I don't have an answer for northern Germany and the exact period you mentioned. I've put together some numbers for England towards the later part of your time span.

First, to get an idea inflation, here's a list of daily wages for a thatcher and thatcher's mate, from Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages by Christopher Dyer. Numbers are in pence. There were 12 pennies to a shilling, 20 shillings to the pound.

Year	Thatcher	Thatcher's Mate
1261-70	2	1
1271-80	2.5	1
1281-90	2.25	1
1291-1300	2.5	1
1301-10	2.5	1
1311-20	3	1.25
1321-30	3	1
1331-40	3	1.25
1341-50	3	1.25
1351-60	3.5	2
1361-70	3.5	2
1371-80	4.25	2.5
1381-90	4	2.25
1391-1400	4.25	2.75

Next, getting to the cost of cheese, Henry II's accounts show that around the year 1170, he bought 10,240 pounds of cheddar cheese for a farthing (quarter penny) per pound. The same book I linked above says that around the year 1350, cheese sold for about half a penny per pound.

The difference in prices partly reflects inflation, but also volume discounts. Henry II's order was large, for over 4 tons of cheese. The later price is calculated from an order for 80 pounds of cheese. Presumably, things are more expensive if you buy smaller amounts.

So, in the period when a pound of cheese cost half a penny, a thatcher was earning between 3.5 to 4 pennies a day, or enough to buy 7 or 8 pounds of cheese per day if he spent money on nothing else.

How much did people actually spend on food? Unfortunately, I can't find household budgets for "average" folks. What I have instead are food expenses from large landowners feeding retainers on their estates. Around the middle 1300's, accounts list food costs at around 7 pence/day for the lords, 4 pence/day for esquires, 3 pence/day for yeomen, 1 pence/day for grooms.

This seems to show that people could have eaten significant amounts of cheese. Even the worst fed on the lord's estate was budgeted enough money for 2 pounds of cheese per day (if he ate nothing else). Other things you could buy for a penny might be 2 dozens eggs, or 2 chickens. Keep in mind that medieval chickens were scrawny and eggs were tiny, so it's not like your grocery store chicken/eggs.

Getting to cheaper fare, cheap ale cost about 2 or 3 farthings a gallon (1/2 or 3/4 of a penny). We have a record of dry oats going for 1 to 2 shillings per quarter, depending on locale (more expensive in London than in the countryside). A quarter is 8 bushels, a bushel is 8 imperial gallons, a gallon is about 4.5 liters. So you could have bought over 10 pounds of dry oats for a penny.

That seems like a lot of food, but it hinges on every person being an earner. In reality, that thatcher or groom would have a family and children, dependents who had to be fed. A penny a day for food doesn't go as far when divided between 4-5 people. They'd be eating more oats, not cheese, plus anything they could raise on their own land.

A cow cost 6-10 shillings, a pig around 2-3 shillings, a sheep about 1.5 shillings. If you could buy a piglet or two for cheap, you could raise them on kitchen scraps until old enough to slaughter or sell. A cow was worth a month's wages to the thatcher, a pig worth 10 days.

If you didn't own your house, you paid rent. A cheap cottage rented for about 5 shillings a year, a very modest house for about 20 shillings. That comes to 5 pennies/week (working 2 days a week to pay rent for the thatcher's apprentice). The modest house was unaffordable to both thatcher and apprentice, you'd need to be better off to afford that.

Clothes were expensive. The very cheapest scraps of tunics could be had for 1 to 6 pennies, but more decent quality cloth was nearer 10 pence per yard (need 2 - 2.5 yards to make a tunic). A woolen tunic would cost you more like 3 shillings. Shoes would be 4 - 6 pennies a pair at the lower end.

So your lifestyle at the lower end of income really depended on how many earners you had in the family. If you were only responsible for yourself and you worked even a low wage job, you could probably have eaten half a pound of cheese a day if you really wanted to. But your situation deteriorated rapidly with how many mouths you had to feed, and it's unlikely that a single wage poor family ate any cheese, except once in a while. There was a strong incentive for all adults to make some income, regardless of age or sex. And even children were put to work when possible.

Some sources:

• Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages, Christopher Dyer, Cambridge University Press, 1989.

• The Cost of Castle Building: The Case of the Tower at Langeais by Bernard Bachrach, in The Medieval Castle: Romance and Reality, ed. Kathryn Reyerson and Faye Powe, Kendall/Hunt, Dubuque, Iowa, 1984.

• English Weapons & Warfare, 449-1660 by A. V. B. Norman and Don Pottinger, Barnes & Noble, 1992.

• Life in a Medieval City by Joseph and Frances Gies, Harper & Row, New York, 1969.

I do not know if this is allowed, but as a follow-up question what would that available cheese look like? Is it something we would recognize? What are we familiar with that would be the closest thing to the cheese available at the time?

Finding quantitative data or even estimates on dairy production and consumption during the medieval period for northern Germany has been unfruitful. The English language literature focuses on conditions in Medieval England. If its all right, could we relax the geographic scope of this question to allow the admission of the English data?

First, consider the case of one Robert le Kyng, a tenant of the bishop of Worcester in the year 1299. The historian Christopher Dyer attempted to reconstruct this tenant’s annual budget based upon surveys conducted on behalf of the bishop. Dyer assumed that the le Kyng household consisted of Robert, a wife and three children aged 5 through 12. They had two cows (and offspring) and Dyer estimated these cows produced 160 lbs worth of cheese annually, of which half was eaten by the five individuals of the household and the remaining sold – so one answer is 80 lbs for 5 people in one year. This is based on the 160 lbs produced by two cows, how reasonable is that number?

Kathy L. Pearson provides a range of estimates for the annual milking yields for cows in her article, “Nutrition and the Early-Medieval Diet.” Medieval cows (and other livestock) were typically smaller and yielded less than their modern counterparts – cows would only lactate with the birth of their young and a good 20 to 25% of the annual milk yield of the cow was ‘wasted’ on nursing calves. The low end estimate for the milk yield for English cattle in the fourteenth century was 540 – 647 liters, the high end estimate based on southern German cattle was 540 – 1200 liters. Based on archaeological data and the 20-25% reduction due to nursing, Pearson accepts and revises the low end estimate to an annual 405 – 517.6 liters of milk produced by the “average cow”. Additional milk could be gained by milking goats and sheep but these produce only about a tenth of the yield of a cow and thus goat and sheep cheese were niche compared to cheese made from cow milk. As milk spoils quickly, cheese and butter making were essential processes in preserving the nutritional goodness of milk with cheese being the ‘cheaper’ option to preserve milk (cheese and butter are also much easier to transport and sell than milk). Based on the modern artisanal cheesemaking techniques (the closest processes we have to medieval cheese production techniques), Pearson estimates that it took 4.18 liters of milk to make 500 grams of cheese (i.e. 1.1 lbs); 1 kg of butter, on the other hand, took between 18.9 to 35 liters of milk. Not all milk was available for butter or cheesemaking as a portion would be lost to spoilage and contamination. Going by these numbers, the annual production of 160 lbs of cheese would then require 608 liters of milk which is easily achievable by two cows producing 400 - 500 liters annually and including factors such as spoilage.

Robert le Kyng was lucky to own cows and thus could produce cheese for consumption and sale; even those individuals who owned ewes could milk and imbibe in dairy products, but it should be noted that a quarter to a half of peasant households did not own livestock and thus did not have ready access to cheese. In these circumstances, the individual might get access to cheese by working as a harvest worker in one of the great manors of the land, which paid a food allowance and a cash wage. For the Norwich Cathedral Priory around 1300, a harvest worker received 2 oz of cheese for every 2 lbs of barley bread. Cheese is also found in the food allowances granted to harvest workers in other manors as well – for instance the manor Sedgeford set aside about 600 lbs worth of cheese to feed its workers in 1256 and this in combination with bread served as 80 % of the calorific value of the food allowance. Thus, the final answer to this question may depend on the individual’s access to livestock but even those without livestock could consume a generous quantity of cheese, at least for harvest season, if they happened to be hired to bring in the harvest of their lord.

While I do not have numbers for Germany, I would like to cite the work of Ursula Heinzelmann on the history of German cheesemaking to provide some insight on the location of interest. She notes that most traditional German cheeses were made from quark, a byproduct of buttermaking (butter was absolutely vital in Germany due to the absence of vegetable oils) and so cheesemaking in Germany occurred only when there was a surplus of milk and when market conditions did not favor fresh milk or butter; it should be noted that northern Germany was surrounded by many cattle raising regions such as the Alps, Frisia, Southern Scandinavia which all produced and exported cheese in vast quantities and this may explain the secondary nature of cheese production. Increased cattle breeding and cheese making would only become a phenomenon in the 19th century after a major agrarian revolution.

Sources:

Bach, Volker. The Kitchen, Food, and Cooking in Reformation Germany. Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.

Dyer. Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Heinzelmann, Ursula. “Möhrenlaibchen: How the Carrot Got into the Cheese.” Gastronomica, vol. 9, no. 3, 2009, pp. 48–52.,

Pearson, Kathy L. “Nutrition and the Early-Medieval Diet.” Speculum, vol. 72, no. 1, 1997, pp. 1–32.,

Woolgar, Christopher Michael, et al. Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition. Oxford University Press, 2011.