![]() ![]() Second, horse bread concentrated, in a travel-friendly object, nutrients that owners would otherwise have to gather from vast quantities of grain and grass. “Bread, where you’ve ground the food and baked it, pre-digests it, so you get more calories released more quickly.” First, it saved time and energy because it was “pre-digested,” says William Rubel, author of English Horse-bread, 1590-1800 and a leading historian-and baker-of this functional bread. After a long haul, exhausted horses had to rebound quickly for another trip, so they needed carbohydrates and protein, fast.īread solved this problem in two ways. These huge animals were responsible for hauling people and cargo across England at high speeds. Courtesy of William RubelĪccording to some estimates, medieval horses consumed about 20 pounds of food per day. ![]() Ordinary horse bread was darker, flatter, and denser. An enriched, white horse bread baked by William Rubel from a 1607 recipe for race horses. “In England and other places … a certain bread which they call horsebread … is so general among them, that you shall not find an inn, ale-house or common Harbor, which doth want the same,” writes Gervase Markham, a horse trainer and cookbook author, in a 1616 treatise on rural living called Maison Rustique. The ubiquitous bread was made from a dough of bran, bean flour, or a combination of the two, and typically was flat, coarse, and brown. It was so logistically important that it was more highly regulated than its human counterpart, with commercial bakers adhering to laws dictating who could bake horse bread, as well as the bread’s price, size, and occasionally even its composition. Horse bread, typically a flat, brown bread baked alongside human bread, fueled England’s equine transport system from the Middle Ages up until the early 1800s. But in pre-industrial England, it was the best technology available for powering the horses on which English society relied. Today, feeding bread to a horse might seem like the whimsy of a sentimental pet owner. But their appetite for bread was likely nothing compared to that of medieval horses who, after a day spent lugging cargo at high speeds across the British Isles, would often devour coarse loaves of horse bread. In medieval England, people consumed two to three pounds of bread every day. ![]()
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