The Medieval Year: The Ides of September, AD 1224

With thoughts on balancing a basket of grapes.

The Medieval Year, a weekly feature of the Via Mediaevalis newsletter, gives us an opportunity to appreciate calendrical artwork from the Middle Ages, reflect on the basic tasks and rhythms of medieval life, and follow the medieval year as we make our way through the modern year. Please refer to the first post in this series for more background information!

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Rural folk in the Middle Ages had a fine selection of fruits near at hand. Apples, cherries, strawberries, plums, peaches, and pears were widely grown for the family and for the market. Medieval society was not accustomed to our fresh-fruit-every-day lifestyle and thus had no reason to resent the seasonality of nature’s finest delicacies, which fell from the trees only at favored times of the year. I’ve found that my appetite for fruit tends to be somewhat seasonal anyway, and my suspicion is that the peasants of old would have been unimpressed with the semi-truck-and-supermarket system after they had tasted the sorry specimens that often pass for fruit these days. Actually, this is more than a suspicion—it’s something I learned through personal experience.

The fruits that left the deepest impression on my gustatory psyche grew near the fields and footpaths of a very old village in eastern Europe. The farmers there have changed plenty since the Middle Ages, but their style of agriculture hasn’t changed too much, and their trees have probably changed even less.