Hi I'm Kevin Hicks, welcome to my YouTube channel the History Squad. Now this is part
two of our spin-off series for the Hundred Years War and we're going to take a look at food, you
know victuals, how did they feed a medieval army now if you've missed any of my previous videos
yeah, then you can find them in the playlist in the description so without further ado.
A human being, me, I'll consume between two and four pound of food a day apparently,
so I'm told. So if you have an army of seven thousand men, eight thousand, that's a lot
of food isn't it. But actually it's nothing until you come to a horse right? A horse every day needs
between five and ten gallons of water well that's fine, you find a river yeah? But then he eats
20 pounds of food a day so if that's 2,000 horses that's 40,000 pound of food a day.
So you can imagine just feeding an army is blows your mind yeah? But before I can even continue,
I've got to explain to you the weights and measures of the day. Things were measured in
a quart, and a quart is a London quart, and what it means is it's a volume. It's a quarter of a ton
barrel yeah? So if you've got wheat and it fills a quarter of a ton barrel that's a quart, if you've
got a quart of wine it's the same kind of thing yeah, so it's done by volume so as we go through
this instead of you being confused, you now know we're talking of a London quart yeah? So feeding
an army, now when I was in the British army we had ration packs or we had the cook house and it was
great. A medieval soldier, what would he eat? For a start off pottage was one of their main
foods and it's basically a bubbling vegetable stew. Oats, peas, beans and barley.
You might have fish pottage, you might have bacon in your pottage or you might have the whole lot
in your pottage. Something I learned as a soldier, as long as you've got oatmeal in it, it basically
uh just makes everything, neutralizes a lot of the flavour yeah? So you have to add to it. So your
common or garden bowman yeah, bowl of pottage, he'd be well happy as long as it's nice and hot,
and bread is also important. So I've just got a table I'm going to read for you about how much
food was shipped over from England for various campaigns. We've got the Gascony campaign of 1347
to 49. There were 12,318 quarts of wheat, 695 quarts of oats, 1,185 quarts of beans and peas,
make you go faster yeah? Malt 409 quarts, 2,034 tons, so that's the full barrel
of flour and carcasses, meat carcasses yeah for Gascony campaign 936. Now your meat carcasses
were salted down yeah, so you can have salt beef, salt pork, your fish can be smoked or even pickled
yeah? Or if you're lucky and you you're serving near a river or the ocean you might
just get fresh fish yeah. Now for the Brittany campaign, uh 5,336 quarts of wheat and it goes
on and on but I just want to show you for the Crecy campaign here uh 8,027 quarts of wheat,
3,085 quarts of oats, uh 824 full barrels of flour and then for the for the meat side 2,670
carcasses of meat, because soldiers have to be fed well. And this is an interesting
thing about the medieval times if you're a civilian you're going to have meagre rations,
you'll get up in the morning and you'll have what's left from the night before. In the evening
you will have your bowl of pottage you might be lucky to have bread. Don't forget in those days
bread went off very quickly you didn't have all of the preservatives yeah? So bread can
be used as a thickening once it's gone off, there's lots of things to this but the main
important thing is a soldier needs those calories. He's got to march and of course he's got to fight.
A modern soldier apparently needs 4,000 calories a day during combat. Nobody ever told me that
but apparently he gets just over 2 000 calories a day in his rations so it shows you that
uh if you don't feed your soldier eventually he's going to lose his um his energy isn't it.
But it's how on earth did this tiny little country of England manage to get all of
this food across the sea? Well first of all you have the man in charge of your county
the sheriff the shire reeve, he is the guy. You'll also have commissioners who have been
sent by the king and they will tell the sheriff ‘right we need this we need that’. They didn't
then go into the countryside like some of your Hollywood films and they steal all of the food,
it's paid for yeah, and it's paid for properly and it's paid for at the proper price at the time
and then it's gathered in that village which is then moved to the town which will then
be moved out to the coast and I'm going to show you on a map in a moment just how everything
radiated out from the different towns and then was picked up and taken to central areas for supply.
So here's a map of England and Wales, there So collecting victuals, if you've got a farmer up
here who's got plenty of sheep and they go for slaughter let's say in Carlisle,
but to get them all the way down England where there aren't very many roads down to one of the
sink ports, as they call them, the meat’d be no good at all yeah, even though it's salted down.
So what happened was it will be taken from the farmer to the village from the village to the town
then across to a harbour where a ship will take it, and the ship will go to another harbour
where beef or lamb or oats yeah, peas all of these different produce have actually slowly but surely
come in from York and then the boats will go down, stop again, again until eventually these
full boats are coming all the way to Sandwich here, and that's where things were gathered.
Once the boats are full then they can go across to France. It was such a fantastic system, it meant
that a farmer here yeah or even in Wales could actually get his supplies to a coastal town. They
didn't go this way, apparently it was too long so it was better to take the roadway across the
country and then by sea. So it was well organized and it was honourable to gather all that food for
the armies was fantastic and I've read where um noblemen knew that their comrades across the
sea in France, Gascony would be running short of food and they ensured that ships were ready and on
their way so their friends didn't starve to death it all worked and interestingly if a farmer sent
food and it was delayed and came all the way down England there was a problem, it was then looked at
and gauged. If they figured that it wasn't going to make the journey the voyage, it will go rotten,
they would then sell the food for consumption to the locals at a reduced price. This whole thing,
it amazes me the more I read about it the more amazed I actually was how complicated it was,
but hey was it that Frenchman or was he a Corsican who said an army marches on its stomach?
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