Sex and Alcohol in Medieval Times: A Look into the Pleasures of the Middle Ages

Play­ing video games, road-trip­ping across Amer­i­ca, binge-lis­ten­ing to pod­casts, chat­ting with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence: these are a few of our mod­ern plea­sures not just unknown to, but unimag­in­able by, human­i­ty in the Mid­dle Ages. Yet medieval peo­ple were, after all, peo­ple, and as Ter­ence put it more than a mil­len­ni­um before their time, humani nil a me alienum puto. For us mod­erns, it’s a com­mon blun­der to regard dis­tant eras through the lens of our own stan­dards and expec­ta­tions, which pre­vents us from tru­ly under­stand­ing how our lis­ten­ers lived and thought. But per­haps we can begin from a con­sid­er­able patch of com­mon ground: medievals, too, liked their sex and booze.

Such are the points empha­sized by medieval his­to­ri­an Eleanor Jane­ga in these episodes of His­to­ry Hit, which exam­ine the more-than-age-old enjoy­ments in which peo­ple indulged between antiq­ui­ty and moder­ni­ty. Our received image of Europe in the Mid­dle Ages may be one of Church-dom­i­nat­ed, dankly plea­sure-free soci­eties, but Jane­ga and his­to­ri­an of sex­u­al­i­ty Kate Lis­ter point out that, strict though the reli­gious dic­tates may have been about sex­u­al activ­i­ty and oth­er mat­ters besides, many sim­ply ignored them. (And though they may have lacked access to dai­ly hot show­ers, we can rest assured that they were much more con­cerned with how they smelled than we might imag­ine.) In any case, repro­duc­tion was one thing, and court­ly love — or indeed com­mer­cial love — quite anoth­er.

As Bil­ly Crys­tal famous­ly joked, “Women need a rea­son to have sex. Men just need a place.” In the Mid­dle Ages, the place was often a prob­lem for women as well as men, but also for nobles as well as com­mon­ers (though some roy­al­ty did enjoy the ben­e­fit of a cur­tain around their four-poster bed, which afford­ed at least the illu­sion of pri­va­cy). It seems to have been much eas­i­er to find some­where to drink, accord­ing to Jane­ga’s episode about alco­hol. In it, she vis­its a fine exam­ple of “the hum­ble pub,” where even medieval Brits would go to drink their ale, beer not yet hav­ing been invent­ed — and to tell their sto­ries, a prac­tice that would become so deeply ingrained in the cul­ture as to pro­vide a for­mal foun­da­tion for the Can­ter­bury Tales. Even if Chaucer, as a pub-own­er inter­vie­wee reminds us, invent­ed Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture as we know it, we should bear in mind that sex hard­ly began with Wife of Bath.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How to Make Medieval Mead: A 13th Cen­tu­ry Recipe

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Medieval Tav­erns: Learn the His­to­ry of These Rough-and-Tum­ble Ances­tors of the Mod­ern Pub

Peo­ple in the Mid­dle Ages Slept Not Once But Twice Each Night: How This Lost Prac­tice Was Redis­cov­ered

What Sex Was Like in Medieval Times?: His­to­ri­ans Look at How Peo­ple Got It On in the Dark Ages

How Toi­lets Worked in Ancient Rome and Medieval Eng­land

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.