#MiddleAges #MedievalHistory #MedievalFood #GreatFamine #FoodHistory #MedievalLife #HistoryDocumentary #AskTheMiddleAges
What did the poorest people eat when an ordinary medieval diet could no longer keep them alive? The answer begins long before the famous stories about bark, dogs or boiled shoes.
In this episode of *Ask the Middle Ages*, our calm expert and curious host follow an openly reconstructed poor English household through the Great Famine of 1315–1317. Rain damages the harvest, wages shrink, grain prices rise, and food can remain visible in a market while becoming impossible for a labouring family to buy. The loaf grows smaller. Pottage becomes thinner. Peas, beans, barley, oats, rye and bran stretch what remains. Then every meal begins to consume the future: seed grain, tools, clothes, credit, hens, pigs and working animals.
We examine what gleaning and alms could really provide, why forests were not free pantries, and why acorns, chestnuts and inner bark belong to particular regional food systems rather than one universal “medieval famine menu.” We also ask when horsemeat, dogs, cats or carrion crossed from taboo into emergency food—and why a chronicler’s most shocking detail cannot tell us how common it was.
Finally, we test the boiled-shoe story against the evidence. Medieval accounts from the siege of Antioch in 1098 do describe starving people soaking and boiling old dried animal hides. They do not prove that poor English villagers routinely cooked their shoe soles in 1316. The distinction between hide, tanned leather, source tradition and modern myth matters.
The result is a hunger ladder: not a grotesque menu, but a sequence in which poor people lost choice, access, assets and protection one rung at a time.
**Questions from today. Answers from a thousand years ago.**
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This episode uses AI-assisted voice and visual reconstruction based on a researched human-edited script. Reconstructed scenes represent historically plausible ordinary life and do not depict documented individuals.
Public sources:
– Phillipp R. Schofield, “Peasants and Food Security in England and Wales c.1300”
– John of Trokelowe, chronicle account of the famine of 1315
– Henry S. Lucas, “The Great European Famine of 1315, 1316, and 1317”
– William Chester Jordan, *The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century*
– Philip Slavin, *Experiencing Famine in Fourteenth-Century Britain*
– Christopher Dyer, “A Simple Food with Many Meanings: Bread in Late Medieval England”
– James Davis, research on the Assize of Bread and Ale
– William Langland, *Piers Plowman*, Passus VI
– *Feeding Medieval England*, Oxford University Press
– Historic England archaeobotany guidance and plant-remains reports
– Helen Louise MacKenzie, *Desperate with Hunger: Food and Famine in the First Crusade*
– Peter Tudebode, *Historia de Hierosolymitano Itinere*
– Guibert of Nogent, *The Deeds of God through the Franks*
– “Hippophagy in Medieval Hungary: A Quantitative Analysis,” *Antiquity*
– Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, *Poor Relief in England, 1350–1600*
– Buchanan Sharp, *Famine and Scarcity in Late Medieval and Early Modern England*
– Research on acorns as human food and Mediterranean acorn processing
– Environmental archaeology of chestnut production in medieval Italy
– Research on northern-European peasant food-provision strategies and inner-bark foods
– Scientific studies of collagen, gelatin extraction and archaeological leather manufacture
– London Museum medieval leather-shoe collection
– Bioarchaeological studies of selective mortality and frailty in medieval London
Chapters:
00:00 When the Rain Took the Harvest
04:30 Smaller Loaves and Thinner Pottage
09:25 Eating Tomorrow’s Seed
15:18 Gleaning, Acorns, Bark and Charity
27:08 When Animals Became Food
32:21 Old Hides, Shoes and Siege Hunger
40:48 Why Hunger Outlasted the Rain