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When Times were Really Tough

So you think times are tough? Are you feeling as down as the economy? Is it enough to drive a man to drink? Consider what life was like a millennium ago.

Alcohol played a large role in the daily lives of our European ancestor’s. Peasants and priests, kings, knights and bishops, men, women and children were all imbibers. But it wasn’t just for fun.

John Wheatplanter pulled long and hard on the jug of strong ale his wife brought to the field. Although the sun was still in the sky and John’s workday was not quite over, he needed the encouragement the fermented liquid offered to see him through a hard day’s work. William Sawyer’s beat up body used liquid spirits as a painkiller to mask the cuts and bruises he suffered at the lumberyard. Ralph Miller’s arms and hands took a beating while grinding John Wheatplanter’s grains into flour. Vit Fisher’s body suffered from all the ailments encountered by a seadog making his living on the salty ocean. Molly Dressmaker suffered from carpal tunnel centuries before the term was invented.

For the simple crime of petty theft, a guilty party could have their hand chopped off. This was a job for Olaf Butcher. Phillip Tanner was not only the village’s leather worker; he had the ghastly duty of meting out punishment to big-time thieves. Phillip Tanner was handed the task of drawing and quartering the poor sap who stole from the Royalty or the Churches’ coffers. Many leather workers were so skilled with their blades that they could literally skin a human alive (with four long incisions) and remove the entire person’s hide, including face, in one piece. The hide was then hung in front of the place where the theft occurred as a means of discouraging other would be miscreants.

The relief offered to the over-worked common peasants and mean-spirited royalty by the various brews in Medieval Europe was only one of the reasons our European ancestors hit the bottle quite regularly; you might say, on a daily basis. It was not because Wallace Tavern’s house of business offered hospitality, food and a place to sleep, although that was certainly an enticement. It had more to do with the sanitary conditions of the times.

The conditions were such that any place where humans gathered, be it small villages like George’s Town or huge metropolis’s like London or Paris, the drinking water tended to be highly polluted. Many towns situated themselves along the banks of rivers for obvious reasons including crop irrigation, moving logs to the lumber mills, grains to the flour mills, and people from place to place. However, it wasn’t just the commercial waste that went into the river that was the problem. It was the garbage and animal and human excrement that polluted the drinking water that caused the populace to turn to fermented beverages as their main source of liquid nourishment. Latrines were either absent or placed beside wells and cisterns.

Even small children were served ‘weak wine’ or ale from the time they were babies. Along with beer and wine, bathtub gin made from juniper berries became quite popular among the British. The favorite brew for the French was wine from the Bordeaux region of France. Public drunkenness, a punishable offense, was frowned upon, but despite the daily continual use of alcohol, it wasn’t as much of a problem as one would imagine. The populace tended to drink as a safe means of quenching their thirst rather than catching a buzz although I’m certain that was a side effect. This behavior leads me to believe that our ancestors probably spent their waking hours either half-drunk or half hung-over. No surprise that people were crude, ill-mannered and quick to temper in those days.

For most of the population, every day was spent toiling at their craft or in the fields with the exception being Sunday, a day of rest and worship. The monthly and annual fairs where goods and services were traded were also held on Sundays, allowing the rural population their chance to attend services in a real church, often elaborate cathedrals that took decades to build.

As if life wasn’t hard enough, in the mid 14th century, the rat brought a new misery to the continent, ‘La Moira Grande’. The Great Plague reared its ugly head in France. Life (and death) was about to become brutal.

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Moose Lake Area Celebrate Recovery Open House

Tuesday, Sept. 14th at the Moose Lake Covenant Church. Dinner at 5:45 pm. Group begins 6:30 pm. Call Linda at 218-206-4376 or Gary at 218-485-4640 with questions.

Annual Pancake Breakfast and Silent Auction

Blackhoof Firefighters Relief Association Saturday Sept. 11th from 7: am to 10: am, Blackhoof Fire Hall on Cty Rd. 5

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To all Classmates of MLHS

class of 1958

Our 52nd reunion will be held at Gampers in Moose Lake on October 9, 2010 at 1:00 PM. We will be ordering off the menu, so please do not send any money. Please RSVP to Elva Johnson Anderson
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