"""
They wore the tall, pointy hats so that their customers could see them in the crowded marketplace. They transported their brew in cauldrons. And those who sold their beer out of stores had cats not as demon familiars, but to keep mice away from the grain. Some argue that iconography we associate with witches, from the pointy hat to the cauldron, originated from women working as master brewers.
"""
It's probably a mix of sources. Famously, Goya's Witches Flight (0) shows the three witches wearing the same hat decorated with flames that Inquisitors forced their victims to wear (1) (2) (the flames showing they were to be burned for not repenting).
I find these "believe it or not, women used to do stuff" articles weird. Women still do stuff. Why is it surprising that they used to do stuff too?
The article starts with "As the old sexist saw goes, “Beer is a man’s drink.”" Who even says that? I honestly have never met a single person who would say that. I even got laid at a beer festival once. Is the author perhaps betraying their own preconceptions?
The mindset seems to result from careerism: that people define themselves according to the interesting and publicly recognized work that they do. In reality I suspect that people simply had no choice but to work according to their status and ability. It's just labor and there was plenty of it to go around. Why do we have to romanticize it?
The link makes the claim that only small ale was drunk in medieval times because water was considered unhealthy, but I thought that was an urban myth?
From the depiction of the home as the woman’s sphere in medieval Northern European literature, it isn’t surprising that brewing was women’s work along with cooking in general.
> it isn’t surprising that brewing was women’s work along with cooking in general.
What's interesting here is precisely that brewing beer was a domestic job (and therefore women's work), in a way that baking bread, for example, was not.
> most villages depended on local bakers to prepare bread ... Most households alternated between making their own ale and buying from and selling to neighbors
From my understanding, ovens were often large communal or commercial ovens in the middle ages and renaissance periods. The poor wouldn't have had an oven in their home.
Very much so. Most homes would have had either a fire pit or a hearth. It was too resource intensive to design something just for cooking when you could also use it for heat, light, and warding off bugs.
> in a way that baking bread, for example, was not.
This probably just comes down to availability of equipment. Bread making in the home has been common in places like England and India for a long time. In places like Austria and France the preference is for bread that is best from special ovens that people don't have at home, but even there people would make things like brioche at home.
No idea what the concensus is, but it also doesn't make sense that everyone drank beer instead of water. Young children almost certainly didn't drink beer. And I expect it to have been out of reach for large parts of the population: cost and availability of ingredients.
AIUI consensus is that people did drink water but also quite a lot of beer.
"Young children almost certainly didn't drink beer." - wanna bet?
> In his A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education, in Boarding Schools published 1797, writer Erasmus Darwin agreed that "For the drink of the more robust children water is preferable, and for the weaker ones, small beer ..."
To be honest if you are unaware of the bad effects of beer or how addiction works in general, it seems like a thing that you would get so easily addicted to.
If I had a different knowledge set and easy access to beer, perhaps I would just drink it daily.
Without water I imagine there are going to be massive hangovers though.
Common beers back then were very different from today's beer. Beer was more of a liquid meal, with lots of calories and about half the alcohol content of a Coors Light.
Yes, this is called Small Beer or Table Beer in Belgium. It goes as low as 1% and was very normal in schools and at homes before clean water was a common thing.
It still is a very popular beer to drink while you eat but children don't consume it anymore. My father did tell me that when he was younger (1970-1980) they still drank it at the table in his school.
I don't know when the rules changed but when I was a child in England in the sixties anything less than 2% could be sold to anyone, it wasn't regarded as properly alcoholic. The brand I remember is Top Deck Shandy, half and half lemonade and light beer.
I specifically said small beer, and that is something that has been commonly served to children in various places even into modern times. Your claim that beer was too costly also seems to be based on how beer is made and sold today: back then, beer was made without hops, and grain was available to medieval peasants because they were growing it themselves. A sort of beer was drunk by the working classes in Ancient Egypt, it has never been an elite drink.
Many people don’t realize that yeast leavened bread is about 1% alcohol and as high as 2%. Obviously we let children eat it. Why would small beer at the same percentage be a problem?
Obviously not. Next time state your definitions when you redefine basic terms from normal use. Or just refrain from the discussion when you don't want a constructive dialog.
I assume the GP was chuckling at how the OP offered two authoritative (well, not really) links to support a claim in my top-level post, but then went on to make an erroneous claim himself.
No not at all. Its is true and well documented claim that people didn't drink alcohol at all times instead of water. The links and what he is claiming is not overlapping.
My parents definitely offered me alcohol when I was a child. The hard alcohol was mostly to show me how it burns the throat and not to try it, while beer was bitter but okay for a sip or two to feel grownup. Alcohol also had a medicinal use in the family, though I'm not sure about the medicinal effect.
After I was 14 and more, alcohol was introduced on more regular bases, but not with social pressure to drink, just was available as an option.
I had essentially the same experience. I'm 67 now. My grandmother used to give me a miniature of De Kuyper's Cherry Brandy for Christmas from when I was six or seven, I made it last until after New Year!
> “Ale was virtually the sole liquid consumed by medieval peasants,” writes Judith M. Bennett in a chapter in the edited volume, Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe. “Water was considered to be unhealthy, [so] each household required a large and steady supply of this perishable item.”
This myth again? You don't even need to know medieval history to figure out it is bullshit.
Think about it logically, you can not brew bear from water that is contaminated in the first place. Garbage in garbage out. If you have a safe water source, well just drink water. Also, we are talking about medieval beer with maybe 2 percent alcohol, how the hell is that going to help? That percentage is way too low to do any good.
Obviously people were mostly drinking water. I mean think of all the calories, the logistics and all. It is true though that households would brew their own bear for consumption. Export of bear would develop in the late medieval period. It is also true, that weak 2% ale was consumed a lot, just not as much a water.
I guess people just really like the idea of medieval people being shitfaced all the time.
Edd: Also most places where not very densely populated, even cities were not compared to modern time. So while water safety was a concern, it was not as big as one might think.
Beer is boiled, which destroys most pathogens you might worry about. You could boil plain water and be safe, but that wasn't understood until later, see pasteurization.
A vessel inoculated with yeast and other brewing microorganisms will make it harder for other microorganisms to take root. They'll be outcompeted by the large existing population. So a barrel of beer will tend to stay healthier than a barrel of water.
If someone drank say, 100oz of 2% abv beer over the course of the day, that's equivalent to 2.5 pints of 5% beer - hardly enough to get shitfaced.
Edit in response to your edit: density was lower but technology to manage density was less sophisticated as well. Providing clean water to a large population is a hard problem that people have had to solve lots of ways, and brewing is one of the solutions. Later, an infected city water pump led to the invention of modern epidemiology.
> You could boil plain water and be safe, but that wasn't understood until later
Not sure that's true. We have evidence that ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans (and I assume other societies) understood that boiling water made it safer to drink. Basic sand/gravel filters.
Hypocrates for instance described a method of boiling water and then filtering it through a cloth to purify it and remove "bad smells".
To be fair even if you have no clue about bacteria it's not a particularly complex concept to understand. If for instance pre modern people truly drank beer because it was safer surely at some point one of them would've asked the question why is that the case?
In addition, if hops (or other herbs) were used in the boil, the acids from the hops (what gives beer its bitter bite), even in small amounts, would provide anti-bacterial benefits to the beer.
For the medieval period, it would have been other herbs. Hops are something of a later addition. I don't believe that they came into very widespread use until the reformation era.
And at about 0.5% ABV you digest the alcohol at about the rate you can drink it (assuming you drink it at anything below a "competitive" rate. Just like, as much as you'd drink socially, or with a meal, or for rehydration)
I don't think you're actually applying logic. Your priors make exactly no sense.
As others have pointed out - boiling contaminated water decontaminates it... beer involves boiling.
2% alcohol content is plenty to help slow bacterial growth, making it keep longer.
> I mean think of all the calories, the logistics and all
Ok let's do that. In the pre-modern eras, calories were the thing almost everyone was focused on. Famine was common (famine is when lots of people starve to death), so any way of getting calories was good. Beer is made of malt, that is sprouted grain that is then heated to dry and cook it. Sprouted grain doesn't keep - it either becomes a plant or rots. Using it for beer makes good use of calories that would otherwise go to waste. NO one was worried about getting fat (in fact if you were lucky enough to get fat, it was a benefit - you're more likely to survie the next famine).
> Obviously people were mostly drinking water... It is also true, that weak 2% ale was consumed a lot, just not as much a water.
This is not obvious at all - do you have any good sources besides weak logic based on false assumptions?
The idea that people only drank beer because it was safe and water wasn't is a myth, yes.
The idea that premodern and early modern people considered water unsafe is not, though. You can see this view all over the european primary record, and it's very clear that in many areas and for much of premodern history people preferred fermented drinks when they had access to the choice.
> Think about it logically, you can not brew bear from water that is contaminated in the first place.
This is also not strictly true, depending on what sort of contamination you're talking about. Heavy metal or contemporary chemical contamination won't be affected by the brewing process, but it will kill parasites for example. Bacterial contamination varies by the specifics and degree, but you may be better off having brewed it.
Securing clean springs and wells was a high priority for people all through history. Brewing is part of a range of techniques and technologies that were used to varying extents when they weren't able to.
"They drank beer instead of water because it was safe" is a myth but also so is "water was safe and there was no advantage to drinking beer."
No one is saying water was always safe, you are making a straw man so you can do a both sides thing.
People where obviously worried about water safety, yes. Fermented drinks are not guaranteed to be safe though. The 2% isn't going to do much.
The brewing process helps a bit but you you can just boil water after all.
The question is not whether water safety was a concern, it certainly was but whether people brew beer MAINLY for safety reasons. I think it is safe(!) to assume they brew beer because they liked drinking bear.
2% of what? If you mean alcohol, that is not how fermentation works for preserving food/drinks.
Using beneficial/harmless cultures to outcompete harmful microorganisms, which is how fermentation is used to preserve food/drinks, has been the main way of preserving food across cultures. Especially before fridge, canning and and other modern industrial techniques have been possible. Yeah I do not get the "beer instead of water" thing, but I can imagine there could be a lot of situations that beer could be important to have as a water source, like traveling distances.
No, not before Louis Pasteur. It's likely that people knew brewed beverages were safer but didn't know why, and didn't know they could skip most of the brewing process and simply boil the water.
They didn't knew about bacteria and wouldn't have had the theory to explain why it would help.
Boiling water wasn't really that necessary because the medieval period was sparsely populated and people had access to safe water sources. I am sure they would have figured out boiling water if their survival dependent on it.
We know that People generally knew about basic hygiene and applied it even if they lacked modern theory.
> They didn't knew about bacteria and wouldn't have had the theory to explain why it would help.
That didn't stop say, the sterilization effects of silver from being widely known and spread across myths.
Fewer people got sick when they drank from silver cups and silver stuff. They didn't know a thing about bacteria, but enough people drinking from enough different cups and suddenly a pattern emerges that forms the basis of a myth or legend.
> We know that People generally knew about basic hygiene and applied it even if they lacked modern theory.
Soap and its effects to destroy common pathogens (viruses and bacteria) wasn't known... but "Hygiene" became a thing as early as 400BC Roman periods because of similar patterns.
The theories we have today summarize centuries or millennia of collective experience. Not the other way around. We don't need to understand bacteria to discover how useful soap, boiling, or silver/anti-bacterial surfaces are. Instead, we use our knowledge of "silver prevents sickness", "soap prevents sickness", and "boiling prevents sickness" to help us discover a grand theory of microorganisms / bacteria.
Hippocrates did suggest this approach of purifying water so at least educated doctors would've have certainly known that. Also it's not exactly rocket science most people would have probably understood that to some extent. At least that boiling removes "bad" smells and improves the taste (that's what Hippocrates said at least, not how effective that is).
> Think about it logically, you can not brew bear from water that is contaminated in the first place.
My assumption is that the contamination is biological, which would be fixed by the long boil required in brewing. Even with resistance to the local microflora, water was probably more likely to cause disease than a boiled derivative like beer.
> I guess people just really like the idea of medieval people being shitfaced all the time.
I've heard that the beer made then, maybe especially for consumption by peasants, had a low ABV by today's standards. High alcohol beer is a waste of grain if the goal is a slightly-more-antiseptic-than-water beverage.
> I've heard that the beer made then, maybe especially for consumption by peasants, had a low ABV by today's standards. High alcohol beer is a waste of grain if the goal is a slightly-more-antiseptic-than-water beverage.
You might want to reread what I wrote, yes it was only like 2 percent. The problem is, how anti-septic is 2% beer? It is not. It doesn't really help in any meaningful way.
If you want stable beer that you can transport over longer distances you want higher alcohol concentration but then again higher alcohol concentration isn't exactly great for keeping people hydrated.
Well if alcohol itself is irrelevant why did they not simply boil the water before drinking it without making a beer from it?
I think the fact that people just like to drink beer is a much better explanation of why did they drink so much of it. The "safer to drink" part was secondary at best.
Hypocrates specifically recommended doctors to boil and filter water before giving to patients to drink.
Ancient Egytpians, Indians and Romans understood that boiling makes water safer to drink as well (Galen even suggested using boiling water to sterilize surgical instruments).
IMHO it makes perfect sense in the context of the miasma theory (if people thought that "bad smells" were the main vector spreading diseases and illnesses and boiling water removes bad smells, improves taste etc. then it also must have made it safer to drink).
>I guess people just really like the idea of medieval people being shitfaced all the time.
Dunno about medieval people being shitfaced, but it probably followed from the fact that in early America drinking was absolutely a problem. The Whiskey Tax was heavily backed by religious reformers as a de facto 'sin tax' cause there was so much drinking going on. The Prohibition/Temperance movement was about a hundred years old when it finally won legal prohibition in 1920.
These weren't just neurotic Christian fundamentalists being annoying, average people were drinking around three and a half gallons of alcohol a year, and we're talking whiskey and rum here.[0]
Is drinking 3.5 gallons of whiskey or rum per year that big of a societal problem? That's only a little more than 1 oz per day. If someone is drinking to the point of disfunction I would expect their consumption to be a great deal more than that.
First, it's amongst all people - so toddlers, kids and non- drinkers too. Second, it's pure alcohol count. Not 3,5 gallons of whisky, but so much whisky that there was 3,5 gallons of pure alcohol in it.
This isn't just wrong because of the beer thing, but people also drank a variety of herbal teas and other drinks, the most popular being a boiled barley drink. Just like now people prefer drinking something with more flavor then water.
A significant portion of the examples in that link follow the form:
This person is so holy that they drink water.
The very fact that it was a sign of unusual holiness to drink water seems to undermine the point. It's like saying "in the 2020s people mostly didn't use cell phones. Look at this passage about a group called the Amish, see what I mean?".
The article misses that in the period, ale and beer were different drinks. Ale was made with herbs. Hops, and the word beer, came later.
The 14th century is about when hops and word beer starting taking over in England. I can't find evidence but I wouldn't be surprised if beer was brewed by men.
I had a little wife, the prettiest ever seen,
She washed all the dishes and kept the house clean.
She went to the mill to fetch me some flour,
She brought it home in less than an hour.
She baked me my bread, she brewed me my beer,
She sat by the fire and made good cheer.
I had a little wife, and I am in jail. She didn't know how to cook, nor did any chores. She went to the nail salon, and brought a new fellow. She took my house, I drank in sorrow.
So—beer was certainly the primary beverage, but people still drank water without boiling it (which is, after all, rather time and energy consuming and requires a ready fire).
I have ready links to provide better context, and this is literally the most hated question on /r/AskHistorians, so I'm sure you could get rapid replies for follow-up questions. It's an extremely useful resource to tap into to get a professional historian with training in historiography to weigh in on arbitrary questions.
""" They wore the tall, pointy hats so that their customers could see them in the crowded marketplace. They transported their brew in cauldrons. And those who sold their beer out of stores had cats not as demon familiars, but to keep mice away from the grain. Some argue that iconography we associate with witches, from the pointy hat to the cauldron, originated from women working as master brewers. """
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/women-used-dominate-b...