Midsummer Night’s Dream

While studying the Middle Ages, one of the strangest ideas for me to comprehend was that the “starving time” was not in the cold of February or March, but in late June. During a normal year, enough wheat would be milled and stored away in big wooden barrels that modest husbandry skills would get the family through the darkest part of winter.
Late April would usher in spring crops like peas or leaf vegetables. These would last until early June. Then things would get tough. The term “scraping the bottom of the barrel” comes from this period. Cooks would literally be scraping the barrels to get enough to make a meal.( Of course the simplest thing would have been to hunt the forests or fish the streams, but that would result in military target practice with you being the target. )
Then sometime in “Mid Summer” the village Reeve would declare harvesting of wheat could begin the following Monday. This would set off the Mid Summer Night Festival. Everyone would use up all the leftover food and create a gigantic party. The alcohol consumption was probably lower than during most festivals, yet the woods would be filled with bizarre behavior, visions, reported spirit sightings, and more than one very “good” young lady would wake up with more than a hangover. The best description would be a 1967 Hippie party with unlimited free LSD.
AND
There was a good reason it resembled those parties. It WAS one of those parties. It seems that if wheat is stored in a wooden barrel it produces a chemical reaction in which a compound nearly identical to LSD is produced. The longer in the barrel and the more pressure the purer the product. In addition it tends to migrate to the bottom of the barrel. SO --- when mama scraped the last of the wheat for the party bread, she was mixing high quality mind altering drugs right in. The more consumed, the wackier the sights.
So, once again Shakespeare was telling the truth.