Social Classes During The Middle Ages

During the late Middle Ages when the bubonic plague was rampant throughout Europe, there came a time when the common townsfolk found themselves with heavier pockets, due to lack of workers and increased prices on daily goods and services. When the upper class saw their culture being infiltrated by lowly common folk who could suddenly afford lavish goods like themselves, what are known as sumptuary laws came into effect. These laws alongside the feudal system discriminated against the lower class as well as minorities across Europe, preventing them from acquiring the lifestyle of the elite by prohibiting them from eating and dressing in the same manner as the upper class. Knowing this, one might say the upper class had monopolized the way they
It should be quite clear at this point how this is seen through their concocting of dishes like pottages, but what now must be considered is the way the upper class would have eaten such meals. While differing variations of pottage were a common meal for many a persons during the late Middle Ages it, alongside numerous other dishes, was also regularly served at banquets and feasts that only the elite would have had the privilege of attending. Of course, any event planned for the upper class would have been far more extravagant and much more refined than anything a common person would have attended. Thus the pottage served at a banquet or feast would have been made with only the best ingredients attainable and prepared with the utmost care, so as to impress noble diners and
Perhaps feasts and banquets in the late Middle Ages might have been better termed extravaganzas. Upon entering the dining hall an elite guest would have likely seen a heavy, elongated, wooden table accompanied by benches of the same material, in a dimly lit space (if the feast was held after sundown, that is), with wall decorations such as tapestries and hunting relics hung where everyone could see (see figures 7 and 8). It was also common in the dining hall for there to be a less than hygienic floor that in all honesty must have always been ignored by everyone until its stench became unbearable due to numerous droppings of food giblets that accumulated over time. Adorned with cloth, sometimes covered by flowers, supporting numerous eating and drinking vessels of gold, silver, glass, and crystal, and trenchers laid about, the table in which a well-to-do person would have eaten their pottage would have been a scene all its