You have to visit Disneyland, or some other major tourist attraction, to get a real sense of the obesity issue. In your own neighborhood you might know one or two people who perhaps have a “weight problem,” but a trip to one of the nation’s many theme parks is necessary to really get a true grasp of the enormity (ahem) of the problem. There you see not merely people who are a trifle zaftig, but droves of the truly obese, the sort of people who prompted the Southwest Airlines dictat that any individual who occupies two seats (or one and a portion of a second) should pay for two seats. This prompted yelps of complaint from the happily overweight, who characterized the decision as “sizeist” and tried to position it as a civil rights issue.

After a brief fuss, the whole airline angle vanished (though not the requirement). In fact, the public at large has been remarkably unreceptive to the issue. We seem to have a limit to the amount of sympathy we are prepared to dispense to …well, fat people.

Perhaps the reason for this lies in history. In the past the only people who were fat were the wealthy. In the 18th and 19th centuries the description “a fine figure of a man” crops up frequently in fiction. They didn’t mean that the squire looked like he had a gym in the stables. No, the phrase meant that the gentleman in question had a belly. He was well fed. He was, therefore, well-to-do. The preferred physique for women was also well-rounded and plump (witness countless classic works of art). “Health” for many centuries meant being what we would now regard as overweight.

Of course, most people in ages past did not fit into this category. They struggled to find food, coaxing the unforgiving earth to bring forth a few green shoots. They were subsistence farmers, or they worked in grim cities for wages that barely kept body and soul together. It was for these people that the legend of Robin Hood was created. And an integral part of the story of the man who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor was, of course, Friar Tuck.

Now the Tuck of Robin Hood’s gang was a benevolent character, but he represented a stereotype with which most people of the period could have identified: the fat friar.

By the 12th and 13th centuries the church had become immensely powerful in Europe, with monasteries and priories amassing vast wealth through tithes and “gifts”. The sight of corpulent monks doing very little while the people around them worked their fingers to the bone was a familiar one to mediaeval people, and the supposedly religious brothers were resented by many among their flock.

But was that resentment well-founded? Were monks really better fed than the ordinary people? The results of a new study by the Institute of Archaeology at the University of London appear to answer those questions with a resounding, “Yes!”

The study examined the remains of 300 monks from three abbeys (Tower Hill, Merton and Bermondsey) and found plenty of evidence that would have made Mr. Atkins despair. The monks suffered from a variety of complaints common among the clinically obese: arthritis in knees, hips and fingers and well as evidence of a condition now known as Dish (diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis). Dish is caused by overeating and a rich diet. The evidence is a coating on the spine that looks like dripping candlewax.

Before you go running for an MRI, it should be noted that these mediaeval monks were apparently indulging in diets that provided them with around 6,000 calories a day. And even those famous fasts of the middle ages still meant around 4,500 calories to the inhabitants of the local priory. These figures are supported by contemporary records which have monks consuming up to six eggs a day (and that was only a small fraction of a diet that, to put it frankly, would choke a carthorse). In fact, the problem was so endemic that some monasteries instituted checks – one Cistercian abbey in Portugal had a door into the dining room that could only be entered by the relatively trim. If a monk couldn’t squeeze through, he was out of luck until he’d slimmed down.

None of this fitted with the monastic rule, of course. But abbots found themselves in a situation in which they had to control large numbers of men engaged in largely sedentary pursuits. Food fitted the bill where most other alternatives would not.

The result was diets laden with saturated fats and carbohydrates. The obvious obesity of the inhabitants of the local monastery led to a not unnatural resentment from the people in the surrounding villages who were bankrolling the habit while scraping by on vegetable pottages.

And somehow, we have never quite been able to shake off that resentment. Although many of us struggle with our weight, there’s still a tiny voice that tells us that the extremely obese have wandered willingly into their malaise. And no matter how often we hear about genetic or metabolic causes, there’s still that belief that overindulgence is really at the core of the problem.

But there’s always that spinal candlewax thing. Now, there’s a deterrent!

As for the monks, here’s an example of their daily diet:

Morning: Three eggs, boiled or fried in lard. Vegetable porridge with beans, leeks, carrots and other produce of monastery garden. Pork chops, bacon, and mutton. Capon (chicken), duck and goose with oranges. Half a pound of bread, to use as sop (“sop” was provided to soak up the gravy and juices). Peaches, strawberries and bilberries with egg flan. Four pints of small (low alcohol) beer.