Aside from coarse and gritty bread, another common item of people's diet was gruel.

Gruel is a form of soup, usually with a grain or cabbage base.  In times of plenty, such a preparation might be fairly thick and nourishing.  In times of famine, it would thin out, and be supplemented with other "dainties".

These additions might include any form of meat, if available, or leaves, grasses, herbs, or vegetables.

Vegetables, such as they are, were themselves by no means plentiful or of any sort of variety, even of the cheaper root crops.

Indeed, even such common tubers as the potato and the turnip, themselves often considered a food of "the poor", were not introduced until the revolutionary period.

Wild acorns were a widely available staple item.  A number of recipes have survived in which acorns are featured.

Acorns were also roasted and scraped to provide a powder from which a kind of acorn "coffee" could be boiled.

Few people in that day could afford real coffee, and even the better-known British tradition of tea was a luxury generally reserved for the wealthy.

Alcohol can be produced from all kinds of things and was therefore fairly plentiful.  Much of what was referred to as "ale" was probably nothing more than very cheap and improperly cured gin, produced from whatever fermentable material was available at the time.

Red meat was extraordinarily costly, and most often reserved for the king and his nobles.

Mutton (sheep) and beef was fairly common, but high-priced and not for every-day eating or the ordinary diets of commoners.

Fish, generally salt-water varieties, was a staple especially closer to the coastal regions.  Game animals (deer, rabbit, or quail etc) were under royal sanction and off limits to the common people.  Anyone caught shooting or trapping a deer, rabbit, or other game animal was subject to serious punishment.

In spite of penalties which included the amputation of fingers, ears, noses, or hands - and on occasion death - poaching was a common crime, the alternative being probably death by slow starvation.

To deter poachers, man-traps were devised and placed in the royal forests.  These included deep pits into which an unwary poacher might be trapped, and actual steel-jawed trap devices along the lines of a more modern bear trap.

These latter could sever a man's arm or leg, or at the very least hold him captive until found (dead or alive) by the royal gamekeeper or bounty hunter.

Clearly, life - such as it was - was hard and cruel.

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