Sex and Alcohol in the Middle Ages

ELI5/TLDR

Medieval people were far less prudish than we imagine. Streets were named after what you could buy there — including sex. The church had elaborate rules about when, how, and in what position you could have sex, but almost nobody followed them, including the priests. People drank ale with breakfast, brewed beer as a form of prayer, and the pint was enshrined in the Magna Carta. Jousting, falconry, and real tennis rounded out the pleasures. We think of the Middle Ages as grim mostly because it flatters us to believe we invented fun.

The Full Story

The Streets Had No Euphemisms

Medieval historian Eleanor Janega walks us through York, one of England’s largest medieval cities, with sex historian Dr. Kate Lister. Their first stop: Grape Lane. Originally recorded as Gropecunt Lane. There were equivalents all over Britain — Cock Lane, Horsemount, Sitdown Hoe. Medieval people named streets after what was sold there. Milk Street, Poultry Street, and yes, that.

Sex work wasn’t hidden. It was zoned. Authorities required sex workers to wear identifying clothing — red hoods in some cities, striped hoods in others, bells in Vienna. The Viennese sex workers took their mandated accessories and made them fashionable. Platform stilettos. The highborn ladies started copying them.

“Marriage is sex work — one man at a time, really.”

Career options for women were thin. You could become a nun. You could marry. Or you could enter a trade that paid well and everybody knew about. The redemption arcs of medieval female saints tend to confirm this:

“They generally don’t start by going ‘she was on the game and absolutely hated it.’ It’s generally like ‘she had a really great shoe collection and then she found Christ.’”

The Church’s Rules (And Why Nobody Followed Them)

The theological argument against sexual pleasure traces to St. Augustine, who thought about sex constantly — having had a lot of it before joining the clergy. His position: in the Garden of Eden, conception would have been a purely mechanical act. No arousal, no pleasure. Post-Fall, humans got turned on, and that’s what makes sex sinful. The problem isn’t babies. The problem is enjoying the process.

Thomas Aquinas refined this into a ranking system in the 13th century. Sex between married people wanting a baby — fine. Too many lascivious kisses — sinful. Getting naked — sinful. Any act that can’t produce a child — sodomy, regardless of who’s doing it. The church’s position on Saturdays and Sundays: no sex, in case you’re still turned on during mass. Missionary only. Keep your clothes on. Have the least amount of fun possible.

Nobody listened. Not even the clergy. In 14th-century Prague, the archdeaconate protocol — essentially a door-to-door parish survey — reveals priests living openly with concubines, one priest running a four-woman brothel out of his own house, another who defended his regular visits to a sex worker by noting he “always paid her right away and made her leave immediately after.” The best one: a priest caught in a brothel who fled naked through the streets of Prague, past all his parishioners.

Privacy Was Not a Thing

Medieval bedrooms were shared. Even royal ones. A king’s bed chamber was basically a thoroughfare with curtains. The bedding ceremony on a royal wedding night involved a priest blessing the bed, a party, groomsmen and bridesmaids putting the couple to bed, then everyone throwing stockings at each other (hit the monarch, you’re next to marry). Only then would the curtains close. The court had a vested interest in the royal sex life because no sex meant no heirs meant no dynasty.

Courtly love — that romanticized medieval ideal — was almost exclusively between married women and unmarried men at court. The literary payoff was typically non-procreative sex. In Arthurian legend, Guinevere and Lancelot literally destroy Camelot by having the procreative kind.

Eleanor Rykener and the Limits of Medieval Scandal

In 1394, a sex worker named Eleanor Rykener was arrested in London with a client. The court record reveals she had been born John Rykener but had been living as a woman for years. The remarkable part: nobody cared about that. The only issue was that she’d been having sex in the wrong part of town.

Medieval Drinking: Not Because the Water Was Bad

Well, not only because the water was bad. In the countryside, streams were fine. In the middle of London, the river was a toilet. But the main reason medieval people drank was they liked it.

Before pubs existed, there were three separate establishments: taverns (wine, dating back to the Romans), inns (grew out of monasteries, served travelers), and ale houses (someone’s living room where the owner happened to brew well). When you had a fresh batch, you’d hang a broom — an “ale stake” — outside. These got so elaborate they started falling into the street and killing people. Authorities demanded painted signs instead. Because most people couldn’t read, the signs depicted recognizable images. The Pope’s Head. Then after the split with Rome, the King’s Head. The White Hart. The Red Rose. This is where all pub names come from.

The Pint Is in the Magna Carta

Article 32 of the Magna Carta (1215) mandates a single standard measure for ale throughout the kingdom. In the Chester miracle plays, Christ returns to earth, pardons all the criminals, and sends the brewer who served short pints straight to hell.

“Quite right too.”

Tankards supposedly had pegs inside — you were meant to drink only down to the next peg. If you wanted to humble someone, you’d “take them down a peg or two.” This may be apocryphal, but it’s a good story.

What Medieval Beer Actually Tasted Like

At Wildcard Brewery, brewer Jagger Weiss recreated a medieval ale. No hops — those didn’t arrive in England until the late 15th century and were considered offensively foreign. Instead: nettle, mugwort, whatever herbs grew locally. The beer was dark, sweet, malty, slightly smoky (from drying barley over fire), with a hint of sourness because it went off quickly without hops’ antibacterial properties. Every household’s beer tasted different depending on local herbs and the bacteria living in their wooden brewing vessels. The concept of getting the same pint twice did not exist.

The first running produced stronger, fancier beer. The last running produced “small beer” — low enough in alcohol to drink all day while working. Monks started with small beer in the morning and worked up. Brewing in a monastery counted as prayer.

Royal Drinking Was a Status Arms Race

At Hampton Court, food historian Richard Fitch explains: courtiers received 2-3 gallons of wine per day as their standard allowance. Once a cask was opened, it had to be finished — no way to reseal it. The 1521 Field of the Cloth of Gold between Henry VIII and Francis I featured a wine fountain that somehow ran continuously. Nobody knows how it worked. The painting of the event helpfully includes people puking and fighting near the fountain.

Queen Elizabeth I’s beer “was so strong that not any man could touch it.”

Sport: Not Just Jousting, But Mostly Jousting

Only nobles could joust. Everyone else watched, drank, and flirted. Italian armor was preferred — smoother surfaces, more deflection. Tournament armor evolved to be so reinforced on the left side (where the lance hits) that it became useless for actual combat. Purely designed to absorb a lance impact at a combined speed of 50 mph.

Crossbow guilds were the medieval middle class’s answer to being locked out of tournaments. The crossbow was the great equalizer — a longbow took seven years to master, a crossbow took an afternoon. You could spend all day as a merchant and still compete.

Real tennis started as a street game so popular it was banned because nobody was working. The scoring system (15, 30, 40) probably derives from a base-60 currency. At Hampton Court, there’s a portrait of Henry VIII on the court wall. Hit it, score a point.

Falconry Was Medieval Formula 1

The gyrfalcon — the largest falcon species, sourced from the Arctic via 2-3 year expeditions — was exclusively royal. Peregrines for earls. Lanners for lesser nobility (the name means “coward” in Old French, because they ambush prey rather than diving from the sky). Merlins for ladies — miniature peregrines, hunting skylarks and thrushes purely for the thrill.

The real distinction: hawking (using hawks in woodland for the kitchen) versus falconry (using falcons in open country for sport). Hawks hunt where you can’t see them, which makes for a terrible spectator event. Falcons hunt in the open with high-speed aerial chases. Medieval people understood entertainment value.

Claude’s Take

This is a well-produced popular history compilation — three episodes stitched together covering sex, alcohol, and sport in the Middle Ages. Eleanor Janega is a solid medieval historian (she’s published academic work on this period), and the expert guests — Kate Lister on sex history, Pete Brown on pub history, the falconer, the brewer — are genuine specialists, not TV talking heads.

The core thesis is sound and well-supported by primary sources: medieval people were normal humans who enjoyed themselves, and our image of the “Dark Ages” as uniformly grim is a modern projection that conveniently makes us feel like progress’s endpoint. The Prague archdeaconate records, the sumptuary laws, the Rykener case, Burchard of Worms’ penitential — these are real documents, and Janega cites them accurately.

What it lacks in depth it makes up for in breadth and accessibility. The brewing segment with actual recreation of a medieval nettle-and-mugwort ale is genuinely informative. The falconry section is surprisingly rich on the social economics of bird ownership.

The main limitation is the TV documentary format — everything has to be charming and slightly breathless. The Eleanor Rykener case gets maybe 90 seconds when it deserves its own episode. The class dimensions of pleasure (who actually got to enjoy what) get gestured at but never fully excavated.

claude_score: 7 — Engaging, well-sourced popular history with genuine experts. Covers an impressive range across three episodes. Nothing here will surprise a medievalist, but for a general audience it’s an effective corrective to the “grim Dark Ages” stereotype. The primary sources are the real strength.

Sex and Alcohol in the Middle Ages | Full Series with Eleanor Janega