Wheat

 Wheat is the single biggest food crop in the world today, and it was also the basis for the heart of the medieval diet, bread.  Planting wheat around the world requires clearing off other plants and trees, to be replaced by fields of food.  Now in 2022, the war in Ukraine is disrupting wheat growing, a real problem because Ukraine has been a major provider of wheat to third-world countries.  Wheat production has really expanded world-wide in the last two or three generations, due to modern fertilizers and improved hybrids and farming methods, but the danger of relying too much on one ubiquitous crop is dealing with its absence.

Wheat has been cultivated for close to 12,000 years, starting in the Middle East.  Without agriculture, you really cannot have cities (or civilization), because you need a reliable crop that will feed a lot of people without everyone having to go out and hunt and gather every couple of days, said hunting and gathering requiring that people be fairly widely spread out, so they don't exhaust local resources.

Medieval wheat was primarily winter wheat, planted in the fall, sprouting but then lying dormant through the winter, ready to start growing for real as soon as it warms up in the spring.  It would be harvested around July.  One can also plant wheat in the spring, but the most common spring-planted grains were oats, rye, and barley, barley primarily around the Mediterranean, rye and oats in more northerly climates.  You can make bread out of any of these, but it was uniformly agreed that it was inferior to wheat bread.  For one thing, those grains don't have as much gluten, meaning bread wouldn't rise nearly as well.

Farm work was thus spread out, some grain planted in the spring, wheat harvested in the summer, non-wheat grains harvested in early fall, wheat planted in late fall.  The three-field system of crop rotation, where one of the three fields lies fallow every year to theoretically regenerate itself, thus provided work spread over the months and a fall-back if there was a disastrous wheat harvest.

(People with ceoliac disease, intolerance to gluten, would have been in serious trouble in the Middle Ages.  There was no "gluten-free" aisle at the grocery store, and for that matter no grocery store.)

Wheat is derived from wild grasses, bred over the millennia to have more seed heads (which is why modern wheat needs a lot of fertilizer) and to have the seed heads not easily break away from the stem.  This makes it easier to harvest, whereas wild grasses have the seed heads break loose and disperse if the stalk is disturbed.  This is fine for wild grasses spreading themselves, but it makes for a difficult harvest.

Wheat thus had to be threshed and winnowed to get the seeds free of the stalks and hulls.  Threshing required beating it once in a barn, to break the seeds free, and winnowing, that is separating seeds from hulls.  On a windy day winnowing could be achieved by tossing the wheat and hulls in the air so the lighter chaff would blow away.

Because it needs no refrigeration, wheat could be easily stored.  The problem was keeping out mice and rats.  Medieval cities tried to stockpile grain against bad harvests.  With wheat, the grain, the food, is also the seed for next year's planting, so if there was a bad harvest there was always the unenviable choice of eating the grain now, to keep from starving, and then having little to plant, meaning starving next year.

Wheat stalks were valuable in the Middle Ages, because they were an excellent source of thatch for thatched roofs.  Modern wheat no longer has the very tall stalks it did then, because it has been deliberately bred for shorter stalks (to put more energy into the seeds instead of the stalk).

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

Mills

 Mills were the equivalent of medieval factories, places where machinery provided a lot of the hard work that made it possible for people to do more than they could have through their own physical labor.  Although there were some precursors in the ancient world, mills, essentially in the form they kept through the nineteenth century, are medieval inventions.  (Below is a picture of a nineteenth-century water mill.)  Big electricity-generating windmills and water mills ("hydro power") show that mills are still very important, even though the technology has changed.

The Romans had had water mills, but they treated them as toys; none of them were more than miniature little mechanical contraptions that looked cute when water ran through them.  Windmills  appear to have developed originally in central Asia and spread very rapidly across Europe in the twelfth century.  (Contrary to what you may have heard, windmills do not cause cancer.)

Windmills predominated where there was strong and steady wind.  Water mills could be set up on any rapidly running stream, or, as in the picture above, a race could take water from a stream and funnel it to a mill, with a big drop (fall) to power the wheel.  Medieval streams were thick with mills, and there were always quarrels about people damming streams (to create the big drop of water) and depriving people downstream of water.  Along the coast there were tide mills.

If you have ever visited a historic mill, you have probably been impressed by all the gears.  The wind or water drives a shaft around and around, and gears and ropes take that power off for useful purposes.  Because, I have discussed earlier, bread was the single biggest item in the medieval diet, grinding grain into flour was the most important function of a mill.  In ancient Rome, it would take a slave all day with a hand mill to grind enough flour for the household for that day.  With a mill, you could grind a 50 pound sack of grain into a 50 pound sack of flour in half an hour.  Big millstones ground against each other to break the hard grains of wheat into flour.

It's actually possible to tell if a community had adopted mill-ground flour, because a tiny amount of stone dust gets into the flour and wears down people's teeth, which is evident in skeletal remains.

Mills had many other uses.  They could power hammers, used both in forging and in "fulling," the beating of woolen cloth to make it thick and tight (like what we call boiled wool).  They could also be used for sawing lumber, again making the work much easier for humans; we still speak of sawmills.  With all the ropes and gears mills could be dangerous places, but the miller was a highly revered member of the community.  Some lords and monasteries insisted that the local inhabitants grind their grain only in their mills (for a fee of course), to make back the substantial expense of building one.

As Americans moved west in the nineteenth century, one of the first things to be established in a new community was a mill.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

Read more about medieval food and technology in my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms. Also available in paperback!

Medieval bread

As I noted in an earlier post, the basis of the medieval diet for both peasants and aristocrats was bread.  Low carb, gluten free, and "paleo" diets would have seemed completely bizarre.  I guess people with celiac disease, full-blown gluten allergy, would have been in serious trouble in the Middle Ages.

Ideally bread was made from wheat, but rye and barley were also used, especially in more northern climates where wheat did not grow as well.  Medieval wheat was "winter wheat," planted in late fall, so it would grow very slowly over the winter and then quickly in the spring, being ready to harvest in early summer.  Rye and barley, on the other hand, are planted in the spring and harvested in the fall, so they could supplement a poor wheat harvest.

Wheat, and other similar grassy grains, produces a seed head which is both the grain we eat and the seed for next year.  The medieval farmer always hoped to get a lot more grains of wheat back than what he planted.  In modern agriculture, the ratio is generally 20 to 1 or better, grains harvested to seeds planted.  The return for medieval farmers, without modern fertilizers or specially developed strains, was much worse. They especially feared getting down to a ratio of 2:1.  With a 2:1 ratio, one harvested two grains for every one planted.  That meant you ate half the crop and saved the rest for seed for next year.  Probably half the crop wasn't enough food to last all year.  Then you ate some of the seed, meaning not enough to plant for next year.  Starve now, or starve next year.

Wheat had to be threshed, that is beaten, to get the seeds off the stems, then the "wheat was separated from the chaff" (people in Biblical times had the same issues).  Preferably one's bread didn't end up with bits of stem or seed coating.  However, the wheat germ was not removed, as in modern white flour.  What medieval people called white bread was all-wheat (as opposed to partly rye or barley), with no bits of chaff left in to make it more filling (but less nutritious).

There was a thirteenth-century story of someone asking to become a monk.  As part of the process of joining the monastery, he was asked why he sought the monastic life, with the expected answer something like, "To honor God and atone for my sins."  But he answered, "I want white bread and plenty of it!"  (Monks kept the chaff out of their bread.)

Wheat had to be ground into flour before it could be baked into bread.  Once wind and water mills replaced the hand mills that had been used under the Roman Empire, a big sack of grain could be quickly and efficiently made into flour.  Bread had to baked every day, because (like bread in modern France) it would stale very quickly.  It was all sour dough bread, because there were no handy little foil packets of yeast.  The ingredients were just flour, water, and a little salt.

People could bake their own bread, but most villages had a bakehouse, where one could buy one's bread.  Indeed, bread was the one food that peasants would regularly buy rather than produce themselves.  (They could sell their flour to the baker.)  The bakehouse and the brewhouse, where beer was brewed, were often run as a combo, by a husband and wife team.  He would bake, she would brew.

© C. Dale Brittain 2016

Read more about medieval food and so much in my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.