Jane Austen and the gentry

Jane Austen was not medieval.  Not even close.  She lived and wrote in the early nineteenth century, the century when, as I have discussed elsewhere, a whole lot of the things that we would now consider modern were invented, from electricity to indoor plumbing to factory goods to furnaces to telephones to being able to get quickly down the road by mechanical means (e.g. trains).

But the early nineteenth-century English world that Austen describes, at a time shortly before all these inventions took place, was, for the gentry (the well-to-do), sort of a half-way spot between aristocratic life in the Middle Ages and the modern age.

(If you haven't read any of Jane Austen's novels, I urge you to do so.  Start with Pride and Prejudice.  If they made you read it in high school I hope they told you that it is extremely funny.  Austen found all the silliness, greed, misplaced pride, and lack of education of many of her contemporaries hilarious.  If you have trouble getting into it--and you shouldn't--start by watching the BBC mini series with Colin Firth.)

Austen's gentry lived in large manor houses with servants, as the twelfth-century aristocracy would have lived.  They derived much of their income from agricultural rents and had their own "home farm" lands.  They valued music, art, and literature.  In this they were like medieval aristocrats.

Also like medieval aristocrats, they believed in love as a reason to get married, even though marrying someone from outside one's social class was unthinkable.  Austen's heroines still have their parents and guardians trying to arrange appropriate marriages for their children, as twelfth-century parents had done, though Austen suggests this often led to disaster.

We think of medieval aristocrats as living in castles, and indeed many did, but a castle was too expensive for everyone to have one, so a lot of them lived in large and elegant houses, like their nineteenth-century descendants.  The castles not destroyed during the early modern period would still have had wealthy owners in the nineteenth century, but the interiors had been transformed to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideas of comfort.

Manor houses were thick on the ground in Austen's day, but by a century later (the time of Downton Abbey if you watched that show), it became hard to maintain them, and many were turned into institutions (nursing homes, schools, hotels, etc.) or torn down.

Like aristocratic households of the twelfth century, the nineteenth-century gentry's big meal of the day, called dinner, was in what we would call late afternoon, around 4 or 5 o'clock.  But whereas medieval people would have been up at dawn, maybe had a quick bite then, worked till dinner, and then relaxed for a short period before going to bed (with or without an additional quick bite of supper), Austen's gentry liked to stay up late.  (See more here on medieval meals and meal-times.)

The nineteenth-century gentry breakfasted at 9 or 10, then had their "morning," which lasted until dinner time (ever wonder why a performance at 1 o'clock is called a matinée?).  After dinner there were many more hours of socializing, playing music, and the like, broken at some point by tea.  The after dinner period was called evening.  This is when one had parties and dancing, and many stayed up until midnight.  A party would be expected to include a light supper.

The gentry provided a lot of military leaders for England, as the medieval aristocracy had defined themselves militarily, but wars were far away, and most young men did not take part in military exercises.  There were still knights, or at least men called Sir, but unlike medieval knights they never charged into combat with long lances and swords at the ready; nineteenth-century knighthood was primarily a matter of status.

The gentry still learned to fence, and an insult might end in a challenge to a duel.  Duels were officially illegal but happened anyway, men without shields or armor fencing with foils (light weight swords) until one yielded or was killed or at least injured.  A medieval challenge to single combat in contrast would have required horses, lances, armor, shields, and serious swords, and nobody would have considered it illegal.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more about life of the aristocracy, fighting, knights, and so much more, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Medieval Meals and Mealtime

We now think of three meals a day as the norm.  Everybody knows about breakfast-lunch-dinner, though the fast food industry has tried to sneak a "fourth meal" in, pizza-time, coming around 9 or 10 at night.  And of course there's British tea-time, which can come in late afternoon and may substitute for the evening meal.

But this was not the medieval norm.  In the morning, you got up and got to work.  No cereal and orange juice, no coffee or tea, no bacon and eggs, no blueberry pancakes.  At most one would grab a piece of bread and a mug of beer.

Now "morning" of course began at sun-up, which was, by definition, 6am.  By our standards, 6am moved around a lot, coming very early in midsummer, late in midwinter.  But this did not worry medieval people.

One got the day's work in, then had "dinner" at "noon."  Now noon did not come in the middle of the day, as we think of it.  The word comes from the Latin "none," the ninth hour.  Because sun-up was, by definition, 6am, and sunset 6pm. the ninth hour was the middle of the afternoon, what we'd call 3pm at the equinox.  This was dinner time, the one big meal of the day.

(I do believe that our use of the term "noon" for midday is the result of trying to move dinner-time earlier and earlier.  Who wants to wait until 3pm?)

During the summer, of course, one might work what they'd call 9 hours and we'd call 12 hours or more before dinner time, so there might be a snack in there, but not a meal, at most another piece of bread and pull of beer.  Monks, whose daily work consisted of prayer and singing the psalms and reading and copying manuscripts, were warned against the "midday demon" of hunger, because they didn't get snacks, and the midday demon would make them think about food rather than what they were supposed to be thinking about.

Our word "dinner" comes from the French "déjeuner," to break one's fast, that is to end the long period (perhaps close to 24 hours) in which one had not eaten.  In American usage, the word "dinner" still means the big meal of the day (whether at 12 or 6), even if in the modern US we assume that we've broken our fast hours earlier with "breakfast." The French still have "déjeuner" at midday, preceded early in the morning by "petite déjeuner," the little breaking-of-fast, which while consisting of coffee and a roll rather than a mug of beer, is still pretty minimalist by American standards.

(In the last few decades, however, the French have been increasing the size of the "pj" to include juice, granola, yogurt, cheese, and ham, though still not anything hot beyond the coffee.)

After the big afternoon meal, medieval people would have their more relaxing part of the day.  The one big meal might hold them, or they might have a little soup for "supper" ("souper" in French) before turning in.

In the modern US, there are still familial and regional differences as to whether the evening meal should be called "supper" or "dinner," with some insisting that a "dinner" is a big noon meal, not an evening meal.  Mediterranean countries and France still tend to have the biggest meal of the day at midday.  The French refer to the evening meal as "dîner," which of course is from the same root as "déjeuner," but means something different.  In modern French, "souper" is what we'd call an evening snack, what one might have after an performance at the theatre before heading home.  In the twenty-first century, it is sometimes even pizza.

Click here and here for more on what medieval people ate and did not eat.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on medieval food, see also my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.