They had a type of roasted cereal drink in Ancient Egypt. They let it rot a bit in water after sprouting roasting and grinding it. It was very popular…
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There are roasted barley teas in China, Korea, and Japan. I don't know anything about their history but I would hazard a guess that they were not created as a coffee substitute and are fairly old.
Lack of pockets tends to be difficult. Pockets don't seem to be common knowledge until about the 15th century.
Player character: I stuff as much as I can into my pockets...
SG: What is this "pockets" you speak of? You belt pouch is still tied closed.
Regular running water is missed.
Players: We will have a public bathhouse to wash daily, like our Roman antecedents. Um, what do you mean the bath is cleaned and water changed only once a day? We have dozens of people waiting.
At least tell us what we use for toilet paper now that winter has taken all the good leaves away.
So many little things we modern people take for granted.
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At least not at the waist. But monks and scholars use their hoods as "pockets" (when not covering the head!), and the tippet/scarf pocket is starting to appear in the late 13th century (it's already widely in use by the time of Chaucer).
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I feel I should know the answer but I don't; did the Romans clean themselves with a bucket of water first (like the Japanese) or go through a steam room first to sweat off some of the worse grime (which I think might have been a Finnish or Russian custom)?
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The thing of it is that a lot of these issues are details, and are not important to hold your players to the information. How many times has a character gone into a building through the windows, or asked if the windows were open, despite the scarcity of large panes of glass in the period. Solution vatied regionally, from using translucent rocks set in wooden frames to small paned windows to simply having an open space with no pane at all, but simply bars over the opening or even just narrow slits in te wall to allow light and air in that were to small for people. The fact is that just about every aspect of life at the time was different because they lacked our technology and found other solutions.
Which may be that hardest thing to really wrap your head around- they did find other ways to do things. They were not simply shivering in cold rooms or tending constant fires in cold climates, they weren't in stifling heat where it was warm, the differences tend to be architectural rather than a simple solution that could apply to the same layout. Again this is an area where the extreme regional variation came into play, each town and village adapted t their own climate, and their own available resources. The idea that the middle ages were the same everywhere has to be the biggest myth of them all.
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They were rubbed with oil, scraped with a fairly blunt tool to get the surface grime off, then went through a series of bathing rooms in an order I do not recall.
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You're reminding me of David Graeber's "Debt" book, so that would be mostly trade, or tabs, or whatever (it's been a long time). But no oney as we know it, not for long.
I only read "Bullshit Jobs" of his works, it was gifted to me because it has been relevant to my career at times...
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The tool is called a strigil, and it was widely used throughout antiquity by Greeks, Romans, Etruscans etc. Oil + strigil was a very common way to clean oneself up from grime without water particularly after heavy exertion - e.g. after a day of travel, or after practicing sports.
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Women scholars were common in the Muslim world; but exceedingly rare in Christian universities and medical schools (as OneShot correctly points out, Salerno was an exception). I seem to recall, but I cannot find the quote any more, that Usamah Ibn-Munqidh (a 12th century Muslim nobleman, traveler, and poet) wondered at how backwards "Franks" (i.e. Christians/Europeans) were in this regard. @niallchristie is a true academic authority on this subject, so he may want to chime in?
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I am also now coffeeless.
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I'm thinking we could make an in-game spell.
The Day After the Midwinter's Feast (A play on words for cold turkey, and a hangover)
Perdo Corpus (aquam Herbam requisite)
Remove all drugs, stimulants and depressant effects from the target's system. It is up to the Storyguides discretion what effect this will have on the character.
The medical school of Salerno had both women teachers and students. One famous teacher was Trota of Salerno, associated with the Trotula texts on women's medicine widely circulated in medieval Europe.
But Salerno was a verrry unusual place of learning in Christian Europe.
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You might have recalled it from Steven Runciman's A History of the Crusades, 9th Book, Cp.1.
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I think that should be Creo instead of Perdo, but still 
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I don't remember a specific comment from Usama on women as scholars, but I don't have my text handy right now. However, as a general rule, in the Muslim world by this time women were excluded from madrasas in a way not dissimilar to their exclusion from universities in Europe. However, in the Muslim world it was more common for women to be educated privately at home, learning from male and female tutors. Likewise, women who gained a reputation for their learning would then tutor male and female students, again privately in their homes rather than at a public institution.
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In medieval Europe, the extended family or clan was crucial as a political entity, more so than individual rulers. Instead of a ruler imposing power on people, clans functioned as the core unit. Leaders were chosen based on their ability to maintain clan consensus, and if they failed, they could be replaced by more competent relatives. Feuds and debts were typically clan-based, and clans managed land and wealth collectively. Nations were essentially networks of interconnected clans. Additionally, many medieval copyists couldn't read and merely copied books as if they were drawings. Despite this, the books were preserved through constant copying.
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Can anyone confirm? Many copies of the Venerable Bede are very difficult to read because copyists couldn't handle his bad handwriting.
And there seems to be little if any quality control between the official copies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles.
I am sure that was true at some point in time and space, but I think what may be hard to grok is time span, not to speak of the size of area, jointly labelled Medieval. It is easy to take one description and one story, and assume that it described medieval universally.
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