The British Association for the Advancement of Science
describes a test that medieval brewers supposedly used to measure how much alcohol was in beer:
To test a fermentation mixture in a brewery, pour onto a wooden seat. Sit in this puddle wearing leather breeches, while drinking more beer. Try to stand up. If breeches stick to seat, the beer will be strong. This method was used by 13th century Ale Conners, mediaeval Customs and Excise Inspectors. The stickier the mixture, the more sugar. This will produce more alcohol, so more duty is payable. Modern methods are more sophisticated, but less fun!
I suppose this would work. But whether or not medieval brewers actually did this, I don't know.
Comments
Sounds bollocks to me.
Of course, as such ingredients as ammonia, chicken dung and grass clippings were often added to ales in these time sto strengthen them, the sugar and alcohol content were the LEAST of your worries..... :sick:
There were other ways of measuring the ammount of sugar in the unfermented beer (which is called "wort", by the way) The simple and pretty accurate way that early brewers used (and home brewers like myself use still) was to measure the density of the wort before adding the yeast, and then again after the fermentation is complete. The difference corresponds directly to the ammount of alcohol created by the yeast. Though I suppose the sugar in the wort would make the it sticky, I don't think you could differentiate between two different concentrations by this method.
Sounds like BS to me.
Firstly, the conners were doing this test in the field, i.e. in brewerys which were actually public alehouses out in the country, which they travelled to on horseback. They could not carry a lot of equipment - And, recall, this was the 13th century, they didn't HAVE a lot of equipment* - To measure density with. Plus they were testing for overall strength of the finished ale, which included more than the alcohol content.
Lastly, it was not a precision test as to exact percentage of alcohol ( Or even proof, which is twice the alcohol volume ) but just to ensure the stuff wasn't overly watery, nor so powerful as to prevent serfs doing their work through blindness or death.
*Reminds me of a story told by Robert Heinlien: When he wrote the book "Space Cadet" he used a scene where an astronoaut trainee had to perform a tethered jump from a spacecraft. To work out the physics of the movement, he used sheets of butcher's paper for the calcualtions invloved which ran to about three feet worth. When he told this fact to a scientist/fan some time later, the fan was shocke dand asked "Why didn't you use a calculator for such a job? Did you really need all that detail for half a paragraph?" Heinlien recalls "I took a deep breath and said 'Sonny,( And usually I'm in awe of anyone with a PhD, no matter how young ) Remember, I did this in 1948...'."
>>>The Discovery Channel and related channels have an irregular relationship to the truth. If there's a particular fact you think is fascinating, cross-check it with something else before believing it. I've seen them propagate some doozies.<<<
I know this to be true, and have ever since I saw The History Channel repeat the silly canard about Ring Around The Rosie being about the plague as fact. A good hoax can slip past anyone's fact checkers now and then.
All I can say is it's the platypus all over agin 😊
It isn't? I thought it was. What is it's origin? Please tell me more.
Cheers
Snopes does a pretty good coverage of this legend.
http://www.snopes.com/language/literary/rosie.htm
Everyone was still in tunics! (Dresses, for those of you who aren't historical clothing wonks like myself.) A man might wear a white linen shirt, white linen underwear, wool or linen hosen tied to the shirt or underwear or another layer, and then the outer tunic over all of that. The trends were towards more fitted tunics toward the end of this century, but anything we'd call trousers wouldn't show up until late in the 1400s.
Now, it's remotely possible that this excerpt could demonstrate that *someone* was wearing leather breeches, if it is accurate. But if they were, it's not a style seen in the artwork of the time.
Thank you Boo.
😊
Ale was considered to be *food* in the Middle Ages, not *recreational beverage*. Thus, ale (or beer, for that matter) had to show that there were sufficient nutrients - which at that time translated to mean unfermented sugars - in it to be considered as proper food.
Thus the connors' test. The ale (or beer) was expected to have a certain level of unfermented sugars residual in it; there was a pretty clear expectation that the resultant product would be a "proper food". This is one of the reasons behind the epistles against imported Dutch and German beers in the 14th - 16th centuries.
And a tunic is not a dress, it's a longish shirt, never used for anything except wearing as a shirt. Hose would sometimes be worn instead of breeches with a tunic, but that's not the same thing.
I'm in the SCA, I'd know. We have to have authentic documentation for everything, and we go back to the late Roman period, and there are pants from all eras.
I know, your common sense says otherwise. Well, common sense is also what tells you the world is flat.
EMB in Florida
Um, with all due respect: no. I love the SCA dearly, but there are basically no documentation standards. Just because something is common practice in the Society doesn't necessarily indicate that it's authentic.
Mind, I'm saying this as a longtime Laurel. (As are at least two other posters in this thread.) It's a wonderful organization. But it has plenty of inaccuracies...
But there is always one stickler in every group who actually does credible research and only wears period (that is, historicall accurate) clothing, and everyone else will refer to her if they are in doubt. As a point of personal pride, they know what they are talking about. And I've never, ever had a stickler say anything about pants being non-period. (Though I do get a lot of criticism for my pirate hat.)
And while trousers in the sense of tight-fitting pants with buttons and pockets are a recent innovation, breeches have been around forever, more or less. I know because I regularly wear a blue pair of baggy pants that is historically accurate back to about the first century.
As a further example, jogging pants are actually authentic. People have been wearing loose-fitting cotton breeches with drawstrings since pre-Roman times. You show up wearing nothing but jogging pants, and you're a completely authentic Celt. It's our back-up plan for newbies without garb, actually....male newbies of course.
You have to remember, a thousand years is an incredibly long time, moreso when you're talking about the entire Western world. The result is that almost any generalization about period is probably wrong in a lot of times and places. Damned near everything was true in some SCA-covered cultures, and false in others. The devil's in the details. That's why most Laurels tend to talk more specifically than simply whether something is period or not...
People don't wear swords on their belts in this current era. That does not mean that they couldn't if they wanted to, or that they don't have swords at all.
It's true that not all cultures in all times have worn pants. But the idea that pants did not exist before the 1700's is a canard, it's total bunk. The Huns who sacked Rome wore pants, and that was in 410 AD.
Here's the gist of it: you will see pants in a culture whenever horseriding starts to catch on. This makes sense, since it's hard to ride a horse in a long robe or tunic. The result being that pants are usually looked on as garments for the soldiers and lower classes. Royalty would not have worn pants except in battle, which is why it looks like there weren't a lot of pants around--most of the paintings we have to look at from that period are of rich people wearing their best clothes, after all.
Most of the "pants" worn in the 13th century would have been hose, but they would have been made from wool, fit loosely, and coarse. If you saw 13th century hose, you'd think they were jogging pants, and they pretty much were. Hose didn't start getting tight and sheer until the late 14th century, when fashion really started to develop.
It also depends a lot on which region we are talking about. Vikings and the men of Andalusia overwhelmingly favored breeches, as did the horse-riding tribes of Asia and Asia Minor, and all of the Middle East except for the more westernized Levant and Jerusalem regions (thanks to the Crusades). Most of the men who were not wearing pants or breeches of some sort were to be found in Western and Central Europe. Saying they didn't wear pants in 13th century Europe is a lot like saying people don't wear hats in 21st century America--it depends a lot on what region you mean, and the class and profession of the individual.
Actually, that's not so clear. Remember, you're talking about an era with significantly poorer communication than we have today. Just because someone knew about it somewhere doesn't mean that it was known elsewhere and/or elsewhen. Vast amounts of information were just plain *lost* in period, and cross-culture communication was spotty, at best.
In general, one the Society's most common fallacies is to put too much weight on the concept of invention. People in period *could* have had an enormous fraction of what we have today, especially when it comes to matters of culture. Most things weren't a matter of knowing how to do them -- rather, they were matters of taste. That's why we have to focus on what they *did* have in particular times and places, or it just turns into a jumbled mess.
Nor should you underestimate the effect of "fashion". I mean, I *could* wear an Italian tunic and hose today, but I'd get strange looks at best. In practice, it simply doesn't happen outside contexts like ours. Fashion is deeply pervasive in all cultures, and outliers are generally rare -- in most cultures even more than our current one. And remember that the discussion is of what the ale masters *normally* did.
As for hose -- yep, that sounds right. But so far, it still mostly supports the original contention: that the story that started this off is inconsistent with what we know about 13th century Western European men's clothing. Is it possible? Sure. Is it *likely*? I'm still unconvinced...
I don't doubt Egyptian cotton was imported into some parts of Europe, in some eras; but it wouldn't have been cheap, and it probably wouldn't have been been used by the sort of poverty-stricken Celt who would go around without a shirt. This isn't to say that I'd turn up my nose at cotton garb in the SCA; but that's just because linen is so much more expensive these days. But "Cotton is a decent first approximation for linen" and "some Celts had linen" does not imply "Celts had cotton".
http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~marc-carlson/cloth/trousers/breechesindex.htm
I noticed we have become tangled in a disscussion on of all things pants, which I think is a rather round about way to come at this discussion as verifyable or not.
As toward the trouser debate, I can say with confidence that trousers, and hosen were both availible to the medieval man in the 13th century. Pants wearing remains strong with the Nordic countries well into and past the Viking period. While surviving examples tend to be from the pagan era of bog burials (Christian burials not being the best for the preservation of clothing) and can be seen in good effect with the pair found in the Thorsbjerg dig, literary references continue. Now I acknowledge many of you have in mind visual evidence of various illuminations that do indeed show a definded shift toward the short tunic, especially among the peasant class in France. Many such illumiations (you needn't look further than the famous Bayeux piece) also show a hose or trouser worn under the tunic which is difficult to ascertain its material. Further there is also strong written sources that refer to hose and trousers. One such work the "King's Mirror" ca 1250 [one that I am working with as I write this] (If you are a student of Old Norwegian or Old Norse check out http://www.menota.org or I googled up a decent english copy here http://www.mediumaevum.com/75years/mirror/ )
"Your costume you should plan beforehand in such a way that you come fully dressed in good apparel, the smartest that you have, and wearing fine trousers and shoes. You must not come without your coat; and also wear a mantle, the best that you have. For trousers always select cloth of a brown dye. It seems quite proper also to wear trousers of black fur, but not of any other sort of cloth, unless it be scarlet. Your coat should be of brown color or green or red, and all such clothes are good and proper. Your linen should be made of good linen stuff, but with little cloth used; your shirt should be short, and all your linen rather light. Your shirt should be cut somewhat shorter than your coat; for no man of taste can deck himself out in flax or hemp. Before you enter the royal presence be sure to have your hair and beard carefully trimmed according to the fashions of the court when you join the same. When I was at court it was fashionable to have the hair trimmed short just above the earlaps and then combed down as each hair would naturally lie; but later it was cut shorter in front above the eyebrows. It was the style at that time to wear a short beard and a small mustache; but later the cheeks were shaved according to the German mode; and I doubt that any style will ever come which is more becoming or more suitable in warfare. "
Continuing in section XXXVIII on warfare the father describes the dress suitiable for war
"The rider himself should be equipped in this wise: he should wear good soft breeches made of soft and thoroughly blackened linen cloth, which should reach up to the belt; outside these, good mail hose which should come up high enough to be girded on with a double strap; over these he must have good trousers made of linen cloth of the sort that I have already described; finally, over these he should have good knee-pieces madeof thick iron and rivets hard as steel. Above and next to the body he should Wear a soft gambison, which need not come lower than to the middle of, the thigh. Over this he must have a strong breastplate made of good iron covering the body from the nipples to the trousers belt; outside this, a well-made hauberk and over the hauberk a firm gambison made in the manner which I have already described but without sleeves."
Note the distinction made in the text between the undergarments <translated here as breeches> and the outer garments <trousers>. While this is the only example I have at hand this moment to quote, there are a number of descriptions of such clothing scattered through out Scandinavian vernacular writings in the 12th 13th, and 14th centuries (my field of study).
Now I can hear you out there ready to jump on the Scandinavian vs English issue, but I call into play my own uncertainty of this myth's orgin and point out the extremly strong ties of the Norwegian court of the 13th century and the Angevins in terms of intertrade. While it is true that the fasions of the continent spread more rapidly to Post-conquest England, broad dismissal of pants wearing especialy in northern climates of the Brittish Iles, where the chill dictates leg coverings, and further in those areas more touched by the Norse influence such as the Danelaw seem rather radical.
The trousers aside I ask whether anybody might be able to find a reference in a book they might have to the parent document. I see that the Bodleian Library was mentioned earlier. I was wondering if a specific section of the rolls was noted. (Sounds like a promising summer field trip in the offing).
Interesting, I'll grant - seems to blow the 'no trousers' theory out of the water though frankly have you nothing more constructive to do with your time?.
I still say the test itself is a load of cobblers, though.
There are also some questionable 'facts' in the Ring o' Roses explanation in any case. For example, accounts generally claim that the 'posy' refers to bundles of aromatic herbs or suchlike, supposedly carried around to ward off humours. However, at the time of the Black Death a 'posy' primarily meant a line of poetry written to be inscribed inside a ring. Thus in the Diary of Samuel Pepys we have:
...the mutton came in raw, and so we were fain to stay the stewing of it. In the meantime we sat studying a Posy for a ring for her which she is to have at Roger Pepys his wedding.
There is no mention of 'posy' (or alternative spellings 'poesy', 'posey', or 'posie') as referring to any concoction of herbs in Pepys's diary of the plague (the OED refers to the contemporaneous appearance of 'posy' for a bunch of flowers through association with 'the language of flowers', but that etymology suggests it was probably not used prosaically). He (Pepys) refers to being given 'a bottle of Plague-water', preseumably as a sovereign remedy against infection; he also refers to an order of 'plaister and fume' being interpreted as suggesting infection in a house; but there are no references to anything fitting the description of a posy. Beyond Pepys' account, I'm not sure where to look for the evidence of such things...
I have also heard this story before and read it in a book called 'The Science of Measurement' - which (appears) to be one of the more credable sources for this story (I got the book from the Ciba Geigy's R&D;Library in Basel Switzerland)