How did a girl got married in the Middle Ages

Marriage was probably the worst thing that could happen to women in the past till at least two centuries ago. During the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, or even in the modern centuries, marriage was often a reason for crying and grief. Until early in the 20th century in some countries, there was a great sobbing coming from the bride on the day of her wedding.

Why was marriage so bad?
Because:

• ninety percent of the time, there was no love involved (the percent represents my personal estimate);
• because the husband basically owned the wife, and he had the right to apply coercions if he felt it was right; in other words, he could beat up his wife at will;
• because the wife couldn't get a divorce;
• because a woman had no right whatsoever unless she was rich and there was money involved.

Girl inspecting a Hope Chest. 1929, author Poul Friis Nybo.
U.S. public domain
from Wiki Commons

So, how did the couples get married?
First, marriages were based on interests and wealth. If a woman owned some land, cattle, or goods to put her above the peasant class, she could expect a husband with a similar status or wealth. But if she were Cinderella with a golden heart and a super-model overall appearance but was too poor, her parents may give her to an old, rich, and mean bachelor for a few bucks. That’s bad, to begin with!

Second, somebody else was choosing her husband, usually her parents, not because they didn’t love their daughter but because they followed the local traditions, like everybody. They would choose whatever was best for her and for them from among the suitors. Sometimes, midwives paired a bride with a groom and negotiated a contract. Those middle persons (or shall I call them marriage agents?) would come to the bride’s house to propose a groom, and then they would say what was expected of the bride to bring into the marriage. She’ll bring what is called a dowry, often composed of household items and personal pieces of clothing. Wealthy families would even give land, money, cattle, and other goods, including real estate, especially if they had little or no pretenders.


Third, once married, the woman stayed married. No way around it. If she couldn’t take it anymore, the only option was to run away, hoping that the mean husband wouldn’t find her and bring you back, in which case she not only endured increased beating from her significant other but public opprobrium as well. When a girl married, she had to move to her husband’s house. Usually, he was still living with his parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and other relatives. There was a whole new world, waiting for the new wife to start cooking, cleaning, working the farm, taking care of the kids, and performing other tasks that were assigned by her mother-in-law.

Maybe the worst thing was that the boy she liked was still in the village and married to someone else he didn’t care about.

So, was there a wedding?
When their kids got married, most wealthy families put up a public announcement and a small party not to celebrate the event but to show off their social status. Also, much thought was put into the gifts given to the newlyweds by their godparents or local lord protector. However, marriage into a poor family often went quiet, the event being reported only to the church, which kept a record, and to close relatives. In some cases, not even the church knew. It wasn’t until the Reformation that the church started to ask for a formal ceremony in front of a minister.

Then, after the wedding, what?
Simple! The woman took her dowry chest and moved away from home. From now on, she was on her own. If she made it through the marriage, as most couples did, then she did the same for her children as her parents had done for her. And the cycle started over again—and it didn’t stop until the 20th century!

Beer in the Middle Ages

This is the interior of an old inn in Bucharest, Romania.
It is called "Caru cu bere" which may translate
as "The Beer Wagon"
Photo by Baloo69 on Wikimedia Commons
 may translate as

Today, we think of beer mainly as an alcoholic beverage that’s consumed as a drink and gets you in trouble if you don’t know when to stop. But back in the day, people used beer for extended purposes and for other reasons then just entertaining around a football game.

Back in the day, they even made beer soup for the entire family; parents, grandparents, and kids were fed with beer soup.
Beer Soup Medieval Recipe (When beer was served for breakfast and beer bellies were well respected)  This is an article I wrote last summer for Hubpages. It is a short history of beer mainly with the purpose of introducing an old beer soup recipe.

Today I want to speak about beer as a drink in the Middle Ages.
Now, we may think that centuries ago, the best drink for most people was water. And this is partially true. But we do not know that a better drink for our ancestors was beer. And it was quite common among people of all conditions and ages.

One reason they consumed beer was that the water was often impure, posing a health hazard. In this regard, beer was far healthier. The fermentation process of the grains destroys most of the harmful bacteria and other germs that may contaminate the water, so beer was a far more hygienic drink.

Beer was brewed by everyone. The earliest people we know today that they made this drink were Egyptians, some 2000 years B.C. It is said that Greeks and Romans liked wine, though they, too, knew how to make beer.

In the Middle Ages, beer was made at home by housewives, sold at taverns to customers, and in large commercial enterprises for mass consumption. It was so popular that it became the drink of the “common man,” with the largest consumption in German Countries, the Low Countries, and England. It was even a method of payment for workers.

Beer also had its rules and regulations in cities and monasteries, where monks got beer at strict ratios. In London, they had to limit how much water you could draw from a well or spring. (Because they would dry out the wells). In fact, some historians have said that, for the countries mentioned above, there was one brewery for every one hundred people. In this condition, it is no wonder that the municipality of London found them dangerous for the public water supplies.

Beer was not the only drink, though. They also made wine, especially in Greece, Italy, Spain, France, and other eastern and central European countries. With all these drinks, medieval people did not give up on water. But this may be my next subject.

Country side diet in the Middle Ages (aprox. 1000 to 1300)

Medieval farmers, paying the "Urbar."

In the Middle Ages, royalty,  nobility, churches, and monasteries owned most of the European land. Very few other individuals owned a little piece of land, like chevaliers or craftsmen.  The rest of the people were considered lucky to have a little cottage to sleep overnight. They were serfs who belonged to a noble and were allowed to work the noble’s land. They would receive food in exchange for their work, which extended all day. That was their paycheck. The food they got was only enough to survive.

Today, it is very difficult to reconstruct the life of a peasant in the Middle Ages. If there are plenty of records for the upper classes, historians have to dig deep for information about the serfs. The documents that they can find are tax records, donations, wills, household inventories, or funeral banquets. One of these documents shows us that in 1268, in the domain of Beaumont-le-Roger, in France, a couple would receive one large and two smaller breads, 2.5 a gallon of wine, 250 gr. of meat or eggs, and a bushel of peas. And this pay was considered high.

These serfs were populating the rural areas, and they accounted for the majority of a country's (or kingdom's) population. Around the house, they were given a small piece of land, like a regular backyard today, where they were allowed to do whatever they wished.  Almost all families were growing some kind of animals and birds and cultivating a small garden.  They usually had pigs, goats, sheep, and a few chickens or geese. For everything they grew or raised, they had to pay taxes to the landlord in the form of produce they got: eggs from birds, meat, wool, and milk from animals.

Their diet was very dull compared to modern eating habits. The base of a daily meal was the bread. Often made by secondary cereals like barley, rye, spelt, or a mixture of grain. Today, we would consider this type of bread healthy compared with the withe bread, but long ago, it wasn’t as easy to process cereals (and deplete them of all the good nutrients). The bread of peasants was very dark in color. The lighter the color of bread, the higher the social status.

The other product in their daily diet was wine. Grapes are easy to grow in good soil, and the wine-making process is an old discovery. In the Middle Ages, having a winery was so common that everybody knew how to make wine. Remember, peasants got wine in exchange for their labor. If they owned a small piece of land, they would cultivate some grapes, too. This habit has survived to this day in Europe, and we can still find many family farms that cultivate grapes to make wine. So, wine was popular and was consumed by everybody in the family, like beer.

Meat was another important part of the Middle Ages diet. People got the meat either as pay for work or from their own small backyard. Sometimes, they hunted small game, but hunting big game was mostly a privilege of the nobles. The meat was consumed mostly fresh and sometimes was salted and smoked to be preserved over the winter. Again, the ratio of meat was very small, and most days, it was not even part of the meal. Along with meat, as a product of the sustainable small economy, cheese, milk, and eggs were used.

Vegetables were largely consumed. The little backyard of a cottage that belonged to a peasant had a garden where women, children, and elderly folks who lived in the house would cultivate legumes, greens, and vegetables such as cabbage, onion, garlic, turnips, a variety of beans and peas, leeks, spinach, squash, etc. From the wild, they would complement with mushrooms, asparagus, watercress, and a few aromatic herbs like basil, fennel, marjoram, or thyme.   

These folks in the Middle Ages were completely dependent on the weather for their survival. If the year was bad (too dry or too wet) and the cereal crop was compromised, then they could face famine. Between 1000 and 1300, four major food crises affected Europe (1005-6, 1032-33, 1195-97, 1224-26). However, the human species survived to this day and writes stories like this one on the Internet!