During the medieval period – however which way you slice the dates – religion was a large part of daily life. For some, such as monks, nuns, canons, and canonesses, religion WAS their life, as they lived, worked and prayed within the walls of a religious house. Their lives were dictated by various sets of rules based on religious books and the teachings of monastic leaders. Those under monasticism were told when to pray, how to pray, what to read, and even what to eat. These rules were not to be taken lightly, for if you broke one, you were not only letting down St Benedict, you were also potentially letting down God.

With that in mind, let us explore some of the rules, and some of the food, within religious houses during the medieval period and how they intersected. What did monks eat? Could nuns eat the same as monks? Who cooked if everyone was busy praying? How good was the beer?

According to Gerald of Wales visiting Christ Church, Canterbury in c. 1179, the beer in Kent was quite good, yet no one was drinking it due to the copious amounts of wine, cider, claret, must, mead, pyment, and mulberry wine already available on that Trinity Sunday. As an important guest of the Benedictine monastery, Gerald was seated at the high table in the refectory with the prior and senior monks and received the most sumptuous of the meal offerings; indeed, he lost count of the number of dishes served after plate sixteen.[1]

Gerald’s experience at Canterbury is not exactly what was envisioned by Saint Benedict when he wrote down his monastic rule in c. 530.[2] Saint Benedict was a proponent of monastic asceticism and wrote his Rule to express how he believed a monastery under an abbot (or abbess) should function. Within his 73 rules he placed great emphasis on obedience, moderation, and humility, while also dedicating specific chapters to the practicalities of managing a religious house. While chapters 31 and 35 are dedicated to the character of the cellarer and the rota of servers, respectively, chapters 39 and 40 are dedicated specifically to the moderation food and drink.[3] He states that monks should receive two cooked dishes per day, with an optional fruit or vegetable dish if seasonable, with a pound of bread and approximately half pint of wine per person. Those under his rule are to abstain entirely from eating the flesh of quadrupeds, except for the very old, very young, or infirm. Quadrupeds, defined as four-legged animals, usually mammals, included cows, pigs, goats, oxen, and generally any form of meat recognized today. Quadrupeds did not include some modern categories of meat, such as chicken, whale, and fish, and were acceptable for monastic consumption. Animal byproducts are not specifically mentioned by the Rule, and so eggs and cheese also feature heavily in the monastic diet.[4]

But why was meat such an outlaw figure in religious houses, and really, Christianity in general? Unlike Judaism and Islam, Christianity does not designate any food as “unclean” and is still fairly unbounded in terms of dietary restrictions. About 200 years after Christ, Tertullian, a Christian author from Carthage, wrote on ideas connecting flesh with carnal desire and lust. Saint Jerome, writing in the 4th century, agreed with Tertullian, connecting copious amounts of food and wine with sexual desire and lechery. This line of thought was only further punctuated by the influential writings of Isidore of Seville in the 6th century and continued to take hold in the minds of leaders during medieval Christianity’s primary incubation period.[5]

The idea of food asceticism did not begin with Tertullian, Jerome, or Isidore, however; it dates back to Jesus himself. Imitation, they say, is the finest form of flattery. In order to attempt to achieve the highest form of human sanctity, monastic men and women emulated Christ’s practices, specifically fasting, abstinence, and material asceticism. Food, though it is important to keep us alive, should not be a gluttonous indulgence. And meat, the rich, fatty food of the wealthy and of which we ourselves are made, should specifically be renounced for its lustful connections. Thus, monks, nuns, and those who followed the monastic life were primarily vegetarians, at least in the medieval sense of the word.

Abstaining from meat did not recuse religious houses from other fasting periods, both daily and at various points during the liturgical year. As mentioned before, the Benedictine Rule allows for two cooked meals a day, but it is further prescribed that these are only to be eaten at the sixth hour (noon) and the ninth hour (3pm) of the day, or just once at the ninth hour. Benedict does make allowances for necessary sustenance due to hard work at the discretion of the abbot, as long as excessive eating is avoided at all costs. These meals, as it is made clear by the hard work clause, are purely for bodily sustenance and not necessarily for enjoyment. The cooked dishes, called pulmentaria in the original Latin, can be translated as “pottage” and most likely consisted mainly of cereals, vegetables, and legumes such as beans, peas, chickpeas, and lentils, with perhaps the addition of cheeses, eggs, and/or fish for flavor and variety.[6] The image that comes to my mind is…gruel… fishy gruel, with a side of veg, and not necessarily very enjoyable. One pulmentum may differ from the other for variety, but the base of each would likely be the same. During the fasting seasons religious men and women would have to wait at least until the none hour to receive their meal. Truer ascetics could take their fasting further and “dry eat,” that is, subsist on bread, water and salt alone, or “raw eat” and subsist purely on uncooked food.[7]

Cheese, egg, and fish pottages did not prove to be popular with monastic houses that were growing in size, wealth, and popularity, and extra meals called “pittances” were introduced into the monastic diet, due to a rather lax interpretation of the Benedictine Rule. Dishes increasingly became more complex and varied, especially at houses that could afford to purchase food from marketplaces and independent sellers.[8] By the end of the twelfth century, there were even special rooms within monasteries called “misericords” for the consumption of meat by healthy monks in northern Europe.[9]Exemptions and pittances became more and more common for both monks and nuns, especially on feast days and internal monastic holidays such as birthdays and foundation days. Fasting was still observed, but now fasting was understood as abstinence from these “extras” and pittances. To make up for the lack of food on fasting days, sometimes superior food and wine was served.[10]

Some Christians were not pleased with the relaxing of the Benedictine Rule, and new monastic orders, such as the Cistercians, sprung up in opposition to what they saw as depraved behavior. However, even the Cistercians bent to meat eventually, though not on the level of the Benedictines.

Here we return to the at-least sixteen course meal enjoyed by probably inebriated Gerald of Wales in c. 1179. Eating at the prior’s table on a feast day, it is possible that he was served meat from a quadruped (gasp!), but isotope analysis of skeletons from the period suggested that fish and poultry were still the primary foods eaten in religious houses, and indeed lay populations.[11] Gerald’s autobiographical account supports the archaeology, as he does not mention any meat, but spends time describing “so many kinds of fish, roasted and boiled, stuffed and dried, so many dishes contrived with eggs and pepper by dexterous cooks, so many flavorings and condiments, compounded with like dexterity to tickle gluttony and awaken appetite.”[12] The pious Gerald was not impressed with the luxurious display, lamenting the loss of simplicity and abstinence extolled by Paul, Antony, Benedict, and Jerome in the modern church.

Gerald was equally concerned with the amount of wild gesticulating used by the monks at Canterbury, saying they looked like actors or jesters. The monastic life was largely silent with the exception of singing and prayers. Meals in the refectory were prescribed as completely silent by Benedict, with the sole exception being a monk or nun chosen for reading an appropriate text while the rest of the community ate. Therefore, in order to communicate in lieu of speaking, a form of monastic sign language was developed and later evolved to include more food-based signals as meals became more elaborate. Salt was fairly basic sign recognizable today: “Join the ends of the fingers to the thumb and holding them together, move them two or three times separating them from the thumb as though sprinkling something with salt.” To make the sign for “pie”, cup one hand and place it on top of the other flattened hand.[13] Like a pie.

These signs would be used to signal fellow monks seated at the table in the refectory or to the those assigned to serve meals that week. In the Rule, monks were assigned to a rota for serving on a weekly basis. However, wealthier houses could afford servants to distribute and remove plates, and monks or nuns could be exempt from this aspect of the Rule. Food preparation was also not generally done by the religious members of the house but by hired lay persons. Even some of the poorest houses would likely have a cook for meals. This was not the case at the nunnery of Markyate. Some of the professed women there had to cut their prayers short in the afternoon in order to prepare the meal for the rest of the community.[14]

Wealth, not sanctity, was the primary difference between plain pottage and elaborately stuffed fish. It was the difference between relying on the monastic brewhouse and fishponds or importing wine from Gascony and salmon from Scotland. It was the difference between a larder full of spices from the far east and a small cupboard containing just pepper and saffron. During the medieval period the wealth gap between monastic houses was increasingly large, with places like Canterbury feasting every week while poor, usually female, houses like nuns of Marrick only had enough money for two spices.[15]

Though food takes on larger secondary meanings in the context of religion, gender, and class, I see food’s primary purpose in a monastic house - whether large, small, rich or poor - as bringing a community together. Mealtimes, though silent, still held a social functionality with the use of sign language and readings generally associated with house saints. Breaking bread together solidified not only a shared corporeality, but the continued effort of monks, nuns, and other followers of the monastic code to share in their goal of sanctity.

[1] Autobiography of Gerald of Wales, edited and Translated by H.E. Butler (2005). Boydell & Brewer.

[2] ‘Saint Benedict’, Order of Saint Benedict. https://www.osb.org/our-roots/saint-benedict/.

[3] The Holy Rule of St Benedict, translated by Rev. Boniface Verheyan (DATE), Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

[4] Montanari, Massimo (2015), ‘Monastic Cooking’, Medieval Cooking 159-171, p.164.

[5] Adamson, Melitta Weiss (2004) Food in Medieval Times, p. 185.

[6] Montanari, p. 164-5.

[7] Adamson, p.186.

[8] Harvey, B.F. (2006) ‘Monastic Pittances’ in Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition, ed. C.M. Woolgar, D. Serjeantson, and T. Waldron. 215-227, p.

[9] Poster, Jem and Sherlock, David (1987) ‘Denny Abbey: the nun’s refectory’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 76, 67-82, p. 79.

[10] Harvey, p. 220.

[11] Mays, S.A. (1997) “Carbon Stable Isotope Ratios in Mediaeval and Later Human Skeletons From Northern England’ Journal of Archaeological Science, 24, 561-567.

[12] Autobiography of Gerald of Wales, edited and Translated by H.E. Butler (2005). Boydell & Brewer.

[13] Montanari, p. 171.

[14] Woolgar, C.M. (2010) ‘Food in the Middle Ages’, Journal of Medieval History, 36:1, 1-19,  p. 13.

[15] Harvey, p. 227.