> Roman troops would make and haul the stuff around with them rather than risk local water on the march.
it’s more than this: posca or sekanjibin or switchel or any of the other similar vinegar drinks are a bit like savory gatorade: you will preferentially choose them when exerted and they’re available, they’re better regardless of sanitation.
> Even the most crystal clear stream will have some sort of wild animal refuse in it that could leave you sick for days.
When you are local never ever moving out of place you do know what is upstream or in well. This "had no idea cows are up there" thing is modern hiker problem.
> the average person's distaste for drinking plain water is somewhat universal across time and cultures and might very well be a human adaptation.
There is absolutely nothing universal about that. Instead, drinking water seems to be universal accross cultures.
Having access to fresh water is not the same as saying any puddle of water was 100% safe.
You bring up traveling when the vast majority of people did not travel. At all. Maybe to the next market if we talk later medieval period but that was it really. (I do use bottled water when traveling because I am only used to the local bacteria and it is easy to get sick at first when going to a new country.)
As you write most settlements especially early one were very self-sufficient. So they would have some source of water that could be safely consumed. Remember, even for beer brewing you need to start with clean water. Sure heating it up helps with bacteria but you can't brew beer with dirty swamp water. It will be gross.
The whole antisemitic conspiracy theory of Jews poisoning the well only works if people were actually drinking from the well. Not that antisemitism needs to be very rational but it shows that people had a considered safe source of water they regularly drank from.
> But if I may posit something - the average person's distaste for drinking plain water is somewhat universal across time and cultures and might very well be a human adaptation.
I don't think hunter-gatherer societies where big on beer brewing. The whole building settlements thing is a very recent innovation in evolutionary terms so probably not enough time has passed for such a trait to become relevant.
Plus I mean our brains like sugar and carbohydrates very much, we quickly learn to crave alcohol and coffee. We can already explain why people might drink something else than plain water.
If we both went into a time machine, and had to make the choice, I think both of us would still end up drinking the small-beer over even the most pristine local water.
But regardless, this is still not a strong argument that we need to "debunk" the history as the original author is trying to do. We have written primary sources from the dawn of writing until the modern temperance movements in the 1800s that all basically say the same thing - humans in any agricultural society ended up supplying the majority of their hydration from prepared sources of water. Access to clean water was about bathing, preparing food or drink, and the occasional drink of water.
Regardless of how safe their water was or was not to drink, medieval people still ended up drinking small-beer a majority of the time if they could help it.
> The whole antisemitic conspiracy theory of Jews poisoning the well only works if people were actually drinking from the well.
Not really. Independent of people drinking directly from the well:
* animals are watered by getting the water from the well.
* food is prepared with water from the well
* ale is prepared with water from the well
and so on. All of these things would subsequently be poisoned if the well was poisoned. They needed a safe source of water, but that does not imply that they drank it directly.
You'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).
> they will also know by tradition the springs, streams and wells that yield clean water
I once drank water from a mountain stream and spent a week sick from some sort of phage associated with beavers.
As any avid hiker can tell you, even crystal clear, pristine surface waters still run the risk of making you sick. Even without the need of human intervention.
Almost every human culture has some traditional drink that involves something boiled. It's weird to assume Europeans were magically different.
Giardiasis is often referred to as the "beaver fever" because the organism completes part of its lifecycle in mammals and beavers crap wherever they eat, which is in the water.
People have diarrhoea a lot today, in developed countries with stable access to clean water and food. If anything, people massively underestimate the amount of diarrhoea premodern living involved.
Acquired immunity is a thing. If you always drink from the same river, you are more likely to become immune to its pathogens. That’s why travellers to places with poorer sanitation often get sick eating food that is fine for the locals.
I would suggest your personal experience is not representative of what billions of people are living e.g. in Nigeria and most of tropical Africa and India.
What a tedious over-inflation of personal significance. It's utterly depressing that literate people such as yourself could be so unimaginative as to presume the representative significance of your own experience.
Although they're less common among the insufferably narcissistic rich, diarrhoeal diseases account for 1.5 million deaths, annually ranking them as the 8th leading cause of death globally.[0]
Your personal experience must invalidate large parts of the diarrhea filled lives many others before you have lived and died. Thanks for chiming in, wise one.
Natural springs are rare, while streams and rivers are often muddy, seasonal and/or contaminated by domestic animals and wildlife. There's a reason wells were very common.
Well water is not safe either. It's exposed to the atmosphere, so to dust, birds (both s(h)itting and flying), and insects, etc.
Depending on the shape and structure of the well, rats can crawl inside, and lizards, and cockroaches and other insects can crawl in anyway, and poop there. and we all know about rats as a vector of many serious diseases, like the plague in said mediaeval times.
Yep, thought of that as soon as I read the parent and GP comments.
And I have also thought of the same point on my own before.
And it's not just:
>could give you tons of diarrhea due to some animals taking a dump nearby.
But also: from all the way upstream (from aquatic animal life), and from the upstream watersheds (from terrestrial animal life), which, all together, is a shit-ton of dumps, pun not intended.
That was the original purpose. It's a way of preserving grain. Food was a constant struggle for most, and they required every single scrap that they could lay their hands on.
Sounds a lot like the role coca cola plays today, with tourists drinking it in preference to water they don't know as well as just wide drinking of it because it's tastier than water.
> 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.
Still true in modern times. I'm not even sure it's possible to get drunk on Bud Light. Light rice beers have always been clearly intended to be drunk all day. I worked at a convenience store in a trashy neighborhood in the 90s, and the same people who had just bought a case a few hours ago would come back in for the next case, dead sober.
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.