Medieval and Tudor Drinks

What did medieval people drink?

Ale, above all, in English households that could brew or buy it, valued as food as well as pleasure. Water was drunk too, especially by the poor, the young and servants, and every cook used it; the idea that nobody touched it is a modern myth.

The myth leans on one Tudor physician. Andrew Boorde’s Dyetary of Helth (1542) says that “water is not holsome, sole by it selfe, for an Englysshe man,” because Englishmen weren’t used to it and the medicine of his day judged it cold and slow to digest. In the same chapter he ranks the waters, starting with rain water, an odd thing to do with a drink nobody drank.

The fifteenth-century cookery books behind most of these recipes made far more than ale. Feasts closed with hippocras, red wine with cinnamon, ginger and grains of paradise, poured through cloth until it ran clear; clarrey was its honeyed cousin. On fast days, when the Church ruled out milk from animals, cooks ground almonds with water into almond milk. For the sick there were warm ale thickened with egg yolks, and thin oat gruel sweetened with honey.

Tudor England added the still-room, where rose water was distilled and drunk by the ounce, and lambswool, hot spiced ale with roasted apples. Whey, the thin liquid left from cheesemaking, was a drink of shepherds and the poor. Beer with hops, at first a foreign drink, took over from ale over the sixteenth century.

Every recipe here names its source, and the few printed later than the drink they record, such as lambswool from a book of 1869, say so on their pages. The alcohol-free drinks are marked.