Beefing up Medieval Europeans: Meat Consumption in the 15th Century

 By Rebecca Camisa

Many historians have wondered how people ate in the Middle Ages. The prevailing belief is that people ate a lot of bread and vegetables, but that meat was a rarity. A closer examination, however, offers a lot of evidence that medieval Europeans were dining on beef, pork and mutton.

One of the best places to look for meat consumption in the fifteenth century was Barcelona, then home to about 25,000 inhabitants, making it the most densely populated city in Catalonia. Tax records from Barcelona in the year 1462 reveal much meat consumption in that city. In Barcelona, each animal was taxed, and almost 70% of all the meat animals were sheep (representing over 40,000 animals), while cattle were just over 10% (representing almost 5,800 animals), and the remaining 11,600 animals were pigs. Altogether, there were roughly 57,400 animals in total who are brought into the city to be eaten.

How much meat would these animals have provided? The average sheep gives 50 lbs of meat, a bull cow gives around 500 lbs and each pig could give you 180 lbs of pork. By adding up the number of animals in Barcelona, we can learn how much meat that represented:

40,000 sheep at 50 lbs each = 2,000,000 lbs

5,800 bulls at 500 lbs each = 2,900,000 lbs

11,600 pigs at 180 lbs each = 2,088,800 lbs

This brings a total of 57,400 animals providing 6,988,000 lbs of meat per year for a city with 25,000 inhabitants. At almost 280 pounds of meat per person per year (including children and infants), the average daily consumption was 12 ounces per capita. By comparison, it has been estimated that in 2018 Spaniards were eating on average 4.5 ounces of meat per day (it should also be noted that nutrition guidelines suggest that adults should eat no more than four ounces daily).