Saturday, July 12, 2014

The later water myths: Old Regime water after the Middle Ages

An earlier post addressed the tenacious myth that medieval drinkers used alcoholic drinks because the water was bad. But the Middle Ages differed from subsequent centuries in a number of ways. Notably, cities were in decline and many urban centers did not yet exist. Even as this changed towards the end of the period, industry had not yet reached the point which, by the eighteenth century, would require Abbeville, for instance, (in the north of France) to fill in some town waterways because they had become so polluted.

At the start of the twentieth century, “fully half of France's active population worked in agriculture”. (Crumley) France would remain a largely rural country into the nineteenth century, at least, and it is unlikely that mountain springs or simple wells sunk into unpolluted groundwater would have yielded anything but pure water. Still, as the centuries progressed, more industries and simply a growing population changed at least the urban landscape in important ways.

The question then is, after the Middle Ages, did the French continue to drink water as a matter of course or did it indeed become preferable to drink alcoholic drinks or other substitutes? Is there any reason, that is, to believe that Old Regime drinkers actively avoided drinking water? That is the focus of this post.

Preliminary thoughts

In one sense, it seems ludicrous to have to demonstrate a simple, even intuitive fact: human beings have always drunk water. But the idea that the water of earlier times was unhealthy and that people simply must have drunk other things in its place has long taken on a life of its own. Such claims are not made only about the Middle Ages, or even just about Europe; similar claims have been made about later centuries, not only in Europe, but even the American West.

The most striking thing about such claims is that they are always based, not on specific evidence, but on hypothetical reasoning; that is, “people must have drunk alcohol in place of water because.... [fill in the blank].” Having made this claim (based on whatever incontrovertible reason the person triumphantly pulls forth), the logical next step would be to demonstrate, by reference to period documentation, that this was indeed the case; only, that next step invariably is left out. Having demonstrated to their own satisfaction that something must have been true, writer after writer seems to find it superfluous to actually demonstrate that it was.

Scholarship, ideally, consists of examining the facts and drawing conclusions from what they demonstrate. But on a question like this one (there are others), the process is reversed: the conclusion has become so widely established that most simply set out to defend it, rather that returning to the underlying facts and determining where they lead.

Two faulty assumptions above all seem to underlie ideas on this subject. One is that, because hygiene and medicine were, by modern standards, backward, water would necessarily have reflected the unhealthy state of many human beings. But of course this does not follow in the least; a spring or a well does not necessarily become contaminated because the people who use it are unhealthy.

The other is the idea that, if water was bad, people would not drink it. But modern day problems with water in Africa show that people will drink bad water, if that is all there is. One of the Africans quoted on the Clean Water Project's site says: “I feel now people understand how important clean water is and how it makes us healthy. Before we did not know and just drank water we could find.” (Alusine). On another site, we are told “the nearest source... is unprotected and likely contaminated”. Africans have ample access to, and indeed drink, alcohol; not only Western industrial products, but various local drinks. Yet many also continue to drink contaminated water.

Why would earlier Western drinkers, for whom obtaining alcohol was, at the least, less convenient, not have done the same?

With all this, there is the curious assumption that water gets safer in technologically advanced times. But a guide to modern France points out: “The main dangers to clean water come from the abusive use of chemical fertilizers, the illegal dumping of industrial waste, and the growing needs of the population.”

UPDATE 7-17-2014
Consider too this inventory from the Natural Resources Defense Council:

The first line of defense in ensuring the safety and quality of drinking water is to ensure that water sources -- lakes, rivers, streams and aquifers (porous underground formations that hold water) -- are protected from pollution. And as indicated above, there are many ways that contaminants get into source water, among them:

Municipal sewage

Polluted runoff from stormwater or snowmelt in urban and suburban areas

Pesticides and fertilizers from agricultural fields

Animal waste from feedlots and farms

Industrial pollution from factories

Mining waste

Hazardous waste sites

Spills and leaks of petroleum products and industrial chemicals

"Natural" contamination such as arsenic or radon that occurs in water as a result of leaching or release of the contaminant from rock

Are these "worst case" scenarios? Perhaps. But so are some modern imaginings of pollution in earlier eras. And earlier drinkers were in fact spared some risks we face today. Still, even in a less industrial time, “progress” was often the worst enemy of safe drinking water.

What people actually did

From the late medieval period through the late eighteenth century there are numerous specific and matter of fact references to people drinking water.

Jean Froissart (1337-1404) describes a siege of Mauvoisin where the town had one well outside its walls, but only cisterns within it. When these ran dry, "they had a plenitude of wines, which they did not bother with, since they lacked sweet water." The availability of alcohol, in other words, was cold comfort if one did not also have drinking water.

Monstrelet tells how in 1412 soldiers drank from wells in the suburbs – and began to die. Because the wells had been poisoned, in full expectation that the soldiers would (as was clearly natural) drink water from them. (The soldiers were then ordered to only drink from fountains and running streams, showing how safe these natural – and mobile – sources were thought to be.)

In the sixteenth century, Jacques Le Lieur's Book of Fountains of Rouen (1525) showed that city with, among other things, “a whole system for supplying drinking water”. (Leguay) Montaigne (1533-1592) told a friend that water was the best drink in the world (the friend had thought it was wine). Marshal Montluc writes of how, in 1545, he would drink water along with soldiers in order to encourage them and gain their trust. In 1583, Henry III (reigned 1574 – 1589), was said to be doing very well after falling ill and to drink “his water better than the greatest drunkard of Germany drinks Rhine wine.” In 1587, Laurent Joubert wrote of an aunt who drank water before going to bed.

Moving into the seventeenth century, the count of Souvigny writes that in 1616 when he was sick he took to only drinking pure water and was soon well. In 1628, during the siege of La Rochelle, his ship was granted a barrel of fresh water a day (and a pint of wine a day for each soldier).

The count of Loménie de Brienne (1635-1698) writes of an Italian in France who "only ever drank water". Madame de Sévigné (1626-1696), in her voluminous correspondence, mentions, in 1676, a new pump being built: "One thinks with pleasure of this natural water, both for drinking, and for bathing." In 1677, she wrote her daughter, "I drink the healthiest water, and in the best weather".

In 1715, at the start of the eighteenth century, Louis XIV's doctor wanted the aging king to take medicine; when he refused, Fagon advised him to begin his meals with figs followed by a glass of water. In 1785 people in Senlis used “river water as their normal drink.” (Caix de Saint-Aymour) In her memoir of Marie-Antoinette, Mme Campan talks about courtiers regarding the right to give the queen a glass of water as a prized prerogative.

Note that many of these people were of a social rank where wine and other alcohol was readily available, yet they drank, in some cases, eagerly drank, water. A number of other references are made to “taking the waters” at various places known for the special quality of the water. Numerous references, too, are made to people being condemned to only bread and water (as they already had been in the Middle Ages); clearly, the water, though punitive, was not considered to be unhealthy.

As in the Middle Ages, then, there are numerous examples of people drinking water. Conversely, there are none of people drinking wine or beer because they feared water in general. (Fetid or still water is always an exception, as it would be today.)

The experts

Numerous experts of different sorts wrote about water all through this period. Here is a sample of some of these texts.

In 1363, towards the end of the medieval period, the surgeon Guy de Chauliac (c. 1298-1368) published a work on surgery. It includes a chapter on drink: "Drink is natural or artificial. The natural is water, and the artificial wine, cider, beer." He begins by looking at water, itemizing the qualities of good water:

The best water is that which is clear and limpid, light and without odor, which can be heated and cooled easily...

The good qualities of water of which I have just spoken are particularly found in the water of fountains and rain, rarely in well water. As to swampy and muddy waters, they have no good qualities and are only good to throw out, as well as the water of snows and ices...

When necessity obliges one to drink bad waters, one must boil them.

In many ways this echoes what is found in other writers before and after him; note however that several disagree on exactly which water was best to drink.

In his 1577 work on running a farm and living in the country, Liebaut writes:

it is not enough to find sources of wells and fountains, one must further see to the goodness and healthfulness of water; because since our life consists in the greatest part in the use of this element, it is quite reasonable that the master of the rustic house take care to have good water, given that water must be the main drink of his servants.

He goes into great detail about building cisterns and wells, and how to have "good tasting water" and to avoid it being slimy or tasting of earth. He warns against using lead in fountains, which, he says, contaminates the water "which often causes dysenteries". Though he examines various uses of water, its use as drink is certainly a prime concern.

Bernard Palissy (1510 - 1589/1590) is best known for his wonderful ceramics. But he also left a classic work on water ("Admirable discourse on the nature of both natural and artificial waters and fountains", 1580). One of the points he makes is that even drinkable, natural water can include some toxins:

I do not say that there is not some tree, and so plants, whose salts might be toxic; and one must not think that all waters good to drink are free of toxins; but a little poison in a great quantity of water does not have the power to activate its bad nature.

In general, he says, all waters pick up salts in flowing underground, but these salts are not harmful. He admits however that there are exceptions, not because of pollution, but because of the nature of the salts in certain areas. In fact, he claims that in the Gascon region of Bigorre, many people had swellings (probably goitre) due to the local water. All of this of course takes for granted that people drink water and should be concerned with what makes it healthy or not.

Gérard François, one of Henry IV's doctors, left three volumes of a poem on health (1583) in which he writes:

As to drinking water no one is excluded,

It is true it helps some more, some less...

Wine is good. But water is more necessary:

Not everyone needs wine, all have to do with water.

At the start of the seventeenth century, in 1616, De Serres, in yet another work on agriculture, begins his section on water with a long panegyric on the liquid and its benefits to humanity. Further on, he particularly focuses on the water of fountains whose “abundance provides all our necessities, to guide it diversely according to the diversity of its services. That is, in part in close pipes, for ordinary drink, in order to be clean and cool, and in part in open canals for mills, waterings, feeding ponds, and such services.”

He then goes on at some length about developing fountains, cisterns, wells, etc. and on ways to keep the water clean and fresh. Again, he treats drinking water as a basic concern.

In a work from 1626 on “the medicinal virtues of ordinary water”, the author states:

We should only... drink water ordinarily, and it is pointless to limit its quantity for people who are in good health. Still two or three large glasses of Water or about, in rising, as many an hour and a half or two hours after each meal, is, to my mind, the most excellent preventative against all sorts of internal maladies.

The great surgeon Paré writes (1641):

There are several sick people, and also healthy, who never want or can drink another drink but water alone. Because of this the desire has struck me to show in writing the good water noted by the ancients; and it is quite necessary to recognize it, give that our life consists for the greatest part in using this. Because it is the principal drink...

Pare then recommends rainwater, fallen in summer and gathered in a cistern as the best; then those from fountains whose water comes down from mountains, through rocks and stones, then well water "or what comes out at the base of a mountain." Also river water, But "that of ponds or swamps is bad."

Like Pliny, he says that the best water has no taste, odor or color.

In 1714, Nicolas Lémery (1645-1715), a famous French pharmacist and chemist, also itemized the qualities of different kinds of waters. He advises river water as best for drinking, even if one has to sometimes filter it or let it settle. He even recommends taking three glasses of in the morning. He advises against drinking swamp water or other impure still waters without boiling them first.

Finally, in Diderot's Encyclopedia, one reads (1782):

Pure water is the most general drink of Man.

This healthy drink has for all time been covered with the greatest praise by philosophers and doctors; the most steady and the most vigorous health has been promised to drinkers of water, as an ample repayment for the passing pleasures which the use of fermented liquors can provide them....

Drinkers of water, in contrast with drinkers of wine,... more commonly enjoy good health than the latter. The former are less subject to gout, to redness of the eyes, to trembling of the members, and to other discomforts, that are counted with reason among the unfortunate effects of the use of spirits.

“A sewer where each can drink”

All the above shows that water was considered, both in practice and in theory, a standard and even healthful drink. At the same time, several of the medical opinions show that people knew (as they already did in medieval times) not to drink just any water and in particular to avoid water that smelled or tasted bad.

But what if the most available water did have off-putting qualities? Did people then turn to alcohol? The answer here is: it depends.

In 1675, Barra wrote of people in Lyons who drank "with so much pleasure water chilled with ice". The image itself shows how natural it was to simply take water as a refreshment. But he then goes on to say that they would have done better to drink melted snow or ice than to drink this water, which came from wells. Why?

In Lyons the wells and the bags [sic] of the latrines are pell-mell throughout the city, the well water comes there from the rivers, and under earth where the flow from the latrine goes it mixes with it, so that everywhere the well waters are infected with it, and, in several places through the proximity of the latrines, the well water, though clear, has a bad taste and stinks.

The ice, on the other hand, came from the Rhône and Saône rivers "whose waters are much better than well waters".

Whether or not Barra's advice was ever heeded, it is clear that the people of Lyons were happy to drink water which their senses might have warned them was unhealthy. For no better reason, it seems, than that that was at hand – and this despite the fact that Lyons is in the heart of a major wine region.

No doubt similar attitudes held in other cities. But the great example in this regard is Paris, and the water of the Seine.

Parisian water did not only come from the Seine, but it has always been one of the principal sources of the city's drinking water. Until the eighteenth century, says Roche, it was the principal source. In his study of "Scarce water from the Middle Ages to modern times", he vividly summarizes the nature of its water: "The Seine is a sewer where each can drink".

The reputation of the Seine's water in fact seems to have been a bad one even in France. The English doctor William Blakey wrote, around 1764, “And though the very French, from their provinces, have a bad opinion of the Seine water, it has always done me good.”

It certainly did not help that the sewers did literally empty into the Seine, a fact that did not escape the notice of the medical community:

Some reports from the Faculty of Medicine which appeared at that time, on the danger of drawing the waters of the Seine below the outlet of the sewers, gave much importance to projects which different companies presented for selling filtered waters within Paris. Mssrs. Ferrand and Molin de Montbruel obtained, on June 2, 1763, patent letters from the King which authorized them to establish on the Seine river, at Port-à-l'Anglais, one or several boats in which would be placed diverse machines and apparatuses appropriate for drawing the waters and filtering them.

(Girard)

But the project failed; the filtered water did not sell. Which gives some idea of how little the water's quality concerned Parisians.

About twenty years later, the satirist Sebastien Mercier noted with indignation a new attempt to sell people... water. "What does one not turn into merchandise in this extraordinary city! A company is forming to sell us the water of the Seine." (Water bearers had long charged for water, but basically for the service of carrying it, not for the water itself.)

He goes on to indignantly point out that this company sought to profit by making people afraid of the same water they have always drunk:

What does this establishment prove? That the water of the Seine is muddy three fourths of the year, and that despite all the organization of the authority, its offices and its inspectors, one must purify the Seine's water at home, if one wants to drink it light and healthy.

One drank water, twenty years ago, without much thinking about it; but since the family of gas, the race of acids and salts have appeared on the horizon immediately after the puppets and the silhouettes [that is, children's shows], one thinks about the announcements of chemists; one has noticed that all the streams and underground sewers went right to the river: then everyone took up arms against mephitis. This new word has resounded like a terrible tocsin; harmful gases are seen everywhere...

And so we have begun to analyze water: and one reflects today, when drinking a glass of it, something our thoughtless ancestors did not.

Mercier was exaggerating, but only by a few decades. It was in the eighteenth century that municipalities began to show some concern with circumstances many had long taken for granted:

Town-dwellers all over France drank putrid water in the eighteenth century. The two main sources of cooking and drinking water – rivers and urban canals – doubled as latrines and public dumping grounds. Covered sewers, where they even existed, oozed malodorously into municipal waterways. Beyond the feces and sludge that muddied the waters, those looking to slake their thirst or bring home a bucket of cooking water – rich and poor alike – also had to contend with a fetid blend of pollutants that wound up in rivers: to wit, the contaminated runoff from dyers, launderers, cloth-makers, butchers, and other industries that required sites along water courses. All of the main rivers that flowed through city centers – the Seine and Bièvre in Paris, the Rhône and Saône in Lyons, the Garonne in Bordeaux and Toulouse – suffered from extensive environmental degradation yet nonetheless mostly kept humans and horses alive. Water filtration, usually done crudely with sand, occurred only on a limited basis. Wells, which existed in abundance in cities such as Paris and Lyons, contained toxins as well, since they generally tapped into groundwater infected with urine (human and animal alike) and the waste from corpses decomposing in poorly situated cemeteries....

The records left by the academies, paired with other sources, indicate that numerous municipalities in the middle and late eighteenth century confronted the problem of potable water supply. Indeed one could say that water management constituted a central focus for urban planners in this period. The growing awareness that city centers lacked sufficient quantities of salubrious drinking water appears to have been the byproduct of a double prise de conscience. First of all, new medical research illustrated the desirability of more hygienic forms of alimentation, inspiring men of letters and enlightened administrators to push for greater sanitation; and urban planners increasingly recognized the need for better management of unreplenishable natural resources.

(Caradonna)

Note however that all this awareness of the dangers of the Seine's water came into focus with the Enlightenment. For centuries before that, whatever its defects, it had been considered acceptable: “Lacking bacteriological analysis, obviously impossible, no one could prove the harmfulness of old waters and Parisian consumption had never ceased to depend on the river.” (Roche) People seem to have taken the side effects in stride:

For the people, for the average burgher the sickening water of wells or of the River, all on the street and the rare latrines are the ordinary horizon. One drinks the water of the Seine and fountains that has been left to decant and filter. The frequency of enteritis noted by medical topographies shows that the organisms adapt for better or worse, foreigners must get used to them and travelers denounce these regrettable diarrheas; sometimes they die of them, this is what happens to Mozart's mother.

(Roche)

In Roche's analysis, this may have been one situation where people did use alcohol - but not to avoid standard, odorless water; to avoid the overtly fetid water of the Seine:

On the eve of the Revolution the Parisian disposes of a good half liter [of wine] counting women and children... That is to say, one lifts the elbow from dawn to dusk. The organism requires, in the XXth century, 3 litres of daily water... In the XVIIIth century the daily ration of the Parisian must count on average between .5 l et 1 l of wine and perhaps .5 l of water....In a word, cities drink wine because the water is unappetizing.

Roche's conclusions here are arguable; he does not give his sources for his figures and even if accurate they do not conclusively show why people drank more wine in Paris (because they liked it? Because it was a distraction from other hardships? These too are reasonable explanations). But even taken at face value, they show only that at the end of the eighteenth century, when distribution made various qualities of wine more readily available and Parisian water remained overtly off-putting, a small part of the French population chose alcohol over water.

What stands out above all in these accounts is that for a long time people drank water even in cities where its bad qualities were plain. Though purity of water was increasingly an objective, it was not a pre-requisite for drinking it.

Conclusions

Specific examples and the statements of doctors, agriculturalists and others show, simply, that people regularly drank water after the Middle Ages, as they had before. Conversely, even though documentation now becomes far more abundant than in the Middle Ages, there is no specific period record of anyone preferring wine or beer to water because the latter was considered unhealthy. This is the case even when, arguably, it was unhealthy, as it increasingly became in cities. Ironically, though the claim that people drank wine or beer instead of water is often applied to less developed periods, in fact it is progress that made urban water less safe: more people in a limited space, more toxic trades (dyers, tanners, etc) dumping their waste products, more bodies buried near the living, infecting ground water, etc. Even then, the only (and arguable) evidence that people drank more alcohol than water comes late in the period, towards the end of the Old Regime, and then (so far) for Paris.

It is important too to note that the problems of cities were not the problems of France, which long remained an essentially rural country. Nothing suggests that, outside cities and towns, the water from springs or streams would have been any less healthy than it always had been and wells would have been far less susceptible to contamination than when, for instance, they were close to urban sewers.

None of this is to suggest that those who could did not prefer to drink alcoholic drinks; even today many prefer drinks other than plain water. But, as with the Middle Ages, the claim that people regularly avoided regular (clean, odorless) drinking water and favored alcoholic drinks as a healthier alternative cannot be supported by evidence from the period. To the contrary, it is clear that water was a common and even recommended drink.

FOR FURTHER READING:

Crumley, Bruce, "How to Save Rural France", Time, August 2, 2010

The Water Project thewaterproject.org

Charity Water charitywater.org

“Biggest Alcohol-Drinking Nations In Africa”, AFK Insider, 2013

Gofen, Ethel, Blandine Pengili Reymann, France 2003

"Study Finds Safety of Drinking Water in U.S. Cities at Risk". Natural Resources Defense Council Accessed 7-17-2015

Joubert, Laurent, La premiere et la seconde partie des erreurs populaires touchant la Medecine & le regime de santé 1587 -

Froissart, Jean, Joseph Marie Bruno Constantin Kervyn de Lettenhove (baron), Oeuvres de Froissart: 1383 1870

Leguay, Jean-Pierre, La pollution au Moyen Age: dans le royaume de France et dans les grands fiefs 1999

Monstrelet, Enguerrand de, Choix de chroniques et mémoires sur l'histoire de France, avec notices biographiques. , Chroniques de Monstrelet (France, Angleterre, Bourgogne) : 1400-1444 ed J.-A.-C. Buchon 1875

Montaigne, Michel de, Charles Louandre, Estienne de La Boétie Essais de Montaigne: Suivis de Sa Correspondance, Et de La ..., V4 1862

Montluc, Blaise de,Buchon,Jean Alexandre C.,Choix de chroniques et mémoires sur l'histoire de France, avec notices biographiques, par J.-A.-C. Buchon. [V. 10]. Commentaires du maréchal Blaise de Montluc. Mémoires du maréchal de Vieilleville 1861

Charrière, Ernest, Négociations de la France dans le Levant, ou Correspondances, mémoires et actes diplomatiques des ambassadeurs deFrance à Constantinople et des ambassadeurs, envoyés ou résidentsà divers titres à Venise, Raguse, Rome, Malte et Jérusalem, enTurquie, Perse, Géorgie, Crimée, Syrie, Égypte, etc., et dans lesÉtats de Tunis, d'Alger et de Maroc. IV. 1860

Souvigny, Jean de Gangnières, Cte de, Mémoires du comte de Souvigny, lieutenant-général des armées du roi. Vol 1 1613-1638 ed Baron Ludovic de Contenson 1906-1909

Brienne, Louis-Henri de Loménie, Mémoires de Louis-Henri de Loménie, comte de Brienne, dit le Jeune Brienne. Ed V1H. Laurens 1916-1919

Villars, Louis-Hector, Mémoires du maréchal de Villars. V4 1884-1904

Caix de Saint-Aymour, Amédée, Mémoires et documents pour servir à l'histoire des pays qui forment aujourd'hui le département de l'Oise : (Picardie méridionale, nord de l'Ile de France). Série 21898-1916

Sévigné, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Lettres de Madame de Sévigné, de safamille, et de ses amis. V. 1676-1678 ed Gault de Saint-Germain. 1823

Campan, Madame, Mémoires sur la vie de Marie-Antoinette, reine de France et de Navarre : suivis de souvenirs et anecdotes historiques sur les règnes de Louis XIV, de Louis XV et de Louis XVI / par Mme Campan edFs. Barrière, 1849

Guy de Chauliac, Laurent Verduc, Le Maistre En Chirurgie, Ou L'Abrege De La Chirurgie (etc.)

1697

Liebault, Jean, Carolus Stephanus, Jean de Clamorgan, L'agriculture et maison rustique ... plus un bref recueil des chasses du cerf, du sanglier,du lieure ... & du loup : et de la fauconnerie. Le tout reveu,corrigee & augmente ... 1577

Not all good drinking water free of poisons

Palissy, Bernard, Discours admirables de la nature des eaux et fontaines tantnaturelles qu'artificielles, des metaux, des sels & salines, despierres, des terres, du feu & des emaux ... plus vn traité de la Marne ... 1580

Gérard François, Les trois premiers livres de la santé 1583

de Serres, Olivier, Le théâtre d'agriculture et mesnage des champs 1617

Smith, John, Jean-Pierre Nicéron, Pierre Noguez, Traité des vertus médicinales de l'eau commune 1626

Paré, Ambroise, Rigaud, Les oeuures d'Ambroise Paré, conseiller et premierchirurgien du roy. Dixiesme edition, reueue et corrigée en plusieurs endroits, et augmentée d'vn fort ample traicté des fiéures, tanten general qu'en particulier, et de la curation d'icelles,nouuellement trouué dans les manuscrits de l'autheur : auec les pourtraicts & figures, tant de l'anatomie, que des instrumens de chirurgie, & de plusieurs monstres 1641

Lemery, Nicolas, Traité universel des drogues simples, mises en ordre alphabétique... par Nicolas Lemery 1714

Diderot, Denis, “Eau”, Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers ... 1782

Barra, Pierre, L'usage de la glace, de la neige et du froid 1675

Blakey, William, Essay on the Manner of Preserving Children and Grown Personsfrom Ruptures: By Mr. Blakey, ... In Four Parts. 1792

Girard, Pierre-Simon, Recherches sur les eaux publiques de Paris, les distributions successives qui ont été proposés pour en augmenter le volume 1812

Mercier, Louis Sebastien, Tableau de Paris. Nouv. ed., corr. et augm. 1782-83

Caradonna, Jeremy L.,The Enlightenment in Practice: academic prize contests and intellectual culture in France, 1670-1794 2012

Roche, Daniel, "Le temps de l'eau rare du Moyen Âge à l'époque moderne", Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations V39 1984

Saturday, July 5, 2014

Shifts in fasting in medieval France

Knotker the Stammerer tells how Charlemagne visited a bishop on a Friday and the bishop having no other fast day food offered him cheese (and possibly, in one reading, fat). Yet in the fifteenth century, a diarist said that people were eating cheese “as in meat-eating time”, showing that it was not normally a fast day food. By that later date, too, a “fish day” and a “fast day” were virtually the same thing. Yet in earlier centuries, not only did fish not have a special status, it was forbidden to some religious communities.

These were not the only changes in Catholic fasting in France in the medieval period, and even after. A number of factors joined to modify this fundamental practice over the centuries and have continued to do so in more recent times.

Father Thomassin, one of the great authorities on the subject of Church fasting, goes so far as to see in such variations a kind of poetry:

There is no harm in saying that the Apostles established different practices in different Churches, so that this variety makes up a part of the beauty of the dress of the Church, which is this Queen Spouse of Eternal Wisdom, which has inside her quite other beauties in the unity of her faith and her mysteries.

Any reader of French with a deep interest in this subject will want to consult his work, whose chapter headings alone give some idea of the daunting complexity of the subject. Mercifully, the focus here is only on medieval France – a sufficiently complex period in regard to fasting.

For more about the early Middle Ages
Feasting with the Franks

The First French Medieval Food

Early variations

When the Franks took over Gaul, Christianity was still only a few centuries old. Fasting had begun in the most extreme way:

In the primitive ages, Christians used no other food on fasting days than herbs, pulse, roots or fruit, with bread: some added a small quantity of little fishes; but had nothing of this dressed nicely, or with much preparation.... Some allowed themselves no other food than what was eat raw, without any dressing by fire; and this was called by the Greek name Homophagic: Those who observed the most severe, and what was called the true fast, confined their meal to Xerophagie, that is, to dry food, such as nuts, almonds, and such like fruits with bread: some took only bread and water.

(Butler)

Even then, it seems, people could (as French nobles later would) make restricted meals luxurious; St. Jerome inveighs against those who brought the finest, most luxurious fruits to their table when fasting.

By the fourth century, as the belief moved beyond a small core of believers, fasting practices began to vary. St. Epiphanius [c. 315-403] wrote:

The Catholic Faithful follow, in their way of living, several commendable regimes; because some abstain not only from the flesh of quadrupeds, of birds, and of fish, but also from eggs and cheese; others give up only quadrupeds, and allow themselves birds and all other foods. Some eat no flying creatures; but they eat eggs, and fish. Others forbid themselves eggs. There are those who only use fish; there are those who, abstaining from fish, eat cheese, of which others deprive themselves. Finally, some reject bread; and others, the fruits of trees, as well as all cooked foods.

Another historian of the period, named (like the ancient philosopher) Socrates [born c. 380] made similar observations:

Some abstain generally from all animals; others, of all types of animals, eat only fish; others join to fish flying creatures, and think them born of water as Moses says... There are those who, when they have fasted until the ninth hour, then allow themselves various foods. Different nations have their different ways of fasting, and this diversity has an infinity of causes. Because, since no one can show in the Holy Books anything precise on this subject, it is obvious that the Apostles have left to each of the Faithful the liberty of doing in this Realm what he pleases; and that is, in my opinion, the reason for the difference in fasts which exist in the various churches.

Socrates makes an important point: the Bible did not, for Christians, define dietary details, even for fasting. It is not surprising then that over time the Church was obliged to “fine-tune” the concept. This did not only involve defining the appropriate foods; Thomassin outlines various early disagreements about which days should be fast days, whether Christians should fast on Saturdays during Lent (which the Greeks did not), etc.

Two major concerns in earlier centuries were heresies and “Judaizing”; that is, adopting any practice which might seem to reflect or preserve Jewish influence. It has been suggested, for instance, that Wednesday and Friday were preferred for fasts because of an idea that Jews fasted on Mondays and Thursdays. The idea of fasting on the Lord's Day, recommended by some heretics, was rejected, as at the fourth council of Carthage of 398: “Who intentionally fasts on the Lord's Day, is not considered Catholic” (Qui Dominico die studiose jejunat, non credatur Catholicus).

A Council of Gangres [c. 340] condemned the idea of Eustatus [Eustathius, 4^th c.] that eating meat itself was criminal. A later council at Ancyre [325?] obliged priests or deacons who abstained from meat to try some before abstaining after if they wanted. But anyone who would not eat vegetables cooked with meat was to leave the orders. (Hi qui in clero sunt, Prebyteri vel Diaconi, et a carnibus abstinent, placuit eas quidam attingere, et sic, si voluerint, abstinere. Si autem noluerint olera quae cum carnibus coquntar comedere, et canoni non cedant, ab Ordine cessare,) The Council of Toledo of 400 anathemized those who rejected meat or fowl not out of self-mortification but because of considering them execrable.

Lingering paganism was also a concern: one fast was set on the Calends of January primarily to counter pagan celebrations of Janus.

Even before Roman Gaul began to become France, then, the details of fasting were far from settled. The full history of Catholic fasting was from the start, and would remain, shifting and complex.

Early French Catholicism

The Council of Orleans of 511 was the first under the Franks and was in fact organized by Clovis himself. In regard to fasting, Church councils above all addressed Lent. This one set that Lent should last forty, not fifty, days, an issue which was still debated at this time. It also, unusually, addresses Rogation, saying that the three days of fasting for it should end on Ascension and that during the fast, Lenten foods (quadragesimalibus cibis) should be used. But it does not define these.

The next Council of Orleans, in 541, set the limits of Lent precisely and forbid healthy people from breaking the fast on Saturdays (as the Greeks then did); they were only allowed to have dinner (that is, a midday meal) on Sundays. (The exact time when one could break a Lenten fast itself was a subject of much discussion.) The 567 Council of Tours laid out detailed fasting requirements for monks, including the fact that they should dine (that is, not fast) between Christmas and Epiphany, since these are feast days. But its canons say nothing of lay people.

Friday and Saturday fasting

Note that these first councils addressed fasting on Lent. In fact, except where the canons from councils lay out detailed calendars for fasting for monks (as several do), when they address fasting, it is in regard to Lent. Yet the story of Charlemagne's cheese shows that, by his time, Friday was already set as a fast day. The first Church council to specify this seems to have come later, at Coyoac (in Spain) in 1050: “that Christians fast every Friday” (ut Christiani per omnes sextas ferias jejunent). The idea however had been discussed since the time of Tertullian (c. 160 – c. 225).

These fasts or half-fasts of the Fourth [Wednesday] and Sixth [Friday] day are certainly very ancient in the one and the other Church, though with this difference, principally that in the Latin Church these were fasts of devotion and in the Orient there was a law on this.... The Church claimed that the Apostles had only ordered the Lenten fast, while they left other fasts to the choice and the devotion of the faithful...

(Thomassin)

St. Augustine (354 – 430) wrote that Romans “often” fasted on Wednesday, Fridays and Saturdays; since he says elsewhere that people fasted every Saturday, it seems that fasting on Fridays, as on Wednesdays, was still essentially optional.

Innocent I (pope 401 – 417) wrote only that “we do not oppose fasting on Fridays”. But he was more definite about fasting on Saturdays, which Thomassin says was standard at this time in Rome, though not necessarily elsewhere. Yet, “this Pope does not let a single word escape his plume which tends to condemn other Churches, where this Saturday fast was not observed.” (Innocent by the way associated Friday and Saturday fasts with the sadness of the Apostles before Easter Sunday; this is an unusual justification for fasting which more typically is described as serving to rein in carnal urges.)

Thomassin says a great deal about fast days in this period, but never addresses how Friday became firmly set as a fast day. Knotker's anecdote about Charlemagne may be the first specific note of that being the case.

It is always useful too to bear in mind that for several centuries after Clovis' conversion (496) many Christians continued to be recently converted pagans and the Church may have taken some time to impose its more demanding rules; just enforcing Lent once a year probably took some doing, especially with groups whose diet included more meat than that of the Romans.

Whatever the practice in Christian Rome, Saturday fasting seems to have never been widespread elsewhere. According to Rudoph Glaber (985–1047), it was officially instituted after the disasters of his time (war, famine, etc.) to give thanks to God for restoring peace and prosperity. Glaber is the only one to record certain councils in this period, and he says that this was first set at one in the year thousand (a year which some gave special significance in itself). Gregory VII [c. 1015/1028 –1085] confirmed this at a council at Rome in 1078, which recommended Saturday abstinence, except for the sick or if a feast day fell on that day.

Nonetheless, says Le Grand d'Aussy, this was “very badly practiced among us”:

A council of Béziers, held in 1351, EXHORTS the Clergy, and above all Benefice-holders, as people who by their state are obliged to set a good example to lay people. to not eat meat on Saturdays.

Finally, however, there was a Council, held at Lavaut seventeen years later, which imposed this law on every ecclesiastic, Benefice-holders as well as on every person in sacred Orders; and which held them to it by express command, on pain of being denied entry to church for as many months as days they had sinned.

Even then certain Churches and certain Diosceses could be found which, in submitting to it, nonetheless wanted to reserve the right to eat meat, according to old custom, several Saturdays of the year; for example, from Christmas until the Purification. Among the Prelates who admitted the reservation was Poncher, Bishop of Paris. In his synodal Statutes (1500), he expressly says: toleramus diebus sabbathinis carnes comedere à festo Nativitatis Domini usque ad Purificationem B. Mariae. Aliis vero temporibus prohibemus. “We tolerate eating meat, Saturday from Christmas until the Purification. Outside this period, we forbid it.”

If Christians resisted Saturday fasting (which, in theory, still applies today), it may be in part because of the ongoing association of any observation on Saturday with the Jewish Sabbath. For a long time, Sabbato in Latin simply meant Saturday, and referred to the Jewish Sabbath; Sunday was “the Lord's Day”.

This is implicit in a poem by Baldric, the abbot of Bourgeuil (c. 1050 – 1130), who mocked one of his monks for observing it:

Sabbata custodis tanquam judeus Apella;

...tu refugis per sabbata tangere carnem.

[“Apella you keep the Sabbath like a Jew;

… you refuse to touch meat on Saturday.”]

Le Grand points out that this rule then applied to the clergy, not lay people. Saint Antoninus of Florence (1389-1459) makes it plain that in his time the French were among those who did not fast on Saturdays: “To eat meat on Saturday in places where the custom is not universally established is a mortal sin. It is no sin when the custom of eating it survives in the country as in France, Catalonia, etc.” (In Sabbatis comedere carnes, in locus ubi est consuetudo universaliter non comedi, mortale est. Secus, si consuetudo patrie habet quod comedantur; ut in Franciâ, Catalonia.)

Thomassin concludes from this that Saturday abstinence was only obligatory in France after 1450; he does not however describe how it became so. He also addresses the situation in Spain in this regard, once again showing a bland pragmatism:

But the custom having been so long-standing and so widespread in Spain and several other Regions of the West, of freely eating flesh on the ordinary Saturdays of the year; one must not be surprised if from so long-lived a custom something remained. If we had finer and more piercing eyes than we do, there are no old and somewhat common customs of which we would not still note some traces.

Thomassin also notes another change which came over time, not only in France, but in the “Universal Church”: one was no longer excused from fasting on these days because a feast day happened to fall on the same day; the principle only continued to apply on Christmas “which equally frees Fridays and Saturdays from the laws of abstinence.”

Observation of Lent

The observation of Lent was far more strictly regulated from the start of French history, as per the canons of Orleans in 541. It was around the same time that the Greek physician Anthimus wrote his dietetic for Clovis' son Theuderic. His only mention of fasting is specifically in regard to Lent. This may only mean that he did not consider weekly fasting arduous enough to warrant a special food (like the barley infusion he recommends for strength at Lent), but it is typical of early mentions of fasting in focusing on Lent.

In his biography of St. Radegund, Fortunatus describes her as essentially living a permanent fast. Still, he gives special attention to her (extreme) self-mortifications during Lent, but says nothing about her efforts to observe any of the weekly fasts.

Surprisingly, until Charlemagne, none of the Frankish legal codes mention Lent or other fasting obligations, which in later centuries were often legally enforced. Charlemagne most memorably addressed the holiday in his Saxon Capitulary of 789, when he made failure to observe Lent (without a good reason) a capital crime. Le Grand cites this in a way which suggests the rule was general, but in fact Charlemagne had a long history with the Saxons and what he regarded as their betrayals; at this point he did not hesitate to engage in, effectively, forced conversion. The clause then applied only to the Saxons.

Still, there is no doubt he took the holiday seriously. His Capitulary de Villis not only inventories certain foods as Lenten foods, but sets Palm Sunday as the day for his stewards to pay him. In one of Knotker's tales of the Emperor, a bishop presumed to lecture Charlemagne on breaking his fast too early in the day on Lent; the monarch then made the man sit through all the successive services demanded by court etiquette before eating himself – after midnight. It is clear in the anecdote that the Emperor took the criticism seriously. (Thomassin writes that the very fact that the bishop found nothing else to criticize shows how scrupulously Charlemagne observed Lent.)

Charlemagne and Alcuin also corresponded on the finer points of Lent and the periods around it.

Sometime after Charlemagne, but before Charles the Bald, four days were added to Lent; Thomassin says this was in response to criticisms by the Greek Church.

Subsequently, the main variations in Lent were in the particular foods allowed and the rigor with which it was (or was not) enforced. The latter seems to have become more pronounced as the medieval period ended. By 1534, when Guillaume du Moulin, Lord of Brie, sought permission for his aged mother to eat meat, the bishop of Paris granted it only on condition that she do so secretly and that she nonetheless avoid meat on Fridays.

Le Grand cites a 1549 Edict of Henry II which forbids selling meat during Lent to anyone but those who bring a Doctor's certificate. Fourteen years later, Charles IX forbade selling it, even to Protestants, during this period. In 1565, he granted the Hotel-Dieu the exclusive privilege of selling meat, ordering that it be provided only to the sick. When the Parlement (a judicial body) confirmed this, first in 1573, then twenty years later, it not only literally demanded a note (an attestation) from a doctor, but that the butcher take the name and the dwelling of the sick person to allow subsequent verification.

Le Grand says that this strict enforcement (which, bear in mind, followed the terrible losses of the fourteenth century plague) was respected even in military camps. This would be less the case in subsequent centuries, however, as individual soldiers took it upon themselves to violate the fast.

Ember days

In France, these fast-days were known as “Four-Times” (Quatre-Temps). Gaul seems to have been late in adopting them; the Council of Mainz (813), held a year before Charlemagne's death, established them there. Thomassin says the dates set were approximately as they were in his time (the seventeenth century).

Pope Paul VI excluded these as days of fast and abstinence in his decree Paenitemini (February 17, 1966).

Birds on fast days

One of the most surprising aspects of early medieval fasting was the fact that many considered birds acceptable fare for the period. This was based on the fact that birds and fish were created together in Genesis and so, some felt, were of the same nature. Consider Socrates' statement above: “Some abstain generally from all animals; others, of all types of animals, eat only fish; others join to fish flying creatures, and think them born of water as Moses says...” (ab animatis penitus abstinent; alii ex animantibus pisces solos comedunt. Nonnuli, cum piscibus, etiam avibus vescuntur; ex aquis, ut est apud Moysen, eat quoque conditas esse affirmantes). This idea predated Frankish domination of Gaul, but persisted there, as Le Grand writes:

In France, it was regarded as an unquestionable principle; even by the most austere Religious Order, among those devoted to a perpetual Lent. At certain times of year, game and poultry were allowed the Monks. St. Columban so fed his people in a moment of shortage. Carnem quadrupedum, à die conversioniis sua usque ad extremum vitae, edere noluit: Jus e pullo compositum sumebat, si aliqua accessisset debilitas, [“For the day of his conversion to the end of his life he would not eat the meat of quadrupeds: if he felt weak, he took chicken broth.”] says the life of St. Benedict of Aniane. One reads in that of St. Eloi that, since his promotion to the Bishopric, he had given up eating meat; but that one day he allowed himself to eat a fowl with a guest who had arrived.

Gregory of Tours, who apparently did not eat meat, tells of Chilperic having a soup made for him “in which there is nothing but fowl and some chick peas." Le Grand also points out that a number of early saints' lives say that, in addition to abstaining from the meat of quadrupeds, “that as a particular mortification, they abstained... from poultry and two-footed game.”

It is questionable how official this position ever was and most early monastic rules implicitly or explicitly forbid poultry to any but the sick. But St. Benedict's rule (ultimately the most observed) only forbids the meat of quadrupeds to the monks (and at that was already ignored before the end of the Middle Ages).

Under Louis the Pious (reigned 814 – 840), an important council at Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen) in 817 forbade the canons poultry except four days at Easter and four days at Christmas. But this probably had little affect on the laity and seems to have been unevenly observed by the clergy. Le Grand cites this anecdote from the life of St. Odon, Abbot,of Cluny [d. 942]:

A Monk from this Abbey went to see his parents. In arriving, he asked for something to eat; it was a fast day. He was told that all there was in the house was fish. He spotted several chickens in the courtyard, took a stick and struck one down, saying, here is the fish I will eat today. The parents asked him if he had permission to eat meat: no, he answered, but a fowl is not meat. Birds and fish were created at the same time, and they have the same origin, as is taught in our hymn.

UPDATE 9/19/2015: Le Grand neglects however to say that the monk then choked to death on his food, mocked as he did by those around him; clearly, the monk John (who wrote this hagiography) did not approve of his sophistry.

He also cites St Thomas Aquinas [1224/25-1274] as defending the same idea: “and for this reason, the creation of birds is ascribed to water” (et ideo, produĉtio avium aqua adscribitur.

Le Grand cites Vincent de Beauvais [c.1190-1264?] as mentioning a thirteenth century Lateran Council under Innocent III which forbade eating the scoter duck on fast days. (This clause does not seem to appear in those cited by Poisson and Guérin, but documentation of councils is sometimes uncertain.) The issue of whether the scoter duck, in particular, could be considered as “fish” would reoccur in later centuries.

Otherwise, it is not clear when this idea faded from practice as well as official approval, but it was probably before the end of the Middle Ages.

Eggs and milk

Knotker's anecdote is not the only evidence that dairy was considered acceptable on fast days in Charlemagne's time. De Villis lists both cheese and butter as fast day foods.

Two thirds of the Lenten food shall be sent each year for our use — that is, of the vegetables, fish, cheese, butter, honey, mustard, vinegar, millet, panic, dry or green herbs, radishes, turnips, and wax or soap and other small items

In the same period, Theodulf, Bishop of Orléans (797), wrote that "It is a man of great virtue who can abstain from eggs, from cheese, from fish and from wine." (Qui ovis, caseo, piscibus, & vino abstinere potest, magna virtatis est.) This shows that one was not obliged to abstain from any of these, but that it was considered virtuous to do so. Theodulf added what might be considered an observation of plain good sense: “What is forbidden, is drunkenness and wantonness and not milk and eggs, because the Apostle does not say: abstain from eggs and milk, but he says, do not get drunk with wine which produces wantonness."

These observations show that abstinence from these items was at least being considered at this point. But it was some time before an official change occurred.

Of eggs. Le Grand writes:

In regard to eggs, it is not surprising that people ate them without scruple. Opinion having established that fowl were meager [that is, not meat], of the same nature as fish, it was considered as a result that the egg too laid by this fowl was meager. The certificate of Charles the Bald [823 – 877], in favor of the St. Denis Abbey, allows this Monastery, among other things, eleven hundred eggs, annually, on the three great feast-days of the year; and we know that the Benedictine Order always abstains from meat. The Abbey of St. Maur des Fosses received every year, at Ozoir, at Torcy, at Boissy-Saint-Léger, and at Ferrières, a certain number of eggs for the Monks' pittance. Finally, the Carthusians who observe a perpetual Lent and who have always observed it with the strictest regularity, ate eggs. Their rules forbid them these only during Advent; they formally allow them them during all the rest of the year.

In 1365 a council at Anger stated that one should not only avoid meat, but those things which derived from it (a virtually vegan position). It explicitly forbade both the clergy and the laity the use of cheese and butter, even in bread (thus documenting that these were used in bread at this point).

The history of dairy and fasting remains complex after this, but again in the fifteenth century the diarist known as the “Bourgeois of Paris” wrote that “they ate flesh in Lent, cheese, milk, and eggs, as in the meat-eating period.” All of these then were considered inappropriate for fast days by the end of the Middle Ages.

Animal fat

One of the more curious aspects of early medieval fasting was the use of “bacon juice” by those who otherwise avoided meat. This had its roots in a geographical anomaly: olive trees grew readily in the south, but not in the north. The Franks had always used pork fat in the same way southerners used olive oil. Monks in the colder parts of France long did the same, as Le Grand explains:

St. Ansegesis, Abbot of Fontenelle, in the Constitution he wrote for his Monks at the start of the IXth century, sets that they will annually kill forty fat pigs, to provide themselves with fat, bacon and ointment. Louis the Debonaire, in assigning twenty modius of fat per year to the monastery of St. Germain, declares that the Monks can take in exchange fifty pigs, the best that they can find. There exists a Charter of Charles the Bald benefiting the Monastery of St. Denis (862) by which the Prince grants this Abbey, at the solemnities of Christmas and Easter, two fat pigs to prepare poultry; ad volatila eorum praeparanda. Finally, in the Miracles de St. Vandrille, one reads the tale of a knight who, wanting to take some land from the Monastery of this name, began by carrying off all the pigs which the Brothers had fattened in order to season their foods.

Le Grand says this about the practice:

Lacking fat, bacon was used for the Monks' cooking; that is, a piece of bacon was put in with their vegetables and with their greens, when they were cooked. Before serving their vegetables at the table, this bacon was pressed to squeeze out its juice; but once it had been pressed in this way, they were very careful to throw it away; because these same men who, at peace with themselves, swallowed several pounds of pig flesh reduced to juice, would have thought to mortally sin had they knowingly swallowed the slightest bit of this same flesh in its original form.

When this problem was raised at the 817 council of Aix-la-Chapelle, it was decided that the regular canons could use “bacon oil”: "And because the Franks do not have olive oil, the Bishops want the (Regular Canons) to use bacon oil" (Et quia oleum olivarum Franci non habent, voluerunt Episcopi ut (Canonici Regulares) oleo lardino utantur.) This meant in effect that monks who otherwise avoided meat could use the fat from it to season their greens (an idea already mentioned by Anthimus, who says that, from a health point of view, this was acceptable). (Note that “bacon”, in texts from this period, is typically referenced separately from “meat”.)

At some point this was questioned, as Le Grand explains:

Later it was found, as I have observed elsewhere, that this was a dainty ill-suited to people who had devoted themselves, as a penitence, to an austere life. The juice of bacon was forbidden; from then on it was regarded by the Faithful as meat; and so people were obliged to substitute butter for it in preparing dishes. This last substance became almost a necessity; it was combined with the most rigorous fast. This is what can be seen from a work titled Claustro Animæ, by Hugues de Feuillet, Abbot of St. Denis, in 1149. The author, examining what must be the food of a true Monk, says that he must live on fruits and vegetables, and that these vegetables must be prepared, not with fat, but with butter, oil or milk.

Even then, human nature being what it is, it may come as no surprise that even those who had other options took advantage of this indulgence. The 1365 council at Angers noted this fact, and took appropriate action: “We know that in several regions not only the Regular Canons but even the Clerics use milk and butter at Lent and on fast days; even though they have fish, oil, and everything which is necessary for this period. As a result, we forbid any person whatsoever milk and butter during Lent, even in bread and vegetables; unless they have obtained a specific permission.”

Sometime between 817 and the fourteenth century then, it became unacceptable for monks held to abstinence to use “bacon oil”. But the fact that it ever was allowed demonstrates the vagaries of fasting in the medieval period.

Fish

For centuries now, the association between fasting and fish has been a strong one. In the late medieval period, “fish day” and “fast day” were virtually synonymous. Yet in earlier centuries there is no sign of this. Monastic rules only occasionally reference fish and then sometimes to limit its use. Note that Theodulf includes it in his list above of foods a man of "virtue" might avoid. St. Bernard's mention of quadrupeds means that fish was probably allowed to his monks; but nothing in the rule gives it a special status.

A very rare mention of fish on fast days in earlier centuries comes, not from France, but Spain, where the Council of Toledo of 633 cited fish and greens as fast day food. But nothing in other documents echoes this.

Two reasons for this come to mind. One is that, when poultry was still an acceptable option for fasting, fish was probably a less attractive alternative. The other is that, until methods for preserving it improved, it simply was not practical to depend on fish in regions far from the sea or streams that provided it.

Charlemagne kept fish pools and so had fish available on his estates. De Villis includes fish among the Lenten foods to be sent to him. But it has no special place relative to legumes, greens or grains, or even cheese. Still, this is an early mention in France of fish specifically as a fast day option.

At some point, two things happened: eating birds on fast days became less acceptable and new preservation methods made it possible to transport fish across long distances. Very tentatively, this may be why fish suddenly became not just one fast day option, but the main one.

Herring, which is absent from earlier mentions of fish, became common in France towards the end of the Middle Ages. In 1215, for instance, Thibaut, Count of Blois, granted a half-thousand herring annually to the Hospital of Beaugency. St. Louis (reigned 1226 – 1270) granted, among other gifts, sixty-eight thousand herring to different monasteries, leprosariums and hospitals. Eel, which is also barely mentioned in earlier texts, became a standard food.

By the fourteenth century, cookbooks regularly offered fast day options, often including fish. In one fast-day recipe for flan, for instance, cheese is replaced using fish eggs. The council of Angers included fish as one of the acceptable fast day items.

From this time on, fish was standard on fast days and even closely associated with them. But this represented a major change from earlier centuries in France.

Conclusion

Le Grand sums up the shifts in French fasting as follows:

If it was possible to restore to Life for an instant someone who no longer lives, it would be a Spectacle quite worthy of a Philosopher's eyes to seat at the same table a Monk of the VIIIth century, a Monk of the XIVth, and one of ours and to serve all three what, in their different times, and according to the regime of their same Rule, constituted and constitutes their fasting food. One would see the last think to keep a severe abstinence in eating eggs, butter and milk-meat; the second regard these substances as meat and abstain from them with horror; the first to the contrary would join to them without scruple a fowl, a partridge, vegetables or greens seasoned with fat or bacon. What a horrible scandal they would cause each other! How they would mutually condemn each other to excommunication.

Consider how different fasting could be in the early medieval period: birds were long acceptable as fast-day foods, monks could use “bacon oil”, dairy was perfectly standard, fish had no special status as a fast day food. All this is in addition to less-documented changes in the days on which fasting was required and the hour at which it could be broken.

These changes may not have been any more dramatic than others which occurred in fasting before and which would occur later, even into recent centuries. But they add up to a very varied idea of Catholic fasting in the medieval period, one that is often at odds with common ideas of the period.