Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance This page intentionally left blank Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance Richard W. Unger University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia Copyright ᭧ 2004 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 First paperback edition 2007 Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Unger, Richard W. Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance / Richard W. Unger. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-1999-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8122-1999-6 (pbk : alk. paper) 1. Beer—Europe—History—To 1500. 2. Beer—Europe—History—To 1500—16th century. 3. Brewing industry—Europe—History—To 1500. 4. Brewing industry—Europe—History— 16th century. I. Title. TP577.U54 2003 641.2Ј3Ј0940902—dc22 2004049630 For Barbara Unger Williamson and Clark Murray Williamson This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Illustrations ix List of Tables xi Preface xiii List of Abbreviations xvii Introduction: Understanding the History of Brewing Early Medieval Brewing Urbanization and the Rise of Commercial Brewing Hopped Beer, Hanse Towns, and the Origins of the Trade in Beer The Spread of Hopped Beer Brewing: The Northern Low Countries The Spread of Hopped Beer Brewing: The Southern Low Countries, England, and Scandinavia The Mature Industry: Levels of Production The Mature Industry: Levels of Consumption The Mature Industry: Technology The Mature Industry: Capital Investment and Innovation Types of Beer and Their International Exchange viii Contents Taxes and Protection Guilds, Brewery Workers, and Work in Breweries Epilogue: The Decline of Brewing Appendix: On Classification and Measurement Notes Bibliography Index Illustrations . A man holding two drinking vessels, from a calendar from St. Albans, c. . Plan of the monks’ bake and brewhouse from the St. Gall Monastery Plan, c. . The brewer Herttel Pyrpreu, / . A cellarer testing his brew . Hop garden on the edge of Rostock . The waterfront at Hamburg . The home of the family of van Brugghe-van der Aa, the lords of van Gruuthuse, Bruges . Brewers weighing barrels of beer, c. . Barley and hops from a book of hours of Anne of Brittany by Jean Bourdichon . South German round disk showing a beer brewery, Nuremburg, sixteenth century . A peasant dance with beer drinkers, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, c. . Tavern scene, David Teniers the Younger, c. . A boy being asked to fetch some beer, Frans van Mieris the Elder . Plan of a brewhouse from an English country house . Sliding beer barrels into a cellar, Mattha¨us Landauer . The medieval brewhouse at White Castle, Wales . Antwerp, bird’s-eye view of with the site of the breweries built by Gilbert van Schoonbeke . Peasants drinking beer in the countryside, Lagertreiben, a woodcut from Livy’s Roman History, . Testing beer in Germany, Linhard Siegel, . Brewer’s maid pulling a cart with beer barrels, woodcut, A. Mu¨ller, . Still life, Pieter Claesz, . Gin Lane and Beer Street, William Hogarth, – This page intentionally left blank Tables . Hamburg beer production and exports, – . Estimates of beer output by town – . Number of breweries in northern European towns, c. – – . Consumption of beer per person per year – . Beer output per grain input . Proportions of grains for the production of beer, thirteenth through sixteenth century . The maximum size of a brew in towns, fifteenth through seventeenth century – . Size of brews and kettles, fourteenth through eighteenth century . Maximum frequency of brewing in towns, fifteenth through eighteenth century . Frequency of brewing annually at Wismar, – . Share of town income from taxes on beer, fourteenth through seventeenth century . Earliest records of brewers’ organizations in certain towns – This page intentionally left blank Preface The mention of the history of beer always brings a laugh or at the very least a snicker. The history of beer for most people is not a serious topic of study. It seems to them frivolous and hardly worth more than a few divert- ing minutes of anyone’s time. Beer, after all, is a drink for leisure, for young people, generally men, and associated with sports and student life. That per- ception of beer is a case of historical myopia, of an inability of many people at the beginning of the twenty-first century to conceive of a world different from their own. The prevailing presentism makes it difficult for many to compre- hend a world where beer was a necessity, a part of everyday life, a drink for everyone of any age or status, and a beverage for all times of the day from breakfast to dinner and into the evening. The popular conception of beer and ignorance of the place it enjoyed in medieval and Renaissance Europe are major obstacles but not the greatest ones to writing a history of beer, its consumption and production, and the brewers whomadeit.Thegreatesthurdleistheimmensesizeofthehistoryitself. Because of the scale and scope of the industry and its pervasive nature, much of the record of the past is part of the history of beer. The involvement of public authorities in the making of beer and its distribution, already in evi- dence six thousand years ago, opens up not only another extensive dimension of the history of beer but also created a mass of surviving documentation that is difficult to master even if the investigator imposes strict limits on the time and place to be studied. Many people—amateur and professional historians inspired by an interest in the economics of brewing, the techniques of brewing, the government income from brewing, or simply the taste of beer and the con- viviality which accompanied its consumption—have tried their hands at writ- ing about the history of beer. Success has been limited, the task simply too much. Rather than attempting a comprehensive history of brewing, a work that may be impossible to produce, this effort is primarily descriptive and to a lim- ited degree analytical. It establishes some categories which isolate features of the organization of brewing as well as significant and influential technical advances. It also discerns and offers some overarching patterns in the develop- ment of beer making in medieval and Renaissance Europe. The resulting xiv Preface framework may prove to be a basis for others to develop effective discussions of what happened to beer and beer drinkers in the years before . Broad general trends are identified, but only through the compilation of many exam- ples taken from different sites spread across northern Europe. Many other more sensible historians have chosen to concentrate on one town or one region during a limited period of time. It is from their studies, carried out over the last century and before, that the outline of development is drawn. The tables in this work constitute the most obvious cases of compilations where the value of some data may not be obvious. Singular figures or small groups of figures from one town in the tables may not be central to the thrust of this work, but they may, in a larger context or in relation to other questions taken up here, have a useful function. Many cases have been missed so more could easily be added and counterexamples could be found. There is always the chance in such an enterprise of missing yet one more piece of information. That certainly has happened here and will, of necessity, happen in any work on beer in medieval and Renaissance Europe. This study relies heavily on my own earlier and deeper examination of the brewing industry in Holland. This book, however, is more than just an elaboration on that theme and involves more than placing Dutch brewing of the period into some larger European context. The Low Countries still receive the lion’s share of attention along with Germany and England. Brewing, of course, went on in many other places, and inadequate consideration is given here to Poland and the rest of eastern Europe as well as to the Celtic fringe of the British Isles and to northern France. Brewing also went on in classical Greece and in rural Spain under Roman rule. How long beer making in the countryside continued in southern Europe in the Middle Ages and beyond is a question not considered here and, like so many other issues, must be left for others to tackle. Nonetheless, no similar effort has been made to draw together the body of research on European brewing before —that perhaps is the primary value of results offered in this study. If this book serves in any way as a guide to the future work on beer making and drinking, and given past expe- rience there will be a good deal of future work on those topics, then it will have served its purpose. The language of beer creates another significant problem in writing about the history of the drink. In general the word beer is used generically in this work. It is also used to mean the drink made with the addition of hops. Ale is used to describe the drink without hops in which some other additive or addi- tives were put into the drink during brewing. The distinction is kept especially for discussion of English practices. The etymology of the various words used in different languages to identify the drink and the process of making it is taken up in the text along with some of the language used in dealing with other Preface xv drinks that were substitutes for or alternatives to beer. The many names used to describe the various types of beer made and drunk in Europe, especially during the sixteenth century, are also explored.