I feel like some of these debunkings need debunking!
I don't think anyone is truly arguing that medieval people never drank water. But they did drink beer in quantities that would be untenable today.
The author is also muddling points - medieval people didn't have to understand microbiology to know that beer was safer to drink.
And it was! Not only would the brewer have access to better water, it would be boiled as part of the process. (And aromatics like hops acted as mild antiseptics - the beer would be safe to drink for as long as it tasted well).
To review:
- It was tasty
- It was convenient
- People you knew who drink it had the trots less often
- It was cheap enough
- It made you feel good during long days of arduous labor
- There was no social stigma so long as you don't get drunk
And it makes plenty of reason that brewers would be incentivised to keep ABV low so people could drink it all day if they could.
Even going into the US prohibition, I think people would be astonished by how much the typical worker drank (usually cider in the US). With workplaces themselves providing it by the truckload.
Yes, people drank water. But (especially in urban settings) they drank A LOT of low abv drinks.
> Yes, people drank water. But (especially in urban settings) they drank A LOT of low abv drinks.
The vast majority of people in the medieval period did NOT live in cities.
Furthermore the cities that did exists where way less densely populated and would more look like bigger villages to the modern eye.
It is the modern world with it's industrialization and high population density that has the problem of getting safe fresh water. People have images of Victorian London in their head not realizing that is way, way past the medieval era and way into our modern era.
The vast majority of people in the medieval period had access to safe drinking water. They also probably met most of their hydration needs from directly consuming safe water sources. While it was common to brew your own beer and people did so a lot, I think the economics required for everyone to be able to consume multiple liters of beer every day would have been a bit too much.
As for did medieval people prefer drinking beer when given the choice? Many people today would rather drink soft-drinks or a beer even when having access to perfectly safe tab water. So I agree that might be more plausible.
While cities were smaller, I think people forget the inverse, which is that rural areas were much more densely populated. The farms were very small, required lots of labor, and were always close to the manor of a lord or parish. Which almost invariably had a bakery, brewery, and a well present. These services were very convenient to the average peasant, and I was surprised to learn how few medieval homes even had a hearth or oven for baking.
Even in the preindustrial days, you could not just grab water from any old surface stream and drink it raw without some risk (as any avid hiker could tell you). Even the most crystal clear stream will have some sort of wild animal refuse in it that could leave you sick for days.
We know that early settlers in America basically refused to drink the local water except when forced. Even going back to the Roman period, where they were obsessive about fresh water, even then the average peasant might be drinking posca (vinegar water) all day instead of water. Roman troops would make and haul the stuff around with them rather than risk local water on the march. So I think it would be weird to assume there was a middle medieval period where the water was always pristine and everyone drank it.
> Many people today would rather drink soft-drinks or a beer even when having access to perfectly safe tab water.
I mean, if you went to a jobsite today, I would not be shocked if less than a third of what people drink during the course of the day is tap water. But if I may posit something - the average person's distaste for drinking plain water is somewhat universal across time and cultures and might very well be a human adaptation.
> Roman troops would make and haul the stuff around with them rather than risk local water on the march.
it’s more than this: posca or sekanjibin or switchel or any of the other similar vinegar drinks are a bit like savory gatorade: you will preferentially choose them when exerted and they’re available, they’re better regardless of sanitation.
> Even the most crystal clear stream will have some sort of wild animal refuse in it that could leave you sick for days.
When you are local never ever moving out of place you do know what is upstream or in well. This "had no idea cows are up there" thing is modern hiker problem.
> the average person's distaste for drinking plain water is somewhat universal across time and cultures and might very well be a human adaptation.
There is absolutely nothing universal about that. Instead, drinking water seems to be universal accross cultures.
Having access to fresh water is not the same as saying any puddle of water was 100% safe.
You bring up traveling when the vast majority of people did not travel. At all. Maybe to the next market if we talk later medieval period but that was it really. (I do use bottled water when traveling because I am only used to the local bacteria and it is easy to get sick at first when going to a new country.)
As you write most settlements especially early one were very self-sufficient. So they would have some source of water that could be safely consumed. Remember, even for beer brewing you need to start with clean water. Sure heating it up helps with bacteria but you can't brew beer with dirty swamp water. It will be gross.
The whole antisemitic conspiracy theory of Jews poisoning the well only works if people were actually drinking from the well. Not that antisemitism needs to be very rational but it shows that people had a considered safe source of water they regularly drank from.
> But if I may posit something - the average person's distaste for drinking plain water is somewhat universal across time and cultures and might very well be a human adaptation.
I don't think hunter-gatherer societies where big on beer brewing. The whole building settlements thing is a very recent innovation in evolutionary terms so probably not enough time has passed for such a trait to become relevant.
Plus I mean our brains like sugar and carbohydrates very much, we quickly learn to crave alcohol and coffee. We can already explain why people might drink something else than plain water.
If we both went into a time machine, and had to make the choice, I think both of us would still end up drinking the small-beer over even the most pristine local water.
But regardless, this is still not a strong argument that we need to "debunk" the history as the original author is trying to do. We have written primary sources from the dawn of writing until the modern temperance movements in the 1800s that all basically say the same thing - humans in any agricultural society ended up supplying the majority of their hydration from prepared sources of water. Access to clean water was about bathing, preparing food or drink, and the occasional drink of water.
Regardless of how safe their water was or was not to drink, medieval people still ended up drinking small-beer a majority of the time if they could help it.
> The whole antisemitic conspiracy theory of Jews poisoning the well only works if people were actually drinking from the well.
Not really. Independent of people drinking directly from the well:
* animals are watered by getting the water from the well.
* food is prepared with water from the well
* ale is prepared with water from the well
and so on. All of these things would subsequently be poisoned if the well was poisoned. They needed a safe source of water, but that does not imply that they drank it directly.
You're just shoehorning in the assumption that people had diarrhea a lot, because that's the trope about medieval Europe. But if everybody lives in a well-established traditional way (and there's no current war or plague in the area) then they will also know by tradition the springs, streams and wells that yield clean water.
In Georgian times, around 1800, coal-based industry gets under way, there's a population explosion, and many cities have properly horrific slums, latrine courtyards ankle deep, families living with pigs in wet cellars, graveyards overflowing ex-human slurry into the street. This is also when we invent bottled water, and if you can't get that, beer is a good option for safety reasons.
But in calmer medieval times, avoiding the local water can't have been so crucial, because the locals probably knew where to get the clean-ish stuff (however harmlessly brown or wriggling).
> they will also know by tradition the springs, streams and wells that yield clean water
I once drank water from a mountain stream and spent a week sick from some sort of phage associated with beavers.
As any avid hiker can tell you, even crystal clear, pristine surface waters still run the risk of making you sick. Even without the need of human intervention.
Almost every human culture has some traditional drink that involves something boiled. It's weird to assume Europeans were magically different.
Giardiasis is often referred to as the "beaver fever" because the organism completes part of its lifecycle in mammals and beavers crap wherever they eat, which is in the water.
People have diarrhoea a lot today, in developed countries with stable access to clean water and food. If anything, people massively underestimate the amount of diarrhoea premodern living involved.
Acquired immunity is a thing. If you always drink from the same river, you are more likely to become immune to its pathogens. That’s why travellers to places with poorer sanitation often get sick eating food that is fine for the locals.
I would suggest your personal experience is not representative of what billions of people are living e.g. in Nigeria and most of tropical Africa and India.
What a tedious over-inflation of personal significance. It's utterly depressing that literate people such as yourself could be so unimaginative as to presume the representative significance of your own experience.
Although they're less common among the insufferably narcissistic rich, diarrhoeal diseases account for 1.5 million deaths, annually ranking them as the 8th leading cause of death globally.[0]
Your personal experience must invalidate large parts of the diarrhea filled lives many others before you have lived and died. Thanks for chiming in, wise one.
Natural springs are rare, while streams and rivers are often muddy, seasonal and/or contaminated by domestic animals and wildlife. There's a reason wells were very common.
Well water is not safe either. It's exposed to the atmosphere, so to dust, birds (both s(h)itting and flying), and insects, etc.
Depending on the shape and structure of the well, rats can crawl inside, and lizards, and cockroaches and other insects can crawl in anyway, and poop there. and we all know about rats as a vector of many serious diseases, like the plague in said mediaeval times.
Yep, thought of that as soon as I read the parent and GP comments.
And I have also thought of the same point on my own before.
And it's not just:
>could give you tons of diarrhea due to some animals taking a dump nearby.
But also: from all the way upstream (from aquatic animal life), and from the upstream watersheds (from terrestrial animal life), which, all together, is a shit-ton of dumps, pun not intended.
That was the original purpose. It's a way of preserving grain. Food was a constant struggle for most, and they required every single scrap that they could lay their hands on.
Sounds a lot like the role coca cola plays today, with tourists drinking it in preference to water they don't know as well as just wide drinking of it because it's tastier than water.
> And it makes plenty of reason that brewers would be incentivised to keep ABV low so people could drink it all day if they could.
Still true in modern times. I'm not even sure it's possible to get drunk on Bud Light. Light rice beers have always been clearly intended to be drunk all day. I worked at a convenience store in a trashy neighborhood in the 90s, and the same people who had just bought a case a few hours ago would come back in for the next case, dead sober.
>As it happens, drinking water was commonplace throughout history. We have to remember that the notion that water could carry diseases is a fairly modern one
No, it's anything but new. People in the past might not know about viruses and bacteria and such, but they very well knew about clean vs dirty water, the dangers of some animal corpse upstream, and many other such things...
Ancient people had knowledge from experience of far more intricate subjects than "polluted water can kill you", without having to know the mechanisms involved.
OK this one I do know about, as the school I went to in London was founded in 1619. The “poor scholars” who were the original pupils had a ration of 5 pints of ale per day - one with breakfast, two with lunch and two with dinner. This is all recorded in the accounts from the time. It was presumably very weak
I'm not entirely sure I buy this argument. There are vast swathes of the world today where drinking tap water will likely make you sick, and in all these countries it is standard procedure to boil tap water before drinking it. In fact, in eg China & Indonesia, cold water (even if clean) is believed to be bad for you and drinking still warm boiled water or weak tea instead is very common. Was medieval England really an exception?
Yea but for routine consumption, drinking exclusively hot (boiled previously) water wasn't as much of a thing, especially in Northern China, prior to like mid 1800s.
It was after a particular outbreak (cholera?) somewhere in the 19th century that hit northern China way worse than southern China that they figured out the major difference was the hot water habits in the South. Even in the 1930s there was still a push to increase boiled water usage.
Sometimes people do things for a certain reason but it can also have other positive effects. In a way, it doesn’t matter why a trait or behaviour spreads, as long as it’s beneficial.
I don’t disagree with your sentiment but the literal topic of conversation here is the “why” part.
Sometimes conversations can have practical applications. Other times they’re just academic for academics sake. But both are perfectly fine conversations to have.
But humans have been cooking stuff for thousands and thousands of years to improve nutritional value and kill off bacteria. Why would water be an exception?
Bacteria wasn’t known about thousand of years ago. Nor were nutrients (in the sense that we know it now).
There are a plethora of other reasons food might have been cooked, not least of all being flavour. The fact that it also killed bacteria would have been an accidental benefit.
Also a lot of food actually loses nutrients when cooked.
Ancient cultures relied on observation-based trial-and-error knowledge passed down from generation to generation, mostly involving people dying. They didn't have to understand the causes in order to be correct about the effect. E.g., if you eat raw meat that's been sitting there a while, you get sick and might die. How do we know? Because X and Y people died after eating it. But if you cook it, you don't get sick and don't die. How do we know, because A and B people cooked it and didn't die. Thus -> cook meat. Why? Who knows what unscientific reasons they would give (likely superstitious ones). But "discoveries" of this sort were passed down, in the same way that they discovered which mushrooms not to eat (by people dying when they ate them).
Same applied to which local sources of water were safe to drink (i.e., people didn't die when they drank from there), and whether fermented drink (i.e., beer) was safer than water.
They are. But the solution to each might be different. And given the specific argument being contested here is whether beer was drank because it was considered safer, understanding their motives is pretty fundamental to that discussion.
The motives don't always have understanding of the root cause however. We knew that eating raw meat was unsafe even though we didn't know about salmonella.
That's exactly my point. This whole conversation is about whether beer was drank because water was unsafe. Understanding what their understanding of "unsafe" was, and what they considered the remedy, is central to this discussion.
Being smart and knowing stuff are not equivalent. The smartest person alive 300 years ago had no clue about bacteria and viruses. Or anything like horizontal gene transfer. Sure, they were not stupid. They still did not know a lot of things, which occasionally made them do stupid things. For example, it is well documented that people believed diseases were transmitted by “bad air” (i.e. pestilence, or bad smells) up until the mid-19th century (not to mention demons). They were not stupid, but there were some things they did not know.
I am not saying that we are any better; there are a lot of things we don’t know that will be taken for granted in 200 years. If there is still a human race.
> For example, it is well documented that people believed diseases were transmitted by “bad air” (i.e. pestilence, or bad smells) up
But that's not particularly stupid. Bad smells are certainly a proxy for diseases to some extent and avoiding them/removing their sources would also decrease the likelihood of getting sick.
> Bad smells are certainly a proxy for diseases to some extent
No, they are not. Because smell and germs are completely unrelated. There is a limited case where they are correlated (don’t play with organic waste or too old corpses), but even then it is not really helpful. This is why it took so long to understand how to stop cholera: you can have things in your water even if it looks pristine. The air is just a red herring.
It is not even helpful with airborne pathogens, as once they start spreading among humans all bets are off.
> Bacteria wasn’t known about thousand of years ago. Nor were nutrients (in the sense that we know it now).
And yet, processed like nixtamalization (the processed used to make the nutrients in maize available to humans) were discovered over 3000 years ago.
If ancient humans figured that complex process out, they certainly would have been able to figure out that boiling water made it safer to drink, even if they didn't know why. They'd probably just claim it killed the evil spirits or pleased the water god and have been happy with that explanation.
If someone is going to go through the process of boiling water, they might as well throw some stuff in there and turn it into soup/tea/broth/stew/whatever so that it tastes nice and makes you less hungry.
To accurately gauge if something is safe, you need a quick and direct result that is consistent. Unsafe food and liquid isn’t that. Often it’s more a percentage problem. So to solve the percentage problem you then need a larger sample size. And people simply weren’t organised enough to accurately measure at that scale in the periods you’re suggesting.
As an aside, this is why people got thrown into volcanos and such like. If you don’t have measurements that are easy to correlate then you’re effectively left to guesswork.
And in all of those places you'd usually noted how bad is the taste of water, so many people knew it's unsafe not just from tradition, but also from the bad taste. The difference between now and medieval England is that we know taste is not everything, that even "sweet water" can be dangerous unboiled.
> And in all of those places you'd usually noted how bad is the taste of water, so many people knew it's unsafe not just from tradition, but also from the bad taste.
Considering the strength of the Chinese taboo on cold water, I find that fairly unlikely.
My understanding is this is rooted in the perception of hot water as a luxury—it's not like we have any shortage of evidence from chinese texts that people have always drank cold water. The idea that most people even could avoid cold water is an artifact of the last two centuries. Even where boiling water was necessary water was boiled and stored (that's not specific to my knowledge of China, that's just an observation from multiple different places and times).
We often say that the US are not the world and that we should not assume that something is natural just because American do it. Well, it’s also true for China and overall people in a specific place having a specific taboo tells us very little about human health or their understanding of it.
So no, a Chinese taboo on cold water does not tell us anything about a human tendency to drink water any more that a people’s taboo about pork is any indication that pork is unsafe (yes, this also is an urban legend).
People in a specific place having a specific taboo can tell us a lot about how likely they are to engage in the tabooed behavior. The argument was that people in China would have noted the bad taste of their raw water. In order to do that, they would have had to drink it, which I find unlikely.
There’s a line in one of the Aubury Maturin books, Clarissa Oaks when pumping the ship bilges, a sailor remarks, “she flows as clear and sweet as Hobson’s conduit”.
Fresh water was consumed in prodigious quantities in the Royal Navy, not least for watering down grog but also for extracting the salt from salted meats.
Other way around -- grog wasn't so much diluted with water as the grog was applied TO the fresh water as an antiseptic.
Fresh water on ships had typically been sealed inside a barrel for months or even years before it was consumed, growing all manner of unhealthy pathogens. Pre-germ theory people read this as "it smells and tastes bad," which is a pretty good first-order approximation of germ theory.
When you cut that contaminated water with alcohol, that greatly reduces illnesses from drinking it, especially in those whose GI systems are already somewhat adapted to tolerate the pathogens. Strong spices in grog such as cloves also helped mask the taste of drinking years-old barrel water.
These types of posts are .. well thought-out, and usually posted by someone with relevant education. But they are not reviewed documents or journal articles, and you can _tell_ when someone is mixing in a lot of their own educated guessing with the research they've done. Which is the case here.
He probably wasn't intending it to be taken as authoritative source, but that's how most people will _read_ something like this after running into it on the front page of HN. And most of this is just.. guesswork.
The author is presenting a plausible enough theory without any evidence that it is actually more accurate than the actual historical texts.
As one example, the author goes on and on about the importance of the conduits into London - but here's how actual documents from the time describe them:
"A certain conduit was built in the midst of the City of London, so that the rich and middling persons therein might there have water for preparing their food, and the poor for their drink"
This article is right, but also misleading. Yes, people did drink water. But they preferred to drink beer, and basically they drank beer for thirst if they could. And they did this not just in the Middle Ages, but into the 20th century.
Your blog posts doesn't discuss the medieval era at all though. You are strictly talking about modernity.
The medieval period ends around 1500 AD. A time where the vast majority of people lived in small villages. This is when population density was very low and the industrialization hasn't happened yet. Cholera is a modern problem. Water pollution is a mostly modern problem.
So yes, you are right that water safety was an huge issues in the modern era (end still is is in many regions of the world). Not sure about always preferring beer as I haven't looked deeper at the evidence but it is hell more plausible than for the medieval period.
This is a great podcast about how Victorian London built a huge sewer system to deal with the vast amount of human waste generated by one of the biggest cities in the world: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001gjcm
I was reminded of it by the mention of people who collected the waste from cess pits, which is also in the podcast - it was transported outside the city and used for fertiliser.
> Again, this was not a disease control issue, as there was no notion of separating wastewater from spring water for health reasons — it was simply a matter of taste.
The idea that "there was no notion of separating wastewater from spring water for health reasons" is complete bullshit. The dirtier the water, the more need to boil the water. Boiling the water would not have significantly improved the taste. Some streams were known to be unhealthy despite not appearing dirty and locals knew to boil this too. Springs and deep wells were so highly valued in part because these were known to be safe to drink without any processing. European records are full of people being prosecuted or just directly murdered for messing with spring or fountain water. The idea people would not connect the taste of the water (which was quite well observed) with health is not born out by records of the time. Laws on the books dictated where one might bathe, wash clothing, rinse unhealthy flesh, and especially where one might piss or shit, specifically concerned with causing widespread disease. In siena in 1262 a woman was flayed alive after she was accused of poisoning fountain water—not dirtying it, but specifically destroying its safety.
The reason people drank beer is the same as today: it's tasty, it makes you feel good, you get some calories, and water is "boring" unless you're really thirsty. Plus it was "packaged" and ready to drink in town
"12 years in a monastery" (1897) by Joseph McCabe mentions the astronomical amount of beer drunk by monks, as a matter of routine (albiet in the late 19th century)
He was one, before he went over the wall and became a proto socialist free thinker philosopher.
I don't think anyone is truly arguing that medieval people never drank water. But they did drink beer in quantities that would be untenable today.
The author is also muddling points - medieval people didn't have to understand microbiology to know that beer was safer to drink.
And it was! Not only would the brewer have access to better water, it would be boiled as part of the process. (And aromatics like hops acted as mild antiseptics - the beer would be safe to drink for as long as it tasted well).
To review:
- It was tasty
- It was convenient
- People you knew who drink it had the trots less often
- It was cheap enough
- It made you feel good during long days of arduous labor
- There was no social stigma so long as you don't get drunk
And it makes plenty of reason that brewers would be incentivised to keep ABV low so people could drink it all day if they could.
Even going into the US prohibition, I think people would be astonished by how much the typical worker drank (usually cider in the US). With workplaces themselves providing it by the truckload.
Yes, people drank water. But (especially in urban settings) they drank A LOT of low abv drinks.