Medieval Inns/Taverns

Sat Nam! (literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

Inns provided both food and lodging. A well-to-do person might have the funds to pay for a private room, but most rooms--and beds--were shared. Common rooms on the ground floor; chambers (bedrooms) above.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal

Seating (if any) would probably be benches, not chairs. There may not be any tables at all (tables were scarce in most European villages till well into the 17-18c), and if they are present they're likely to be the portable trestle-and-board kind, not built furniture. The drink will be served from the casks it was made in (whether beer or wine) unless you're dealing with a high-class place that brings in bottled wine from elsewhere (the well-known wine areas of France were already exporting wines by the 14-15c, but most people in wine country made do with the local plonk most of the time, and most people outside wine country never drank wine at all, just the neighborhood beer/ale/cider). Drinking vessels are probably ceramic or leather unless the place caters to rich folks who expect glass or metal.

An ordinary village drinking house won't serve food. A somewhat more elaborate tavern might, particularly in a town (where it's possible some of its clientele don't have cooking facilities at home) -- the food in the tavern will reflect whatever the local standard is, probably mostly bread or porridge with a little bit of other ingredients for flavor. Individual bowls or plates were not commonplace at the lower levels of society till the 17c, instead you'd just all dip out of the common pot or platter.

Inns, in contrast to taverns, provided housing & meals for travelers. Beds would be shared (up to 6-8 people in each) - the servants, as always, were expected to sleep on the floor, on straw pallets if they're lucky. On straw pallets in the kitchen where it's warm if they're really lucky. An inn would also generally have some kind of stable attached for the travelers' horses, with hopefully some provision made for their care & feeding. Because of these space requirements the inn was likely to be among the larger buildings around.

Bernard Knight set his Crowner John series of books in Exeter. He frequently describes the Bush Inn. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowner_John_Mysteries

Most inns that prepared food would have had a separate cook house which would be situated at the back of the inn. Fire was a big problem when most buildings were constructed using wood so having the cookhouse away from the main building was a safety feature. Some inns would also have their own brew house for making ale and/or beer. Make sure you know the different ingredients for ale and beer - one, iirc, uses hops and t'other doesn't. A large inn might have a cellar for storing said ale/beers. Barrel sizes vary from a pin which held about four and a half gallons to a tun which held over two hundred gallons. Barrels were sometimes used (I think some one has already said this) to support the ends of a plank of wood to make a table. Most people had their own knives for eating and also a spoon. Food was served on a trencher - a stale slab of bread. Depends on circumstance but the trencher was either eaten at the end of the meal as it would have soaked up the gravy, or it was given to the poor.

On beer vs ale:

"Turkeys, heresy, hops and beer
Came to England all in a year"

benbenberi said:

On beer vs ale:

"Turkeys, heresy, hops and beer
Came to England all in a year"

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LOL! Not heard that for a long time. But what year?

benbenberi said:

"Turkeys, heresy, hops and beer
Came to England all in a year"

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I think I was at that party.

That would have been about 1520.

The party's never stopped since...

There were also some inns in the UK which were essentially someone's front room. There was one of them still operating until quite recently... the inn was basically a house party that went on all year round and you had to pay for your drinks...

areteus said:

There were also some inns in the UK which were essentially someone's front room. There was one of them still operating until quite recently... the inn was basically a house party that went on all year round and you had to pay for your drinks...

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This is probably how most taverns started back in the day: someone freed a room or just opened a window, maybe put some benches, and sold booze by the cup.

An "inn" in a smaller village, without a constant stream of travelers, might also just be the house of an elderly couple who had an extra bedroom or two.

sciencewarrior said:

This is probably how most taverns started back in the day: someone freed a room or just opened a window, maybe put some benches, and sold booze by the cup.

An "inn" in a smaller village, without a constant stream of travelers, might also just be the house of an elderly couple who had an extra bedroom or two.

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Or a little extra floorspace & maybe bedding in The Room (or a vacancy in The Bed), & a place to put the horse where it wouldn't step on you.

If you're selling as fantasy rather than historical fiction, your audience is going to be very lenient, likely having a similar background as you do. But if you're aiming for accuracy, pick up a few books as references. They'll help you out in more stories than this one.

Some time back, I pulled together some links to online books and articles about medieval inns and taverns. Scholarly articles specifically concerning establishments in southern Europe do exist, but they're usually written in Italian or Spanish and they tend to be found in rather obscure publications. If you're thinking about the kinds of accomodations that medieval travellers might use, you can also look up pilgrims' hospices and caravanserais for some alternate ideas about how a hostelry could work.

benbenberi said:

On beer vs ale:

"Turkeys, heresy, hops and beer
Came to England all in a year"

Click to expand...

Can't speak for the hops and turkeys, but "beer" as a word was being used in England during the Dark .Ages It derives from the Old English word for barley and can be found in many English place names - Bere Regis etc.

The earliest quote I know of refers to the drink called by the gods ale and by men beer. Ale and beer were originally synonyms - and in Britain, at least, still pretty much are. Attempts are made to draw a distinction between the two styles, but in reality any such distinction is fairly academic, at least as far as the Great British toper is concerned. If you go into an English pub and ask for a beer, chances are you'll be served something warm, flat, brown and very tasty. If you want a glass of overly chilled, pasteurised, tasteless, fizzy piss-water, you'd have to ask for a lager.

By contrast, if you ask for a beer in Canada, Australia or the US, you'll almost certainly get a glass of overly chilled, pasteurised, tasteless, fizzy piss-water.

Joking aside, I think that "beer" is now used to describe any alcoholic beverage made from barley, whereas ale is now used to describe a particular kind of beer - to whit, real beer*.

On the OP, I believe that many inns originally started out as monastic establishments for the succour of travellers. Little places had beerhouses or alehouses - as others have said, often a front room in a private house. Many alehouses sprang up because a particular woman was very good at brewing beer. One or two surive to this day - including Eli's in Huish Episcopi and the Defford Cider House in the Cotswolds.

Regards,

Peter

*Graham's Guide to British Beer. Visiting Britain? As well as enjoying sodden fish and chips in a force ten gale or trying to understand the rules of cricket as explained by a mentally suspect retired major in a white fedora, you must seek out a pint of one of the following brews: Batemans XB, Timothy Taylor Landlord, Wiveliscombe Exmoor Gold, Fuller's London Pride, Golden Pippin Copper Dragon, Moorhouse's Black Cat, Harvieston Bitter N' Twisted, Sharpe's Doom Bar or Hawkshead Bitter.

Peter Graham said:

Can't speak for the hops and turkeys, but "beer" as a word was being used in England during the Dark .Ages It derives from the Old English word for barley and can be found in many English place names - Bere Regis etc.

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Bere, as in Bere Regis does not refer to 'beer'. The derivation of the name is given in the village's website.
http://www.bereregis.org/VillageName.htm

I always thought that in England ale was made using malt. Beer was not made in England until hops were introduced in the 1540s. I also seem to recall reading that brewers could only brew ale or beer. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_beer#Medieval_Europe scroll down to medieval Europe.

Shakesbear said:

I always thought that in England ale was made using malt. Beer was not made in England until hops were introduced in the 1540s. I also seem to recall reading that brewers could only brew ale or beer. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_beer#Medieval_Europe scroll down to medieval Europe.

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Both ale and beer are made using malted grain. The difference is in the yeast.

Online etymology has an explanation:

In the fifteenth century, and until the seventeenth, ale stood for the unhopped fermented malt liquor which had long been the native drink of these islands. Beer was the hopped malt liquor introduced from the Low Countries in the fifteenth century and popular first of all in the towns.

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Priene said:

Online etymology has an explanation:

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I do not disagree, but today the main difference is that Ale is top fermented, while beer is bottom fermented.
http://www.beertutor.com/articles/ales_vs_lagers.shtml

Snick said:

I do not disagree, but today the main difference is that Ale is top fermented, while beer is bottom fermented.
http://www.beertutor.com/articles/ales_vs_lagers.shtml

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Thanks - but this is about medieval and not today. Frankly m'dears I don't give a damn how the stuff is made - I just drink it and am thankful it exists.

Priene (have you been to St Peters Brewery?) thanks for that definition - there were of course different ales. October was the strongest and best and kept for special times and important visitors. Small ale was, I think, the weakest and the everyday drink that was also part of a servants wages.

Some really good information about beer, ale, lagers and other such wonders here:
http://www.camra.org.uk/aboutale

Ales, which includes bitters, milds, stouts, porters, barley wines, golden ales and old ales, use top-fermenting yeast. The yeast forms a thick head on the top of the fermenting vessel and the process is shorter, more vigorous and carried out at higher temperatures than lager. This is the traditional method of brewing British beer.

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Here's a description of tavern behavior from Piers Ploughman ca. 1372–1389
; start reading at The Confession of Gluttony:

http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/noa/pdf/12Piers_1_4.pdf

Here's some data from an AW member and grad student in medieval history

http://writemedieval.livejournal.com/7440.html

There's a fair amount of data about taverns in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Margery Kemp was a brewer.

areteus said:

There were also some inns in the UK which were essentially someone's front room. There was one of them still operating until quite recently... the inn was basically a house party that went on all year round and you had to pay for your drinks...

Click to expand...

We have one of those locally still (the Frog and Nightgown)

My father's family ran a pub (well, various arms of the family, depending) from about 1600 on. When someone wanted a beer, someone (my gran usually..) ran down to the cellar with a jug. The bar was (still is!) two simple rooms, flagstoned, with pew type benches along the sides. The pub itself (this is a pretty rural location) wasn't enough for a family to live on, so my grandad had a job working on a farm, as did my dad and uncles when they were old enough. This was as late as 1939, so depending on your economy, you may want to think on this - if it's a very rural pub with not much passing trade, they'd need other sources of income, or food (one of my dad's early chores was to look after the rabbit run - almost the only meat they had)

The local coaching inn in town, dating from around 1500 (Our town is named probably for the field they kept the spare horses in, and we're on a route from London to Brighton) had more facilities - some quite fine rooms etc, stables, with extra places for servants/grooms/drivers in the hayloft and served food. As a business it employed quite a few locals, as things went then. Of course, now it's a fancy italian restaurant...

I could probably get you piccies if you like, which would at least show layout etc.