The great Medieval water myth (2013) | Hacker News Reader

The great Medieval water myth (2013)

leslefts.blogspot.com

123 pointsrms71 comments

Former Historical Theology Student. If this drives you nuts wait till you read primary sources of many different historical documents and than just heard how people corrupt history all the time.

Example Nicolaus Copernicus, was persecuted by the Catholic Church for writing his sun centered book and arrested. The book in fact was dedicated to the Pope. It wasn't till 73 years after the book was written that anyone said anything against the theory. It wasn't even a theological attack but was a difference in philosophical thought which was from Aristotle and his opposition to mathematical physics (AKA numbers does not equal reality).

   > Example Nicolaus Copernicus

Where is it [falsely] written that Copernicus was attacked? There's a fair bit on Gallileo being attacked for advocating Copernicus' ideas. I can imagine innocent mistakes coming from confusion of this.

I've read a few books pertaining to the Galileo affair. It seems to be conventional wisdom that Copernicus had permission to publish his book, and that he was not attacked by the Church in his day.

I've also read that Galileo received favorable treatment from the Pope at first, then things went downhill for him later.

A weird tidbit, that I can't confirm, is that Martin Luther denounced Copernicus.

weird tidbit seems true: http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast161/Unit3/resp...

There's a record of Luther dismissing Copernicus, or at least geocentrism, though it's from four years before On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was published:

"So it goes now. Whoever wants to be clever must agree with nothing that others esteem. He must do something of his own. This is what that fellow does who wishes to turn the whole of astronomy upside down."

But that's pretty mild for Luther. If he wasn't using scatalogical references, his heart wasn't really in it. We only know about it because many of Luther's casual conversations were recorded; he was literally complaining about it at the dinner table.

Fortunately, things are completely different in the modern world.

Well, Copernicus died before the book became widely available, didn't he? Maybe that's why he was not attacked during his life by church establishment.

Good eye. But it's still my understanding that the attack from the church fathers didn't occur until much later, around the time of the Galileo affair.

Also the notion that humans in the past were just so vastly different than humans today is another myth we like to tell ourselves. We look at stonehenge and the pyramids of Giza and assume there must be some great philosophical plan behind it, not that people did things for the same reasons we do things today: to impress people, to leave our mark, to challenge ourselves, or just to try something new. The implication here is that if our ignorant savage ancestors endeavored to put the effort into building something, there must be a great spiritual or philosophical reason. It doesn't cross our minds that they sat around and pondered this stuff just like we do.

I feel like this plays into the popular idea that everything in medieval times was poorly built and covered in shit. We seem to want to think that because they lived in a largely illiterate, Church dominated feudal society that all the peasants were too stupid to function. That these savages would be too dim to possess the critical thinking skills to realize that if they used well built tools, that they could accomplish their work faster. That after thousands of years of human advancement, we hit this period where everyone not just lost accumulated knowledge, but forgot how to be a human in the process.

While not exactly covered in shit, things where far more dirty than we are used to. First off dirt floors where fairly common, though this quickly became dry hard pact dirt which is better flooring than you might think. Second running water was uncommon let alone vacuums and dish washers. Even bathing was far less common as getting a warm bath together was difficult in the winter and bathing in freezing water is unpleasant. Add to that indoor fireplaces added quite a bit of smoke and soot into people’s homes.

That said, some things where higher quality back then. For example modern fast growth wood is far lower quality let alone things like particle board.

You don't need to go to medieval times for that, though. My grandparents grew up in those conditions, here in Europe.

Of course, high quality wood items still exist just as they did then. But now there are cheaper alternatives for those on a budget.

I don't disagree that modern, high-quality wood items exist, but the actual wood available today is inferior. The hardwoods that came from old-growth forests are fundamentally different, as the wood from a tree that has survived hundreds of years is different than the wood from a tree that is only 50-60 years old.

One reason for this is that in larger trees, the rings themselves play less of a role in causing warping. Another is that many trees that make it to 50 years in a modern forest wouldn't have made it to 400 years if left alone. Old-growth forests have much greater spacing between trunks as the overgrowth trees that were successful outcompeted their neighbors; to have survived 400 years indicates a tree that was given superior placement and nutrition.

Finally, when trees are much older, they are much larger. This means that relatively more of the wood comes from the center of the tree, where there are fewer knots, voids, inclusions, etc. The moisture bearing part of the tree is on the outside, and in many species is unusable, so you have a much higher uniformity and yield in board feet from a bigger tree.

Old-growth wood would have been rare in much of medieval Europe as well.

One of the more surprising things that I found in Claude Fisher's Made in America[1] is the idea that as late as the American colonial period, chairs were a luxury item. Presumably stools and benches were available, but sitting on the ground is the default choice.

[1] https://madeinamericathebook.wordpress.com/

The way I've heard it wasn't that people drank wine instead of water rather that wine was less alcoholic in antiquity. Then people asked why and concluded it might have been more widely drunk. I don't recall hearing of it as a substitute for water. Just that it was weaker and thinking if the implications that could present.

Yes, wine was weaker, but that only explains willingness to drink so much, not the actual practice. Romans and greeks generally watered their wine down to about half/half if I remember right, and considered anything higher to be barbaric (and a waste of good wine). That's part of why greeks could go all night drinking from bowls in large groups without turning into frat boys, the reduced alcohol content may everything quite a bit tamer than it could have been.

This has almost nothing to do with the original post, I guess you just wanted to bring up the strange idea that Christians are being unfairly persecuted all of the time by the less-religious minority.

It was Galileo that was persecuted for promoting heliocentrism (a.k.a. "Copernicanism"). I was never taught that Copernicus was persecuted...but I can see why some people could get it mixed up. I think you'd have a hard time finding any historians that presented the position that Copernicus himself was persecuted -- it was probably mostly that teachers (etc) remembered incorrectly.

Did this myth, at least partly, originate in the 1854 cholera outbreak in London?

"There was one significant anomaly - none of the monks in the adjacent monastery contracted cholera. Investigation showed that this was not an anomaly, but further evidence, for they drank only beer, which they brewed themselves. Residents near or in the brewery on Broad Street were also not affected as a result of the fermentation of the contaminated water. The beer was safer to drink than the dirty water from the Broad Street Pump."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbr...

Another old reference to drinking water over wine, Daniel 1:11-16

So Daniel said to the steward whom the chief of the eunuchs had set over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, “Please test your servants for ten days, and let them give us vegetables to eat and water to drink. “Then let our appearance be examined before you, and the appearance of the young men who eat the portion of the king’s delicacies; and as you see fit, so deal with your servants.” So he consented with them in this matter, and tested them ten days. And at the end of ten days their features appeared better and fatter in flesh than all the young men who ate the portion of the king’s delicacies. Thus the steward took away their portion of delicacies and the wine that they were to drink, and gave them vegetables.

Is it just me or all the examples given in the article do, in fact, describe drinking water instead of beer or wine as a thing that was done but was (a) something unusual, (b) a sign of religious self-limitation ("so abstemious that he ... drank water instead of wine") or (c) as a punishment (diet of bread and water).

So it only supports the thesis that people in medieval times did generally avoid drinking water to the best of their ability; it does say that the reasons for doing so aren't so simple to avoid 'bad water'.

I've never heard the idea that no one during the Middle Ages drank water, so I'm not sure who the author is referring to when they say reputable scholars repeat this idea unthinkingly. It is notable that there seem to be no references in the post to anyone who actually believes this supposed myth.

The notion that anyone believed "bad water" caused disease is also one I've never heard in a Medieval context. "Bad air" and evil supernatural influences were the most commonly believed causes of disease in Medieval Europe.

People may have drunk watered wine and small beer and said they believed it "healthful", but many people smoked cigarette in early-to-mid 20th century said that was "healthful" too. Some of them may have even believed it. What people say about things doesn't necessarily tell us much about their actual reasons for doing them, or their true effect.

Drinking your local water source, full of micro-organisms your body was already familiar with, may have been on average no worse for you than drinking watered wine or small beer. Or there may have been some raw empiricism at work whereby people noticed that people who rarely drank pure water didn't get sick when everyone else did.

To make that argument you'd have to give an account of why no one ever noticed that bloodletting never cured anyone of anything, or that geese didn't actually come from barnacles, and so on.

Our ancestors were very bright, but had an outlook on the world that allowed them to miss the notion that small animals--tinier than dust motes in a beam of sunshine, too small for the eye to see--that lived in water and on decaying flesh and feces were the cause of much disease. Which is weird, because you'd think that such a simple idea would have been mentioned by god in one of those books he spent so much time dictating or inspiring: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1052

The myth is not clearly defined at the start, but it goes that people avoided water because alcoholic drinks were safer to drink than water. What you're hinting at is that people often prefer to drink something else for flavor/variety/intoxication, which is just as true today. The article does seem to debunk the myth that they were avoiding it for health reasons however.

I think this is adequately addressed in the article as well:

>Did people in the time prefer alcoholic drinks? Probably, and for the same reason most people today drink liquids other than water: variety and flavor. A young man in a tenth century Saxon colloquy is asked what he drinks and answers: “Beer if I have it or water if I have no beer.” This is a clear expression of both being comfortable with water and preferring beer.

The article debunks the idea that there was some sort of blanket fear of water. It makes it pretty clear that when clean water was available and recognized as clean, that people had no problem drinking it.

But I've never heard the myth that people avoided drinking even seemingly clean water. I've always heard that many people didn't have regular access to clean drinking water (particularly in non-Roman cities) would drink alcohol as a safe substitute.

That might possibly be the case. But then, where is any of the academic evidence? In general or even for particular settlements? There seems to be plenty of evidence saying that people were fine drinking water, there seems to be a distinct lack of evidence for the "people were afraid of the water" theory.

The examples given only showed that of drinking only water, which I would say is exactly how we see people today.

If someone is only drinking water, so avoiding coffee, tea, soda, wine, beer, etc. we see it as something unusual. Normally as a sign of self-limitation either due to a self or medically imposed diet.

I haven't drank a glass of water in weeks, does that mean I avoid drinking water, or that I just have something better than water to drink?

Ascribing meaning into a choice with no knowledge or insight into the reasoning inherently creates falsehoods.

The Romans weren't masters of aquaducts just because they wanted to bathe in it. They drank it, they cooked with it. It's just absolutely silly to think people didn't drink water.

I don't drink coffee because my water isn't safe. I drink coffee because it tastes better than my tasteless water.

I'm very grateful someone finally wrote an article like this, it's so annoying having to constantly readjust people's misconceptions on something so basic.

More so, the very idea almost refutes itself. "Nobody drank water back then because everyone got sick all the time from drinking water" has an almost Yogi Berra quality to it.

That's really not contradictory unless you take it incredibly literally.

This only requires a minor adjustment: "nobody drank water back then if they could help it, because whenever anyone did for a reason like poverty, they were very likely to get violently ill." Not that it's true.

As someone mentioned in the comments (and the post author dismisses), a reasonable version of this myth might be constrained to sailing.

I found an okay discussion on it here: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-2008...

There's a reference to "Purser's Instructions", where apparently it is mentioned that the Royal Navy sailors were allotted 1 gallon of beer per day. I tried finding it online, but couldn't find the text. Kind of blows my mind that in 2015 I can't just easily read any book that is more than 250 years old.

I think history is a lot more interesting and makes a lot more sense when you finally realize that people in the past were just as aware and smart as us, as opposed to the bumbling idiots we often assume them to be.

Meh, let's not overestimate our current selves.

Please share how you realized that people in the past were just as aware and smart as us.

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast cemented the idea in my mind more than it had been before. http://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/

If they saw less far, it is only because they stood upon the shoulders of not giants, but dwarves, and many of those had also excavated deep and luxurious holes in the ground for the purposes of their habitation.

Most people, up until the development of scientific inquiry, operated from a position of either complete ignorance or propagated misinformation.

If you transplanted a medieval child into modern times, and afforded the same advantages that we now enjoy, such as low-cost education and easy collaboration with people who have similar interests, you would be hard-pressed to find any difference between that child and one born to this era.

As we know well from trying to solve the problems of AI, intelligence and knowledge are difficult to separate. Medieval people were equally intelligent, but they had far less knowledge, and what they had was less persistent and transferable.

If by "aware" you mean "ignorant of the most basic facts that we take for granted", then yeah.

It's very hard to get our heads around the pre-scientific mindset. These people were not stupid (if intelligence is even a little bit heritable and provides any selective advantage they were in smarter than us, as there has been zero selection for anything in the past 200 years, so we are the dumbest generation of humans ever to live). But they, like Jon Snow, knew nothing.

They filled that vast void of ignorance with beliefs that make modern anti-science people like opponents of vaccinations, GMOs and nuclear power look like caricatures of the most rigidly limited kind of reductive materialism.

The thought that anyone might publicly test an idea that "just made sense" using systematic observation, controlled experiment or Bayesian inference (which people used long before Bayes, of course) as a matter of routine was simply unknown. Arguments were settled via disputations over imagination, putting one form of plausible bullshit against another and seeing which advocate could sway the crowd of ignorant scholars.

So the world was full of causes no one could see, whose existence "just made sense" so no one bothered to test. "Humours" and their "balance" caused health and sickness. Saints and demons influenced all chance events. Thinking made it so. God's plan was manifest by signs and portents. No major decision was taken without prayer.

People (some people) laughed at George W Bush when he talked about doing God's will, but a few hundred years ago everyone talked, and thought that way. They took it for granted and they meant it with a depth and unquestioning sincerity that today can be found only amongst Islamists and a few others.

They were capable technologists (there is an argument that technological capability led the sciences in important ways) but they way technologists thought about their materials and structures was completely alien to us. Much of it was raw empiricism ("do this, that happens") wrapped in a tattered clock of sympathetic magic and tortured religious/hermetic metaphor.

Imagine a world organized in all walks of life around the ideas and mode of thinking practiced by Jenny McCarthy, Food Babe, and Deepak Chopra and you'll get a sense of it, absurd as it sounds.

> there has been zero selection for anything in the past 200 years

This is false to the point of being absurd. For there to be zero selection, mating would have to be completely random, as would death at reproductively viable ages.

You just confused 8000 years of post-agricultural society and culture, with medieval western Europe.

Yes, people are much more educated now, because technology lets them get better access to information, but I think it's inaccurate to say there were no educated societies in the past. Think about Roman engineering. Arabic and Indian mathematics. Baghdad with its libraries. On and on. Modern people didn't invent most of the knowledge we now take for granted... we inherited it from the past, where people found it out through trial and error. Just like we discover new things now.

> I think history is a lot more interesting and makes a lot more sense when you finally realize that people in the past were just as aware and smart as us, as opposed to the bumbling idiots we often assume them to be.

I think the present is a lot more depressing, but makes a lot more sense, when you finally realize that people today are just as much bumbling idiots as those in the past, as opposed to the aware and smart people we often assume ourselves to be.

Yes, this is equally true! I think this re-casting of what I said sheds even more light on both history and the present. We're not as enlightened and different as we like to think. Knowledge and technology increases, but people and emotions don't change.

Maybe, but that doesn't mean it is correct.

I wouldn't call them bumbling idiots, but to think they were as knowledgeable as the average modern person in the first world is rather absurd.

I didn't say knowledgeable.

Knowledgeable about what, though?

I'm sure there are a lot of things that were widely known then that people don't generally know now.

Also, I'm fairly sure a lot of the common knowledge of our time will seem absurd to people in the future.

I've never heard it expressed as though people did not (as in ever) drink water, but that beer and wine were far more popular as casual, everyday drinks than they are now for purposes of sanitation.

Which makes some sense when you consider that the items mentioned - rainfall, melted snow, etc. - are not readily available all times of the year in all locales.

If anyone had said "they didn't drink water in the Medieval ages" I think that, like stagnant water, it wouldn't pass anyone's sniff test.

The reason you gave is exactly what he argues against. The author is saying that a) people DID drink lots of water, just as much as now, but thats uninteresting and nobody would record that, and b) nobody in the past drank because of sanitation reasons. They drank because it tasted good and we like to get drunk, with the pleasant side effect of slightly improved sanitation, but nobody at the time would have realized it.

Whether they realized or not may be immaterial to whether or not the benefit explains the prominence of the behavior -- a socially transmitted behavior (meme) that gives those engaging in it a slight survival advantage can easily be reinforced over time even without conscious recognition of the benefit of the meme.

Would beer and wine actually have significantly less contamination than water?

My understanding is that you need to refrigerate any opened alcohol of less than 15 or 20% because it will spoil. A quick reading of Wikipedia says that it is the hops, not the alcohol, which prevent spoilage, and hops were not mastered until the 13th century.

It's not really that the alcohol is a factor, rather it's that the wort is boiled and the process of boiling kills the pathogens. As long as the beer isn't contaminated after boiling it's fine to drink.

The difference between beer and boiled water is that beer will generally stay uncontaminated due to the alcohol content, while boiled water is clean only for a limited time.

This just in: Humans almost certainly drink water, and have for at least the past two millennium.

haha, but in all seriousness, I always thought when people said "medieval people didn't drink water" that they really meant "medieval people didn't drink as much water, or drank dirty water".

There was a lecture I watched from someone who explained the Medieval period as "everyone drinking beer because the water was so filthy" and the Enlightenment as "everyone drinking tea because the beer was so intoxicating" and the Industrial Revolution as "everyone drinking coffee because tea wasn't strong enough".

I laughed at that and considered the whole idea of Medieval peoples drinking beer instead of water as mostly hyperbole.

I have a problem where I can't tell what to take completely literally/seriously and what not too.

This is something that I did take literally, and now I am happy to be not wrong on something else.

I thought it was true as well, about ancient greece as well as midieval times.

People talk about how children used to drink beer until fairly recently -- I'm not sure if _that's_ really true either, but it is usually explained that the reason for this is that the water couldn't be trusted and nobody drank water, and that part apparently isn't.

There were "small beers" which had very little alcohol content. The yeast is fairly nutritious.

yeah, I understood that... but misunderstood the reason they drank such beers was cause they couldn't drink the water, I guess?

Not to attempt to reinforce the "common knowledge" that this article is challenging, but the author includes numerous references to Greeks and Romans drinking water. I thought the common assumption was that people in the Dark Ages avoided water in favor of wine due to poor sanitation practices. The Romans bathed frequently and had dedicated holes in their roofs with a bowl in the middle of their house to catch rainwater; I've never doubted that they could attain clean drinking water.

^This. When you say 'medieval' and start talking about Galen, you have lost me (even if you point about the medieval period is correct).

The "Clean" episode [1] of PBS's "How We got to now" explored how in one particular case drinking beer was preferred over drinking water. If I recall correctly (the video is no longer available for streaming) drinking water became contaminated and it was observed that regulars to a bar fared better health-wise, leading to the assumption that beer/alcohol was safer.

Whether that story fed the myth discussed in the above article or not, I don't know, but maybe it wasn't entirely baseless as it suggests.

[1] http://video.pbs.org/video/2365323193/

I don't see the revelation here. The reality always had to be much more nuanced than a simple "they always drank short beer, never water." That's silly. Of course people would be able to recognize clean water, and would not hesitate to drink water they felt was clean. It was, after all, probably the second liquid every human ever born became familiar with. However, sources of clean water were much harder to come by in historical times than they are now. A short beer, with alcohol content low enough not to cause inebriation, but high enough to make bad bugs uncomfortable, was a reliable alternative.

I was taught this in my college history classes in reference to cholera outbreaks in the USA in the 1800s. We were taught people use "half beer" which was 50/50 mixed with water, as a safety measure.

I have no idea if it is real. It was just what the book and professor said.

I'm not sure how "great" this myth is, considering that I learned about it just from this article. Could be a cultural thing, of course, since I grew up and was educated in Russia/USSR. We had our share of myths I'm sure.

I'm not so sure about this, I have done some research on the topic for a book I am working on and it appears that in some cities at certain times, safe water was hard to come by and for that and other reasons people consumed beer/wine as their primary beverage and with nearly every meal. I have studied this in the context of the effects on society of coffee and coffee houses that came with displacing beer and taverns as the main beverages and gathering points of society in 17th and 18th century England.

Here is an excerpt from James Howell in 1660:

"Tis found already, that this coffee drink hath caused a greater sobriety among the Nations. Whereas formerly Apprentices and clerks with others used to take a morning draught of Ale, Beer or Wine, which, by the dizziness they cause in the Brain, made many unfit for business, they use now to play the Good-fellows in this wakeful and civil drink"

And another from the historian Michelet:

...For at length the tavern has been dethroned, the detestable tavern where, half a century ago, our young folks rioted among wine-tubs and harlots. Fewer drunken songs o' night time, fewer nobles lying in the gutter... Coffee the sobering beverage, a mighty nutriment of the brain, unlike spirituous liquors, increases purity and clarify; coffee, which clears the imagination of fogs and heavy vapours, which illumines the reality of things with the white light of truth; anti-erotic coffee, which at length substitutes stimulation of the mind for stimulation of the sexual faculties!"

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=Gbmhwpxe9usC&pg=PA10&lpg=P...

Interesting to see that people in medieval times seem to have had actually more environmental problems than we have now.

Really? Is this a genuine comment? That a medieval world population of (optimistically) 500 million would produce more hazardous materials and waste than an industrialised world population of 6 billion?

Likely in reference to their inability to deal with the conditions they faced, either created directly or indirectly by themselves to say nothing of what nature could do.

I am quite sure we all acknowledge modern man is very capable of wrecking the environment, we are however able to prevent much of it and even correct it. It never ceases to amaze me the amount of dangerous materials we work with everyday that never impact the environment

> had more environmental problems

vs.

> produce more hazardous materials

There's a big difference between those two.

You can't possibly think that your environment is worse than the common environment of a medieval european. You have a house insulated from the elements, a wide variety of food sources which you can't imagine ever running out, you've never gotten a disease from drinking the water available to you... and on and on.

The worst you have to worry about is accumulation of toxins that may take decades to manifest into disease, and maybe if you live near a coast, you might have to move inland a mile in 40 years.

Modern technology and productivity have almost entirely insulated us from environmental problems. Ask yourself if you or anyone you've known has personally experienced an environmental problem that was anything more than a mild inconvenience or irritation ... or not entirely based on fear for the future.

"Unfortunately, long-standing myths are not displaced by anything so flimsy as documentation."

I like this guy.

I was literally actually thinking of this just the other day. Alcohol now gives me intestinal liquidity, possibly a result of too many years of 3-4 beer a night. And I couldn't figure out how an entire populace raised on the stuff wouldn't have had larger issues with beer than with water. I was thinking there had to be something I was missing about what I was taught (and I was taught it in college).

I've been reluctantly repeating this "fact" over the years. Although I've always been concerned about the rampant hangovers and dehydration that would have occurred as a result of drinking so much beer. The fact that this is not a fact makes more sense.

Beer historically was 1-2% alcohol. "Drinking only beer" was not impractical at that strength, unlike modern beer.

It's worth noting that beer hasn't exactly had a uniform makeup throughout history. The kind originally made in Mesopotamia and given as rations to soldiers was much more nutritious than the kind we drink recreationally now.

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