Winter in the Middle Ages

 We in the west with good furnaces probably don't appreciate how lucky we are.  It's cold outside, but who cares?  Set the thermostat to a pleasant springtime temperature, the furnace does its thing, and we're comfy warm (this assumes your furnace is working right).  This was of course not the case in the Middle Ages (or for that matter much of the twentieth century, when furnaces were coal-fired and you had to go down to the basement and shovel).

Humans evolved in the nice warm climate of Africa.  But humans like to go places and find new things, so before you know it, off some of them went, heading north.  Neanderthals' skin pigment decided this was stupid, since there was after all an ice age going on, and headed home to Africa, but the Neanderthals stayed.  Hide in caves and hunt woolly mammoths across the glacier, that's the life.  Before too long, Cro-magnons joined them in Europe.  And winter has been a challenge to Caucasians ever since.

For medieval people, the twin challenges were staying warm and having enough to eat.  Staying warm required fire, which meant burning wood, as they did not have gas or oil (and had not started mining coal).  As I have discussed previously, fireplaces really only appeared in the thirteenth century, as a luxury for the rich, so people before then, and lower status people throughout the Middle Ages, would have open fires in the middle of the room.  It's more efficient, because you don't have heat escaping up the chimney, but it's bad for your lungs.

Besides fire, the best way to stay warm is to snuggle up to other mammals.  Medieval peasants, living close to everybody in their family, and with a heat-producing cow right next door, would have been better off than those in a big, cold, drafty castle.  Let's just say that stone is not a good insulator.  Then everybody would have wanted furs and wool blankets to preserve the warmth.

To stay warm of course requires spending minimal time outside.  Fortunately there weren't many farm chores to be done in the winter.  On the other hand, there wasn't a whole lot to do inside either.  Images of winter done in the Middle Ages mostly show people sitting by the fire.  Christmas provided a nice festive high-point, even though it came in what we would call January (those pesky leap years mess up a calendar), as I previously discussed.

The other big challenge was having enough food.  Castles and peasant cottages alike would try to put aside enough food to last the winter, because if there weren't enough beans and wheat and cheese and root vegetables and smoked meat or salted fish in the larder, one would be awfully hungry come spring.  (Try to guess where the word larder comes from....)  The image above is a twelfth-century representation of November, the period in which one essentially stored up fat like a bear getting ready for hibernation (that's what the well-dressed gentleman  is doing, looks like he has a fish and a big chunk of bread).

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on medieval life, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.