Did Medieval Peasants Eat Meat? After The Black Death, Enough To Frighten Parliament

Ask the internet whether medieval peasants ate meat and it serves you pottage, a heel of dark bread and, for good behaviour, the odd rasher of bacon.

For an English labourer in the 1250s, that answer is correct. For a harvest hand in Norfolk around 1400, it is short by nearly a pound of meat a day.

The difference was the Black Death. It cut England’s population by 40% or more, and it left the survivors something a crowded England had long denied its labourers: the power to name their price. They spent the difference on meat and ale. The king and Parliament replied by pinning wages to the rates of 1346, and when that failed, by writing the servant’s dinner into statute.

The peasant on bread and pottage who appears in the story of the modern diet and the history of human height is a real man, and he lived twice: once in the thirteenth century, and again under the Tudors. This is the story of the 150 years in between, when he ate beef, and of the men who spent those years trying to make him stop. The long record of meat kept from ordinary people, from the forest laws to the enclosures, is Forbidden Flesh. This is the one stretch of it where the lock broke, and it shows what people buy the moment they can choose.

What medieval peasants ate in 1256: barley bread and cheese

By 1300 England held somewhere between 4.5 and 6 million people, roughly twice as many as it would in the early 1520s. Every one of them had to be fed from the same fields, and an acre of grain feeds more mouths than an acre of grazing, so the plough went wherever a team of oxen could drag it.

Livestock had jobs. The ox pulled the plough, the cow gave milk for cheese, and the cottage pig turned scraps into a winter’s bacon. The deer in the wood belonged to the king. Most of the animal food that reached a labourer came as milk, cheese and a little butter, which medieval English called white meat, and he ate a good deal more of the white kind than the red.

The clearest record of what a working man was actually given comes from Sedgeford, a manor on the sandy soils of north-west Norfolk. Every harvest its owner, Norwich Cathedral Priory, a house known for meticulous accounting, fed the harvest workers at the lord’s table, and the costs of that food were set down in detail. In 1273, 34 people were recorded at that table, from the sergeant and the reeve to the herdsmen and 2 dairymaids. The accounts run from 1256 into the fifteenth century, and in 1988 the historian Christopher Dyer worked through them.

In 1256 meat made up 4% of the value of the food those workers were given. Bread was 41%, dairy 28%, and fish and ale 13% apiece. Dyer also estimated the calories, and there the picture is starker: bread supplied 74% of the energy and meat 2%. For every 2lb of bread a worker got an ounce or two of meat, mostly bacon, and the bread was mostly barley. Wheat was under 8% of the bread corn, and it probably went to the supervisors.

These were the best-fed wage earners of their day, because harvest was the season of fierce competition for labour. Of the people beneath them, Dyer concludes that at times, especially in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they survived on cereals with very little animal protein.

So the search result has this man right. He was plant-based, and nobody had asked him.

The plague killed the workers and spared the fields

The Black Death came ashore in Dorset in the summer of 1348. By the time the first wave had burned through, England had lost 40% of its people or more.

The fields came through untouched. So did the barns, the ploughs and the oxen. The men and women who worked them were in the churchyard, and for the first time anyone could remember, a pair of working hands was the scarce thing in England.

The survivors noticed quickly. At Teddington in Middlesex, the manor’s carter had been paid 4s 6d a year in the mid-1330s. By 1350 he was on 11s. (12 pennies, written d, made a shilling, written s.) Parliament’s own complaint in 1351 was that servants refused to work unless they got liveries and wages double or treble what they used to take.

What they did with the money, the people who resented it wrote down in detail. William Langland, whose Piers Plowman was being written in the 1370s, gives us labourers with no land to live on but their hands turning their noses up at day-old greens, penny ale and a piece of bacon, and demanding fresh meat or fish, fried or baked, served “chaud and plus chaud”: hot, and hotter. Langland meant it as a sneer. It reads now as a shopping list. John Gower, a poet with manors in Kent, Suffolk and Norfolk, grumbled in his Mirour de l’Omme that the labourers of his day were idle, scarce and greedy, and wanted the highest pay for the least work, and clergy and gentry writers complained that farm servants now expected good ale and fresh meat, well cooked and hot.

The manor accounts back them up. At Appledram in Sussex in 1354, the officials had to explain to the auditors why more ale had been bought for the harvest: the reap-reeve refused to drink anything else for the whole season. In 1375 the same manor recorded that no more cheese or butter had been issued, because 6 wethers and ewes and 3 geese had gone into the harvest instead.

Norwich Cathedral Priory kept the receipts

Back at Sedgeford, the change runs through Dyer’s table like a tide coming in. He measured each food as a percentage of the total value issued, taking prices from the Sedgeford accounts and those of neighbouring manors, and satisfied himself that the trend came mainly from changes in the food on the table rather than from prices.

In 1256 meat was 4% of the harvest food bill. By 1368 it was 25%, and in 1387 it reached 30%. In 1424 meat stood at 28%, ale at 41%, and bread, once 41%, was down to 15%. Dairy fell from 28% to 9%.

In calories, bread dropped from 74% of the allowance to 40%, and meat rose from 2% to 23%. Counting only the solid food, meat took over 40% of the spending by the early fifteenth century, with bread down to a quarter. The thirteenth-century worker had an ounce or two of meat for every 2lb of bread. His fifteenth-century successor had a pound.

The meat changed as well. The bacon gave way to fresh beef, in some years 3 cattle went into the harvest, and fresh mutton joined them. Around 1400 the carcass meat came to nearly a pound a day for every worker on the roll, and a note from 1387 shows the offal was eaten too. Some of that no doubt fed helpers and families at home. Barley bread had vanished from the harvest table by 1387, and from 1407 the bread was wheat and nothing else. The ale went from under 3 pints a head a day to more than 6.

None of it was prime. Manors fed their harvest hands on animals past their working lives: old bulls, worn-out oxen, barren cows and culled sheep. That was the stock covered in the history of cattle and the old wool sheep that fed the country. At Mildenhall in Suffolk 2 heifers went into the harvest with a note to the auditors that they were thought to be diseased, and Dyer wonders whether anyone told the harvest workers.

The beef and strong ale that later generations would call traditional English food became a working man’s food at tables like this one, in the century after the plague.

The tide had begun to turn a little before 1348. On another Norfolk manor, Catton, spending on bread was already falling and spending on meat rising from the 1290s, and at Sedgeford the bread share had been falling since the 1290s, from 48% in 1294 to 34% by 1341. Wages were creeping upward in the decades after the agrarian crisis of 1315 to 1322. The plague took that trickle and made a flood of it, and the water kept rising for 50 years and more, peaking in the fifteenth century. Every step of it follows one variable: how badly the employer needed the man at his table.

The best-fed table in England is the one that settles it

Fine. The harvest hands were an aristocracy of labour, and Dyer says so himself. That is precisely why their table matters. Harvest was the season when lords, demesne farmers, rectors and better-off peasants all wanted the same hired hands, so the harvest table shows what a labourer ate the moment an employer had to bid for him.

The same shift turns up wherever the accounts survive. Dyer checked Sedgeford against 17 other manors from Norfolk to Hampshire. At Martham the bread share of the harvest food bill fell from 48% in 1266 to 16% in 1389. At Thurlby in Lincolnshire meat went from 8% in 1341 to 26% in 1362. In the south, where harvest hands had been given cider, ale replaced it. The year-round manor servants, who never ate at the lord’s table, were given more wheat in their grain wages, and the land moving from plough to pasture after 1349 points to meat eating rising well beyond the harvest field.

The best evidence of all is Parliament. Nobody passes a law about a groom’s dinner unless the groom’s dinner has changed.

Edward III pinned the wage to 1346

The government moved before the plague had finished. On 18 June 1349, with the pestilence still raging, Edward III and his council issued an ordinance to force the able-bodied to work and hold wages at their 1346 level. Every man and woman under 60 without land or a trade to live by was bound to serve whoever required them, and refusal meant prison.

The first Parliament after the plague met in February 1351 and hardened the ordinance into the Statute of Labourers. The petition behind it came from the Commons, the gentry and townsmen who paid the wages, and the statute that answered it set out to curb “the malice of servants”. A reaper was to get 2d a day in the first week of August and 3d in the second. Servants were to be hired by the year, and day workers were to carry their tools openly to the market town and be hired in public, where everyone could see. The food that had sweetened every harvest bargain was banned outright: the rates were to be paid “without meat or drink, or other courtesy to be demanded, given, or taken”. Meat and drink, in the old phrase, meant food of any kind. Every village was ordered to build a set of stocks by Whitsunday.

The fines had a destination. The statute sent them to the collectors of the national tax, to be set against what each village owed. In 1352 the justices in Essex raised £710 10s in labour fines against a county tax bill of £1,234, so more than half the county’s assessment that year was met from the fines. The king’s tax was paid with money taken back from working people for the offence of being paid what they were worth.

Henry Knighton, a chronicler writing at the time, recorded that servants served their masters worse by the day after the statute, while the king’s profits and his power over the people kept on growing.

For a few years it bit. The Teddington carter on 11s in 1350 was down to 7s by 1352, still well above the 4s 6d he had been paid before the plague. That success was brief, confined largely to the 1350s, and the justices spent the following decades chasing people who had noticed. In Lincolnshire in 1373, 3 mowers at Newton on Trent were presented for charging 8d an acre when the statute allowed 5d. In 1374 Alice, wife of John Redhed of East Ravendale, was presented for walking out of her agreed harvest service and taking work outside the village for higher wages.

In 1363 Parliament went for the plate

14 years of wage law had failed to put the servant back where he belonged, so in 1363 Parliament went after his dinner.

The Statute concerning Diet and Apparel opened by deploring the outrageous and excessive dress of people above their station, to the great destruction and impoverishment of all the land. Then it turned to the menu. Grooms, the lowest servants, whether they served lords or worked in the crafts and trades, were to be served “once a Day of Flesh or of Fish”, with the rest of their food milk, butter, cheese and the like, according to their estate. The same statute put farm workers and anyone with goods worth less than 40s in russet or cheap blanket cloth.

The servants it named ate at their employer’s table, so their dinner was part of their wages, and a limit on what could be set in front of them was a pay cap dressed as a bill of fare. It was aimed as much at the employers outbidding each other with food as at the servants who had learned to ask for it.

Enforcing it would have taken a justice at every kitchen table in England at dinnertime, counting the meat and reporting the master who had fed his ploughman well enough to keep him. The law was repealed by the very next Parliament, and England passed no further sumptuary law until 1463. The milk, butter and cheese it left the servant were always worth taking in any case.

In 1381 the labourers answered

The labour laws kept coming back, reissued and sharpened. The historian G. M. Trevelyan called the Statute of Labourers “the favourite child of Parliament”. Then the Crown, short of money for the war in France, reached for the poll tax. There were 3, in 1377, 1379 and 1380, and the third charged a shilling a head for everyone over 15, averaged across each township, with the better-off meant to help the poor. At the Statute of Labourers’ own harvest rate of 2d or 3d a day, a shilling was 4 to 6 days of reaping for every adult in the house, wife included.

In Piers Plowman, the labourer refused his hot meat curses the king and his whole council for making laws that grieve working men. The poll tax lit the fuse. The powder had been packing since 1351: for farm labourers and the urban poor, the chief grievance was probably the Statute of Labourers.

In June 1381 the men of Essex and Kent marched on London. At Mile End on 14 June the rebels met the king, and among their demands was a rent limit of 4d an acre. The 14-year-old Richard II promised them the end of serfdom. At Smithfield the next day, William Walworth, the Mayor of London, struck down Wat Tyler. The letters of freedom granted at Mile End were cancelled, and rebels were killed by judicial and military action in Essex, Norfolk and elsewhere.

7 years later a Parliament sitting at Cambridge tried again. No labourer was to leave his hundred without a letter under the king’s seal, issued on the justices’ say-so, on pain of the stocks, and farm wages were capped afresh: a carter or a shepherd was to get no more than 10s a year.

The law had lost. Through the fifteenth century a day’s pay kept buying more, and by 1476 to 1480 the real wages of building craftsmen in southern England stood at a level not surpassed until 1886 to 1890. Tyler was dead, the leaders were executed, and the wages rose anyway. That century is the one the pottage answer leaves out.

The fields followed the fork

With so few hands left to plough, landowners did the sums. A field of corn needs a crowd at sowing and a bigger one at harvest. A flock or a herd needs a stockman and a dog. So the plough retreated from the poorer land and grass went down in its place. At Sedgeford the manor’s own sown land, which had sometimes topped 400 acres before the plague, was down to 268 by 1424.

The wool side of that shift, the sheep that made England rich, is told in the history of the sheep. On the meat side, land in grass carries animals, animals become dinner, and the cheaper grains and pulses once grown for people’s food went more and more to feeding livestock. Dyer reads the move from arable to pasture after 1349 as a sign of rising meat consumption generally, and during the fifteenth century landlords, leaseholders and prosperous peasants in the Midlands built specialist grazing farms to supply a growing demand for beef.

The labourer’s wage created the demand, and the land nobody could afford to plough raised the supply.

When the people came back, so did the barley loaf

England’s population hit its lowest point after 1400, and in the early 1520s it was still only about 2.3 million, roughly half the 1300 figure. Then it started to climb, and the arithmetic of 1348 ran backwards. Hands were plentiful again and employers stopped bidding. In the sixteenth century the renewed pressure of population drove food output per head and real wages back down.

The grass that had fed the labourer in the fifteenth century was fenced and stocked for the landowner’s profit in the sixteenth, and Forbidden Flesh has the enclosures. William Harrison, vicar of Wimbish in Essex, described England’s bread in 1577. The gentry kept wheat for their own tables. Their households and poor neighbours in some shires made do with rye or barley, and in a dearth with bread of beans, peas or oats, “and some acorns among”.

The barley loaf that had vanished from the Sedgeford harvest by 1387 was back on the poor man’s table. That is the peasant in the story of the modern diet and the history of human height: the man of the 1250s, and the man of the 1570s. Grain is the food of the governed, and both of those men were governed on someone else’s terms. The labourer who stood between them ate beef, because for a hundred years nobody could make him stop.

The menu is still being written for other people

The record runs one way. When labour was cheap, the governed ate grain. When labour was dear, they bought meat, and the people who paid the wages reached for the law to take it back, each time in the language of the common good: the malice of servants, outrageous and excessive living, the destruction and impoverishment of all the land.

Christopher Dyer, in his 1988 paper, noted that modern nutritionists would not count a diet of more and fattier meat as an improvement. He added that too much fat was never the medieval problem. Too little animal protein for the poor was. The harvest hands of 1424, with employers competing for them, took beef, wheat bread and nearly a gallon of ale a day.

Nobody needs a statute now. In October 2025 the EAT-Lancet Commission published its planetary health diet, with the Harvard nutrition professor Walter Willett among its co-chairs: red meat limited to 15g a day, about one serving a week, poultry and fish to 2 servings a week each, and unsaturated plant oils favoured over saturated fats. The case is made for the good of all the land, and the land is now the planet. The making of modern dietary advice is its own story, told in nutrition corruption, and the case against fresh red meat runs a good deal thinner than the headlines, as red meat and cancer sets out.

In 1363 a Parliament frightened of the lower orders still let a groom have meat or fish every day.