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November 10, 2026
November 10, 2026
Did medieval people drink water: The Harvesters by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565, peasants resting and drinking in a wheat field
Facts & Myths

Did Medieval People Drink Water? The Truth About the Beer Myth

Perhaps some of you might have heard from a friend that medieval people spent their whole lives slightly drunk on ale because water would kill them? Perhaps on a guided tour of a castle or in a documentary on TV? At first, if you really stop and think about it, it might sound logical for a moment. There were no clean taps, no water filters, no chemicals that clean the water, or you imagine dirty rivers. The only rational thought is to drink a beverage with alcohol. The answer was left behind by the people who really lived in the Middle Ages, and it tells a different story. They actually said they drank water; they even argued about which water was the best; they tested it, and in some towns they even built pipes miles long just to bring it in. Let me tell you the story of fresh water, and what the sources really tell us.

Did medieval people drink water: fresh water illustrated in a Tacuinum sanitatis health handbook, Italy, 14th century
“Sweet water”, meaning fresh water, gets its own page in this Italian Tacuinum sanitatis, a handbook of healthy living from the late 14th century. Image: Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Where the beer myth comes from

The idea goes something like this: medieval water was so filthy that everyone, even children, drank ale from morning to night instead. It gets repeated so often that hardly anyone stops to ask where it comes from. When historians ask did medieval people drink water, they start with the sources. Those who have looked for medieval texts saying “don’t drink the water, drink ale instead” have not found them.

What they did find is that water had an image problem. Ale and wine were more filling, tastier and more respectable. Water was cheap and ordinary, so writers rarely praised it. That silence was later mistaken for proof that nobody drank it at all.

What medieval writers really said about water

Some of the earliest evidence comes from Bede, the Northumbrian monk who finished his history of the English church in 731. He describes King Edwin of Northumbria, who ruled in the early 7th century, placing stakes next to clear springs along the main roads, with copper drinking cups hanging on them, so that travellers could refresh themselves. Bede says nobody dared to steal the cups. Free drinking water for the public, in the 7th century!

Later physicians were less friendly. In the 1450s the Italian court physician Michele Savonarola called water “the vilest of all beverages”, a drink for working people. That sounds like an attack, but it also tells us who drank it: lots of ordinary people did. Some churchmen even chose it on purpose. Bishops such as Wulfstan of Worcester and Hugh of Lincoln drank water instead of fine wine as an act of self-denial.

How to test your water, the medieval way

As in modern times, people who consume water really care about its quality. The same thing happened with medieval people, and they really had their own methods of testing it. One really simple test was the egg test. It was mentioned by the writer Bartholomew, a 13th-century friar of English origin, a writer whose encyclopedia was a bestseller for centuries. According to him, if you throw an egg in fresh water it will sink, but it floats in brackish water. Another test involved soaking two pieces of linen in two different waters. After that they waited to see which cloth dried faster, and supposed the one that dried faster was the one that came from the better water.

Leaving this non-scientific part aside, we have the doctors’ opinion. The 14th-century physician Peter Fagarola told his own sons, who were studying at that time in the city of Toulouse, that the local water must be boiled in order to cleanse it. That’s modern scientific advice right there! Another piece of advice came from the English doctor John of Gaddesden, who said that strange waters should be avoided. Others suggested that maybe straining the water through cloth, or simply mixing it with a little wine or vinegar, should do the trick. As you may see, if medieval people drank only beer or ale, and did not drink water at all, according to the myths, why bother having so much information about fresh water? This is how you debunk a myth right there!

London’s Great Conduit: free water for the city

The best proof is in the stones and pipes. In 1236, a landowner named Gilbert de Sanford granted the City of London the use of springs at Tyburn, roughly where Bond Street station is today. From there, a lead pipe was laid for about three miles (4.8 km) to Cheapside, the city’s main market street. The first record of the conduit in Cheapside dates from 1261, and for centuries it was one of the city’s main sources of clean water.

The water was meant to be free. In 1310 the keeper of the conduit was ordered not to sell it. Brewers, cooks and fishmongers soon wanted it too, and from 1312 they could use it if they paid a fee for repairs. Not all of them played fair: in 1478 a brewer named William Campion was caught secretly tapping the main pipe. His punishment was to ride through the city on a horse with a vessel shaped like the conduit on his head.

Twelfth-century plan of the water supply system of Canterbury Cathedral priory from the Eadwine Psalter
A plan of the water system of Christ Church, Canterbury, drawn around 1160 in the Eadwine Psalter. Pipes bring spring water from outside the city into the monastery. Image: Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Monks and their water pipes

Monasteries were often ahead of the towns. At Canterbury, Prior Wibert, who led the cathedral monks from 1153 to 1167, had a complete water system built for the priory. A detailed plan of it survives in the Eadwine Psalter, a manuscript made at Canterbury, and it shows water travelling from springs outside the city through pipes and tanks into the cloister, the kitchens and the washrooms.

Monks did drink ale or wine with their meals, as described in our piece on life in a medieval monastery. But a community that spent this much money on clean water clearly needed it for more than washing floors.

There was not enough ale to go round

Let me give you another fact that will debunk this myth. Here is the simple math that will kill the myth. Using figures from the historian Philip Slavin, the beer historian Martyn Cornell estimated that around the year 1300 about 8% of England’s grain harvest went into malt for brewing. That, spread across the adult population, would be about a third of a pint of ale per person per day. As you may know, a working adult needs several pints of liquid a day, even more in summer. Who doesn’t want a pint of ale when working the field, right? According to the calculation, if everybody had drunk only ale, according to the myth, England would have needed most of its grain for brewing, and there would have been almost nothing left to bake bread. It is impossible, and unrealistic from my point of view.

Ale was also a privilege that grew with time. Christopher Dyer, a historian of medieval England, looked at the food handed out to harvest workers on English manors. In the 13th century they received a lot of bread and only small amounts of ale. Two centuries later, in the very different world that followed the Black Death, meat and ale made up a much bigger share of what they got. Ale was something you were given, or could afford, not something that magically replaced water.

Ale was counted as food in the same manner as a drink. You need to know that medieval ale was made from malted grain, and it was nourishing. If you count this for a hard-working peasant, it was an important source of calories. That field won’t plough on its own, right? You can see how it fitted into the rest of the diet in our article on what medieval peasants ate.

The only weakness of the ale was that without hops, it went sour within days, so it had to be brewed again and again. After a hard-working day, the only thing that you need is brewing your ale. The only advantage was that most of the brewing was done by women at home. When they had a surplus of ale, most of the time they sold it to their neighbours. Hopped beer, which kept much longer, only became popular in medieval England at the end of the period, thanks to brewers from the Low Countries.

Medieval brewer Herttel at work in the Mendel housebook from Nuremberg, about 1425
Herttel the brewer at work, painted in the housebook of the Mendel brotherhood in Nuremberg, a charity for old craftsmen, around 1425. Image: Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Would I have trusted the water?

Personally, I drank a lot of water from mountain springs in my own country or on my holidays in other countries. The water was cold, tasty and very refreshing. Now, we have a lot of laws and I trust more that the water is good to drink. If I were a medieval person and I wanted to drink the water, to be honest I would be a bit hesitant. Except if I had an egg in my pocket. The safest thing was probably to wait and watch other people drink it first, or at least I would boil it first.

Was medieval water actually safe?

Even with the rules I mentioned earlier in the article, not always, and folks from medieval times knew it. The reason was that town wells could sit uncomfortably close to cesspits, or rivers might carry waste from the butchers, tanners or dyers. Because of that, towns made rules to protect the supply of fresh water. As an example, in the city of Montpellier, people were banned from washing their bedsheets, fish and even their feet in the public drinking trough. In the Flemish town of Ypres, the town built reservoirs and pipes in the 13th century to bring fresh water from outside the town.

Doctors also had their own fears, which came from medieval medicine and its theory of the four humours. Water was considered cold and wet, so drinking a lot of very cold water was thought to be dangerous, especially after hard work. A Northamptonshire peasant named Nicholas Bernard is recorded as dying after drinking cold water from a stream while mowing. The medieval answer was not to stop drinking water, but to be careful about which water and when.

So, did medieval people drink water?

As we saw during the article, we actually debunked the rumour, and learned that people actually drank water every day. Of course they drank ale too, and they loved it! Who wouldn’t, right? The thing with ale is another story: ale was food, money and entertainment, but in the end it was not a replacement for water. The myth tells us more about how we imagine the Middle Ages than about how people really lived. Water is far from the only thing we get wrong about the period, as our collection of medieval myths shows, and if you are wondering whether all that water was used for washing too, read whether medieval people bathed.

Frequently asked questions

Did medieval people drink water every day?

Yes. Water from springs, wells and rivers was an everyday drink, especially for poorer people, alongside ale, milk and, for the rich, wine.

Is it true that medieval people only drank beer?

No. Ale was very common, but people drank water too. There was not even enough grain in medieval England to brew ale for everyone to drink all day.

Who drank water in the Middle Ages?

Above all working people, who could not afford ale or wine all the time. But travellers drank it, some bishops chose it as a form of self-denial, and the poet Petrarch drank water throughout his childhood and youth.

How did medieval people get clean water?

From springs, wells, rainwater and rivers. Some towns and monasteries built conduits, systems of lead pipes that carried spring water from outside the walls, like London’s Great Conduit in Cheapside.

Why did people think water was dangerous in the Middle Ages?

Polluted town water could make people ill, and doctors believed very cold water was bad for the body. Their solution was to choose good sources, boil or strain doubtful water and avoid unknown water when travelling.

Sources