The notion that, in the Middle Ages, the general populace would choose to drink wine and other forms of alcohol as a safe, healthier alternative to polluted water is widely repeated. But how robust is the evidence for the practice? Focusing on the period from 1600 to 1800, Rod Phillips tries to find the truth about this inversion of 21st-century ideas on healthy drinking.
One of the many supposed historical facts about wine that’s often trotted out is that, in the past, people used to drink wine (and beer) because wine was safer than water. Often no specific period is mentioned, but when it is, it’s usually the Middle Ages. But whenever it was, water was polluted, the story goes, and because alcoholic fermentation killed off many harmful bacteria, wine—and beer—were safer to drink than water was. So, that’s what people did.
Statements of this sort are commonplace, not least on the Internet. There we read that “because water was easily contaminated by the poor sanitary conditions of medieval times, most adults drank alcoholic beverages such as wine and mead with every meal” (historum.com), and that, “for centuries, wine was a necessity for many people, safer to drink than water” (Eric Asimov, New York Times). I can’t be too judgmental: I also alluded to it in my own book Alcohol: A History.
There are many refutations of this idea on the Internet, too, none well grounded historically and many based on an intuitive sense that it doesn’t ring true because there’s evidence that many people did drink water. Here, I’d like to look at the question in Europe in the period from about 1600 to 1800, because there’s some evidence that is quite helpful in helping us to learn what was really going on.
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There is no doubt that many sources of drinking water were polluted, whether they were lakes, rivers, streams, or wells. Humans have historically been careless with their environment, and they regularly polluted their drinking water with human, animal, and industrial waste. We can see this as far back as ancient Rome, where the pollution of the Tiber—helped along by dumping the corpses of executed Romans into it—necessitated building aqueducts to bring potable water to the city. Later, in the 1200s, water was piped into London from springs outside the city.
So, sources of drinking water were polluted early on, and by the 1600s and 1700s they must have been that much worse: Population increased, as did polluting industries such as textiles and brewing. We have no idea how much of the water used for drinking was polluted or to what extent. Did “polluted” mean water looked, smelled, and tasted bad but might not be dangerous to health? Or did the water have to be so bad that people fell ill after drinking it?
Clearly there was a recognized problem, because there were a number of proposals in the 17th century to build aqueducts to bring clean water to London. One described the prevailing supply as foul and muddy and “not fit for many uses” and argued that a reliable supply of “good and cleare strong water” was urgently needed. The River Thames came in for particular attention because it flowed through England’s populous capital. Clergyman Thomas Powell wrote that “the Thames brings us in our Riches, our Gold, Silks, Spices; and we throw all our filth into the Thames.” Two scholars of Shakespeare note that his “audiences at the Globe Theatre must have prayed for cool weather, to keep down the stink of the river oozing past just outside.”
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If that were not bad enough, a pamphlet published in 1696 suggested that the Thames was actually in a better state than most of England’s rivers, which were “choked with filth.” Whether that was true, we don’t know, but it seems clear that there were widespread problems with water—and not only in England. There is plenty of evidence of water pollution throughout Europe by the early modern period.
An indication of what people thought of water in England comes from the Puritans who emigrated to what is now New England in the 1600s to establish a more godly society. (Apparently, the morals of the English were no better than their water.) Although the Puritans brought hundreds of barrels of beer and wine with them on each ship, they soon ran out and had to face the fact that they would have to drink water. They did so apprehensively after the experience in England—and the Netherlands, where some had lived—but when they drank the local New England water, they were astounded by its purity. William Wood, author of New Englands Prospect (1634), wrote, “[T]here can be no better water in the world […]. Those that drinke it be as healthfull, fresh, and lustie, as they that drinke beere.”
We might say, then, that there were clearly widespread problems with drinking water in early modern Europe, and evidence that there were apprehensions about drinking water. It is also clear that many people drank alcoholic beverages in this period. Wine and beer had been around for thousands of years, as had mead and cider, and even though distilled spirits had been commercially produced in Europe only for about a hundred years by the 1600s, they were well received. All these beverages were consumed readily, and there is no evidence of a glut or oversupply of any of them.
But it is one thing to acknowledge that much of the water available for drinking was poor quality and that many people drank beer and wine. It is quite another to say that people drank beer and wine because they were safer than the available water—to make a causal relationship between them. We would expect contemporary physicians to have something to say about it, and one who had quite a lot to say about water was Richard Short, one of the most eminent English physicians of the 17th century.
Short was adamant that English people should not drink water. Water was suitable for people in hot places like “Africa and Libya,” but for the inhabitants of cool places such as England, he wrote, “many have endangered themselves, many have lost their lives by drinking of water.” Yet it was not polluted or dirty water that killed them, but water itself, even in a pure, clean state. Water, Short wrote, destroyed the natural heat of the body and caused all kinds of ailments, especially in old men whose bodies were already growing cold. Short was drawing here on the influential humoral understanding of the body, which among other things taught that bodies cooled with old age. Water, classed in the humoral theory as a “cold” commodity, only compounded the cooling until aging bodies reached their ultimate coldness, in death.
Writing in the 1650s, Short was alarmed that people were ignoring what science knew. There was, he wrote, a “new mode” of drinking water, and the habit of drinking water after dinner had “growne much in use now a dayes” in England. What is significant is what Short did not say—that water was unhealthy because it was polluted. Even pure water was not good for the people of England, Short wrote, “We are not accustomed to drink water in our country,” and “we ought not to change custom when it is ancient.” If Short also wrote that wine and beer were healthy beverages, it was not to contrast them with polluted water but, rather, because they were considered healthy in their own right.
Yet other physicians recommended drinking water. A French doctor from the University of Montpellier also invoked the humoral theory when he wrote that water was “the wholesomest of all Drinks […] a curb to the excessive heat that consumes us […]. Those who drink nothing but Water are ordinarily more healthful and live longer, than those that drink wine. Since Noah, who was the first that drank wine, the Life of Man is become more Short, and Diseases more frequent than before.”
Across the Atlantic, Benjamin Rush, a prominent physician and signatory to the American Declaration of Independence, wrote extensively about water and in the 1780s produced a “Moral and Physical Thermometer” to rank beverages by their health and moral values. At the top were water, milk and water, and “small beer,” which Rush said gave “Serenity of Mind, Reputation, Long Life, & Happiness.” The next category, wine and “strong beer,” gave “Cheerfulness, Strength, and Nourishment, when taken only in small quantities, and at meals.” There was no limit on the volume of water you could drink, then, but the glass of wine or beer he seemed to be suggesting would not have been enough to rehydrate anyone. In Rush’s eyes, water was the way to go, though he warned against drinking cold spring water. Water should be drunk at the body’s temperature, he warned, so as not to shock the system.
Medical opinion went both ways on water, then, but what is noteworthy is that no physician—neither those quoted nor others—recommended drinking wine or beer instead of water for reasons often stated: that the water was unsafe because it was polluted. Water was indeed unsafe, physicians like Thomas Short wrote, but not because it was polluted. Even pure water was unsafe, especially for old people and the English, because of its effects on the body.
Water of life
What happens when we move from theory to practice? If the quality of drinking water was suspicious because it looked, smelled, and tasted unpleasant, and people drank wine and beer, must there not have been a causal relationship? Perhaps observation showed that people who drank wine and beer were healthier or lived longer than people who drank water—just as people learned that it was safer to draw drinking water from a river upstream from where you dumped refuse. But this is predicated on many people avoiding water, and that’s where the problem lies, because most of early modern Europe’s population must have been either drinking water exclusively, rather than wine or beer, or drinking water supplemented by some wine or beer.
I say “must have been” because there is no evidence showing how much water, wine, or beer people consumed. Water was taken from streams and wells, and volumes were no more recorded than the glasses of water we fill from our taps as a proportion of all the water we use. As for wine and beer, production at this time was sporadically recorded, but even when we know how much wine was available, we don’t know how consumption was distributed among consumers.
Despite this, there is no shortage of estimates as to how many gallons of beer and liters of wine people drank on average in the past. Some refer to small populations, such as a dozen or two monks in a religious house, where we know how much wine was brought in and how many monks consumed it. For example, the monks of St-Germain-des-Prés consumed an average 438 liters of wine a year in the 1600s, a little more than a liter (2.1 US pints) a day. But estimates of annual consumption that have been published for large populations are more impressionistic than reliable. In 1637, Parisians are said to have consumed 155 liters of wine per capita, or 0.4 liters a day. At the end of the 1600s, the inhabitants of Toulouse are said to have drunk twice as much, with 274 liters per capita each year, or 0.75 liters a day, precisely a modern standard bottle.
These estimates are based on records of wine that was taxed as it came through city gates, but we know that much more was smuggled in and that citizens went outside the walls to drink wine that was cheaper because it was not taxed. For these reasons, estimates of consumption based on taxed wine are very likely minimum volumes. The other problem is that averages of per capita wine consumption are a very crude way of understanding consumption, because some people drink none and others drink a lot.
For the early modern period, all the evidence points to women drinking much less alcohol than men, and to children rarely drinking alcohol or, more commonly, not drinking it at all. The humoral theory not only taught that older bodies cooled, but that young bodies were hot. Wine was classified as a “hot” commodity in this theory, so giving wine to a child would be adding heat to heat—like putting kindling on a fire, as one physician put it—and risking combustion. “Heat” referred also to sexual lust (it’s why we say some animals are “in heat” and why attractive people are “hot”), so giving wine to young people inflamed their sexual passions with potentially terrible consequences.
Per capita estimates of wine consumption conceal the variation in consumption by gender and age. It’s less a problem when they concern a monastery, where there were no women and children, where we expect most monks to have drunk wine or beer, and where the rules of most religious orders placed daily limits on wine consumption. But estimates of wine consumption in the much more diverse populations of towns are a different matter.
Take the example of Beaune, in Burgundy, where the municipal council calculated its anticipated tax revenues from wine and beer sold in the town each year. It estimated that in 1799, 15,000 275-liter barrels of wine and 200 138-liter barrels of beer would be consumed. Consumption at this level meant that each of Beaune’s 10,000 inhabitants—women, men, and children—had access to 415 liters of wine and beer a year, or a little more than a liter a day.
If we subtract the likely 40% of the population under 19 years of age (early modern populations were much younger than today), each adult had access to 1.9 liters of wine a day. Assuming that women drank half the volume that men did—a generous assumption—each man would have about 2.5 liters a day, and each woman half that. We would expect some men and women to drink more than the average and some less. The poor, who made up between one fifth and one third of the population, would have drunk little or no wine and beer; they cost money and were far less important than bread when water was free.
Was 2.5 liters of wine and beer a day enough to rehydrate men, many of whom were engaged in demanding physical work from daylight to evening? Was 1.3 liters enough to rehydrate women, many of whom also had manual occupations? Rehydrating with wine alone would mean drinking a lot of it—drinking it like water, we might say. These days, the recommended volume of water needed for rehydration depends on your sex, your weight, the climate, and how active you are, and in general it is suggested that two to three liters of water a day is adequate. Of course, a lot of that comes from food, but even if we allow that half the needed water comes from that source, you would need to drink a bottle or two of wine a day. That probably wasn’t disabling in the early modern period because alcohol levels in wine were lower, less than 10%.
If the many men and women of Beaune weren’t getting enough wine and beer to rehydrate themselves, they must have been drinking something else in addition. What could it have been but water? There were no soft drinks or fruit juices on the market, and although coffee and tea entered Europe in the 1600s, they still were largely luxury beverages. They were also excellent sources of water because it was boiled, but you would have had to drink a lot of tea and coffee in order to rehydrate. The conclusion must be that adult men and women, especially women, and the poor of both sexes, were drinking water. So, of course, were children, not least because prevailing medical opinion was that children, including young adults, should keep clear of wine.
Putting it all together, it’s clear that very few people in the early modern period could have got by only on wine and beer. Rather, most Europeans—children and the poor were in themselves a majority—drank only water, while some drank water to supplement their wine. Even if they had wanted to drink wine and beer as healthier alternatives to water, they couldn’t have, because production of both was too limited to provide for the rehydration needs of a whole population.
In these circumstances, what could people do but drink water? If it made them ill or if its effects were harmful over the long term, then drinking water was one factor, along with poor diet, poor housing, poor or no medical care, that led them to die young. Our conclusion must be not that people drank wine because the water was polluted, but that people drank water despite its being polluted, and that medical advice to avoid water was based not on its quality but because any kind of water was risky to health.
Water table turned
From the 1820s, this whole calculus changed. Massive public-works programs created water-treatment plants that began to bring potable water to public pumps and private dwellings in cities throughout the world. It was a slow process (it’s still not complete), but by the late 1800s the inhabitants of large cities and towns throughout Europe and North America had access to clean drinking water. Did this lead to a decline in wine and beer consumption? Ironically, yes, but not because people gave up alcohol in favor of their new, reliably clean drinking water.
Rather, the advent of clean drinking water was virtually a precondition of the temperance and prohibition movements that began at the same time. It would have been difficult, if not impossible, to ask people to give up alcohol if they didn’t have access to potable water. Yes, tea and coffee were affordable to most people by then, and they were recommended alternatives to alcohol. But water was the obvious choice because it was plentiful and free.
Today, the early modern situation is almost reversed. It is not water that is widely seen as unhealthy, but wine and other alcoholic beverages. It might not be that people are turning to drinking water as a healthier alternative, because there are many other options such as juices, soft drinks, tea, and coffee, not to mention dealcoholized wines and beers. But water is a prominent alternative, and in many countries far more bottled water is consumed annually than wine and beer combined—and that is only bottled water, not tap water. If we can’t say that people in the past drank wine as a healthier alternative to water, we can say that today the reverse is to some extent true.
