What Travellers Ate at Medieval Inns
A medieval traveller’s evening meal depended largely on where they stopped for the night — a rough tavern offering cold, salty snacks, or a proper inn equipped to serve a hot supper. Two continuations of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales offer an unusual window into the offerings of the better sort of roadside inn.
In one, weary pilgrims arrive at a Canterbury inn and find its garden well stocked with cooking and medicinal herbs, including sage and hyssop, “for sew and surgery” — a small sign of a well-managed establishment truly able to provide for its guests. In the other, the innkeeper himself greets the poet John Lydgate and his companions and lays out the evening’s menu: a proper pudding or haggis, a sausage-family dish called a franchemole, or an egg-based tansy or froise (essentially a herb omelette and a savoury pancake respectively) — a bill of fare that sounds more varied than it actually is, since most of the named dishes are close cousins of one another, built from largely the same handful of ingredients dressed up in slightly different ways. Not every traveller left satisfied — a well-travelled French poet who served King Charles VI wrote a genuinely blistering account of his repeated misfortunes at inns across the Low Countries: no matter what dish he ordered, no matter what sauce he specifically requested, the kitchen invariably sent out the same thing smothered in mustard regardless — a small, very human complaint about inflexible innkeepers that sounds entirely, comically familiar six centuries later.
Uncover medieval intrigue—grab your copy of The Draychester Chronicles.