Did people really drink beer instead of water in the middle ages?

WATER HISTORY WEDNESDAY | EDITION 08

It’s a popular myth that beer was actually more popular than water in the middle ages. Many books and records from the time like to emphasize that the water was so polluted during this period that medieval men and women would only drink wine, ale or some other kind of beverage.

But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that they truly understood the importance of drinking water. In fact many texts write the benefits of drinking water, as long as it came from good sources.

But were they equipped with good sources?

Leading up to and after the Fall of the Roman Empire, a lot of the famous Roman Aqueducts fell into disrepair having been impacted by war and neglected by a growing population.

During this time and leading into the Middle Ages, the progression that the Romans had made on water technology was falling into decline all across Europe, but they did retain some of the Roman hydraulic components. The basic technological discoveries, based on low-pressure systems of channels and pipes, had been established, meaning a lot of the individual components such as pipes and taps were nearly identical to that of the Romans. However, after the Roman Empire fell the idea of sewers was essentially lost to Europe for 1,300 years.

Water Supply

During the Middle Ages, it was not uncommon for those parts of London which were near the Thames to use the river as their main source of culinary water. Away from the river, houses were built chiefly where there were beds of gravel or loam. These beds afforded a good water supply to shallow wells until an increase in population led to contamination.

Water supply was available in villages from nearby springs, rivers, lakes, wells and cisterns. Like most civilisations in history, villages were positioned in proximity to water sources.

Castles were treated the same but received additional water from masonry-lined wells sunk into their interior courtyards, sometimes accessible from within the castle keep for extra security when under attack. Some castles even drew water from the well at every level of the keep using a system of buckets and ropes that ran inside the walls.

In the 1240s the citizens of London constructed a city-wide underground freshwater system to provide fresh water to London, known as the Great Conduit.

The Great Conduit was the terminal point of the first public water supply system in the City of London. The Great Conduit conveyed freshwater from Tyburn to Cheapside, which ended at a building where the water could be collected outside the Hospital of St Thomas of Acre.

The approval of this construction was granted by King Henry III in 1237. The Corporation purchased several freshwater springs to the west, near Tyburn to convey water from them to the City by a pipeline over 4km long. By the year 1245, the pipeline (primarily built using lead) was finished and the terminal structure known as the Conduit, was built.

By the 13^th century, the increase in population made the existing water supply insufficient, thus second and third Conduits were built, and by the time of the Great Fire 300 years later, there were no less than 15 Conduits in the City.

The Conduits were all similar in design, the head of the conduit was placed near a natural spring and the water was used to fill a nearby cistern or tank. From the cistern, the water flowed through pipes for a distance of a couple kilometers or more. The Conduits were usually situated in the middle of the streets, with an elevated lead tank having multiple outlet pipes and cocks or taps for dispensing water.

This was free to the city’s inhabitants and only monitored for excessive use by the city’s guards. It is noted that there were costs for maintenance and upkeep of this water supply, but it would only be later with the birth of the Industrial Revolution, that taxes on water supply would be imposed.

Waste Systems

In villages or on manor estates the peasanty used a cesspit for their own waste, which might then be taken and spread on the fields as fertiliser. The toilets in a castle, also known as privies or latrines, were much the same as everywhere else although the waste was channelled down a hole into a cesspit at the foot of the castle walls or into the moat itself.

In major towns, the wealthier citizens had their own privy in a backyard or in the house itself, directed by a channel to drain off waste into the yard. Whereas the poorer classes lived in more concentrated households and shared a single outside toilet with their waste leading to a communal cesspit. The cesspits were lined with stone to contain the waste and were often used for other household rubbish and regularly emptied by a city labourer.

There were regulations against tipping waste into the street, but these were often ignored. Paired with horses, farm animals and butchers, the streets were usually filthy leading to increasing rat populations. Thus, becoming an ideal breeding ground for disease. This led to frequent epidemics of waterborne diseases such as typhoid and cholera.

This became particularly dangerous during times of excess rain or flooding. Despite rainfall clearing the streets of waste, it also pushed water to the Thames which was still largely used as a water source by the citizens of London, thus contaminating their water supply.

The subsequent rise of waterborne diseases attributed to the idea that beer became the more popular drink as people chose to drink ale instead of the contaminated water.

The advancements in technology to produce safe drinking water in the cities ultimately accompanied the Industrial Revolution in Europe. As people left the country for jobs in manufacturing, cities grew to populations exceeding half a million, challenging the ability to provide adequate water.

The progress that occurred in this period can mostly be attributed to the growth of industries requiring water, including textile manufacturing and a little later, paper making.

The creation of engines was a big step forward, allowing them to pressurise the water and deliver water not just to the town square but into buildings.

That created the next big problem for water systems, which was the fact that people were now able to use that water inside for baths and for toilets.

All of that dirty water had to go somewhere, and it went back into the drinking water supply downstream of the city and so one of the main engineering challenges was to make that water safe to drink or to bring in clean water from other places.

This problem of contaminated water supplies would be solved by bringing in water from cleaner sources – either through the construction of canals from above the city or canals from the mountains. But later they looked into actually treating the water, which started a movement towards drinking water treatment to combat the rise of waterborne diseases.

Ultimately, the narrative that medieval men and women chose to drink ale over water was indeed a myth, but it did have some weight. As the quality of water declined, they continually chose to substitute water for ale, until movements to source cleaner drinking water arose.