What It Was Like to Get a Meal at a Medieval Tavern

At least since The Can­ter­bury Tales, the set­ting of the medieval tav­ern has held out the promise of adven­ture. For their cus­tomer base dur­ing the actu­al Mid­dle Ages, how­ev­er, they had more util­i­tar­i­an virtues. “If you ever find your­self in the late medieval peri­od, and you are in need of food and drink, you’d bet­ter find your­self an inn, tav­ern, or ale­house,” says Tast­ing His­to­ry host Max Miller in the video above. The dif­fer­ences between them had to do with qual­i­ty: the tav­erns were nicer than the ale­hous­es, and the inns were nicer than the tav­erns, hav­ing begun as full-ser­vice estab­lish­ments where cus­tomers could stay the night.

As for what inn‑, tavern‑, or ale­house-goers would actu­al­ly con­sume, Miller men­tions that the local avail­abil­i­ty of ingre­di­ents would always be a fac­tor. “You might just get a veg­etable potage; in some places it would just be beans and cab­bage.”

Else­where, though, it could be “a fish stew, or some­thing with real­ly qual­i­ty meat in it.” For the recipe of the episode — this being a cook­ing show, after all — Miller choos­es a com­mon medieval meat stew called buke­nade or bok­nade. The actu­al instruc­tions he reads con­tain words reveal­ing of their time peri­od: the Bib­li­cal sound­ing smyte for cut, for instance, or eyroun, the Mid­dle Eng­lish term that ulti­mate­ly lost favor to eggs.

The cus­tomers of tav­erns would orig­i­nal­ly have drunk wine, which in Eng­land was import­ed from France at some expense. As they grew more pop­u­lar, these busi­ness­es diver­si­fied their menus, offer­ing “cider from apples and per­ry from pears,” as well as the pre­mi­um option of mead made with hon­ey. Ale­hous­es, as their name would sug­gest, began as pri­vate homes whose wives sold ale, at least the excess that the fam­i­ly itself could­n’t drink. How­ev­er infor­mal they sound, they were still sub­ject to the same reg­u­la­tions as oth­er drink­ing spots, and alewives found to be sell­ing an infe­ri­or prod­uct were sub­ject to the same kind of pub­lic humil­i­a­tions inflict­ed upon any medieval mis­cre­ant — the likes of whom we might rec­og­nize from any num­ber of the high-fan­ta­sy tales we read today.

Relat­ed con­tent:

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

Tast­ing His­to­ry: A Hit YouTube Series Shows How to Cook the Foods of Ancient Greece & Rome, Medieval Europe, and Oth­er Places & Peri­ods

How to Make Medieval Mead: A 13th Cen­tu­ry Recipe

How to Make Ancient Mesopotami­an Beer: See the 4,000-Year-Old Brew­ing Method Put to the Test

The Entire Man­u­script Col­lec­tion of Geof­frey Chaucer Gets Dig­i­tized: A New Archive Fea­tures 25,000 Images of The Can­ter­bury Tales & Oth­er Illus­trat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

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 the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.