The Armour Archive

Baron Mal -

How about a track at Diamond Wars?? I'm already teaching the basic sewing and spinning classes - not a large stretch to throw in wool prep and weaving stuff. If you want to do an afternoon of basic skills classes, I'm sure that I can arrange for accommodation. There's even a big fireplace in the hall that we may be able to use for the firestarting and cooking part!

Of course, this is late September of next year, so plenty of time to think it over.

Gwyneth

*personal hygne of the dark ages. While mundane to us today, its a very vaible and important part of everyday medieval life.

I am not trying to uppity in saying this, but I am looking at the original question from the stand point of a medieval knight.

1. Using flint & steel to build a fire.

Yes, I can see this one, easily. I might not use it much, if I have servants, but I would probably know how.

2. Sharpening knives

Definitely. Might have more experience with swords, but I carry a knife and use it often.

3. Butchering small animals.

I kind of doubt that most knights would have any real experience with this one. Carving at table was an expected skill, but not handling the meat before it was cooked.

4. Cooking

Maybe, but probably not a lot of experience.

5. Mending

I doubt it.

Now, please understand that I think these are all really useful skills, and I might well be interested in the class, especially if it was taught to the medieval skills. That is, not how to butcher a bunny, but how did a medieval man or woman butcher a bunny. I would defintely want the research behind it that might show how they did it differently.

The time/paternoster idea is one that fits well with the Knight. These are things that he would know.

Sir Mal,

I think it is a great idea for a class. I wish I felt that I would be able to make it to Lilies, but it is doubtful.

You might want to check out Cariadoc's list of persona questions. They were common everyday questions that a medieval man or woman would not have to thought about to answer, but we often do not have good answers. The list might give you some additional ideas.

The Little Things


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Conor
Red Dragon Armoury
I would like to say a few words. And here they are: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!

Slings and ...uh... slinging:
http://www.geocities.com/baldurstrand/slings.html

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Free Companions - live-action roleplaying in the Hyborian Age

What! No basic piloting, navigation and seamanship? How do you all expect to get anywhere? (Except the Swiss. )

I'm half serious; in any island or coastal area this would have been as important as horsemanship; and even the nobility would have to understand what the vessels could and could not do. (...and if they don't; mention the White Ship to them!)

"Bound is the boatless man." (Old Viking saying)

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Full time civil servant, part time blacksmith, and seasonal Viking ship captain.

Visit your National Parks: www.nps.gov

Go viking: www.longshipco.org/

Hit hot iron: www.anvilfire.com

Markland Medieval Mercenary Militia: http://www.markland.org

I've used my flint and steel to light my propane torch when the matches were two flights of stairs up---it's not just for events anymore!

I've been using wood shavings instead of tow, good charcloth is what really makes the difference.

Thomas

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR><font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Thomas Powers:
<B>

I've been using wood shavings instead of tow, good charcloth is what really makes the difference.

Thomas</B></font><HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I can second that. A good charcloth makes for an easily lit fire.

I use tow for tinder. Just offcuts of old rope . . .

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Egfroth

"I hope all your chooks turn to Emus and kick your dunny down."

see my webpage at www.geocities.com/egfrothos

What about Dark/Middle first aid?

plowing, broadcasting, basic husbandry?

law?

If what you teach people helps them to understand that people from the Middle Ages were not a bunch of barely sentient primates, then you will have succeeded.

Seriously. You all know what I mean. At some point in your lives, you were probably presented with the idea that people living more than about 100-200 years ago were fairly stupid. Those of us blessed enough to be born in recent decades are a bunch of geniuses compared to those dolts from the past, right?

I think that just getting people to try out the "basic" skills will show many of them that "it's harder than it looks." If what you teach gives your students a window on how hard life was, what it means to live in a non-automated world, then bravo!

-Woolery

Fire lighting, sure... how about fire banking? You know? Storing coals for later, so it easier to light the next day?

Knife sharpening....I don't know. I mean they had people who specialized in knife sharpening (for a fee)...but still not a bad skill to know I guess.

But how about:

Bartering/Haggling.
An absolute must as there were rarely set prices. Negotiating for goods and services, possibly with a sub-topic on weighing goods using a scales.

Picking out good produce and storing it properly.
Sounds stupid, but a lot of people don't know how to pick a good batch of rutebegas or turnips or taters...and this was a must if you were going to try to make it through the winter on what you bought but you inadvertantly bought or stored your produce in a way that made it rot or sprout.

Telling base metals from gold and silver.This one should be right up there with Bartering/haggling. Most medeival men and women had a pretty good idea of a coin's worth, but not necessarily based on its declared monetary value, but by its weight and color and purity. Some country's coins were of a better manufacturing and purity standard than others, and were therefore more popular and had more stable standardized values. But you had your shavers and your countefeiters even then; mixing base metals with gold and silver to adulterate the coins, or scraping a little gold off a coin here and there and making underweight.
Biting a gold coin...you always see people do that in the movies...but how should that feel? How should real gold taste? Does it taste like copper? Iron? If you mixed copper into it, could you taste the copper? How do you know a good coin from a bad one? How can you tell if someone has given you an underweight coin? Does the bounce trick really work?

Shearing Sheep.
This was one chore that (depending on region of course), everyone seemed to know how to do. Even the lords and the ladies would come down to oversee and participate in the clip.
They had to, because it was so time-consuming with medieval tools and they had only a short timeframe in which to get the clip in and get it to market. Plus the nobles had to be there to oversee the clip because it was revenue, and they had to get and accurate assesment of who had what,to figure out their taxes...both what was owed them, and what they owed to their own lords. Another offshoot of this was spinning & carding wool. Almost all medieval women, rich or poor, would know how to do this.
It was one of their main winter passtimes.

I am considering including a "sheep track" in the classes I will teach/host at Diamond Wars. There are enough local shepherds that I am sure I can find someone to come and let us borrow a sheep for a day. The camp we use is an FFA camp - surely there is an FFA kid that has sheep?

The five classes I am thinking of doing are:
1. Sheep care
2. Shearing
3. Washing and carding the wool
4. Spinning
5. Felting

Of course, this can all be done in a lecture format, but if I can get a real, live sheep, that would be cool.

Gwyneth

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Red Dragon:
3. Butchering small animals.

I kind of doubt that most knights would have any real experience with this one. Carving at table was an expected skill, but not handling the meat before it was cooked.

If you hunt you learn to field dress, or you get sick frequently.
On any sort of raid or campaign you'd be foraging, or raiding - you probably would know how to butcher for the pot.

Gwyneth,

My wife Dejaniera hosts a competition ever year at Lilies that might be right up your alley. Its called "Sheep to Shawl". The contestants are handed a pound ot two of raw woll and they have a couple days to bring back a finished item.

In past years we have seen some amazing projects come out of the competition and it teaches folks a ton they take for granted working with store bought processed wool =)



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Sir Mal
Calontir

Mal - I wanted to do that last year!! Had the kids pretty much full time and they didn't want to do the kids activities, so I didn't ever make it to any classes. Maybe next year.......

Gwyneth

Do we know if there was actuall a prescribed way to shear a sheep BITD? Even now, while many countries with lots of sheep shear the "right way" with only minor variations, many places don't have any set method, just get the wool off the sheep. Were they using the usual 3/4 blow like they did before machines became popular? Or did they just try and get it all off? I have seen some pictures of the sheep resting on people's legs as they shear them. Is this fair dinkum?

Red Dragon, do you really think there has been much of a change in how bunnies and things are butchered? I would be interested in see it if there was. Be mighty interesting. One would imagine that these would remain fairly similar throughout time though?

Some things like the cuts on a sheep may well be different though. Stuff like only cutting it up into butterful stakes instead of chops and things?

You could do the butchering with the sheep stuff if you wanted to, depending on how long the class was. Hell, you could even make it last a whole day. Get your sheep, shear it, kill it, skin it, tan the skin, butcher it, wash the wool, spin the wool, the other womanly stuff and then cook it at the end of things (though I really should hang a day I spose).

Someone was saying that they used to wash the wool on the sheep. Anyone know if this is true? And did they shear it straight after? Cause if you shear wet sheep it does horrible things to your sinuses, and shearers are not required to shear wet sheep under union rules it is that bad for you...

Hmmmmm.......lots to think about now.....

About the washing part - having washed a raw fleece, I personally would want to deal with washing the fleece rather than the sheep. The thought of dealing with a wiggly, wet sheep who really wants to be back with its flock is pretty daunting. Heck, washing my dog is problematic enough!

I really don't know anything about it, but if I had to guess, I would think that running the sheep through a river or stream prior to shearing would not be out of the question. It might get some of the dirt and grime off the sheep. And I don't think that there was a Sheep Shearer's Union back then to worry about the workers' sinuses! Still, a lot of the dirt, grime, briars and sticks would remain - and removal of all this can be handled in the washing and carding phases. Labor was not the issue back then - lots of folks to wash, card, spin and weave.

What I wonder about is how much did a fleece cost in the coinage of the time? What would the equivalent price be today? Was there different pricing for different qualities of wool? Was there different pricing for differing amounts of processing (raw, carded, etc.)? If so, what were the different levels? One of these days, I'll add this research project to my ever-expanding list..........

Gwyneth

A long, long time ago I remember someone teaching a class on math and calculations at an event. That was very interesting.

Oh, yah, and how to make yeast.

G

[This message has been edited by Rod'sWife (edited 11-22-2003).]

Anybody remember reading the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder or the Foxfire books? Both have a lot of basic skills info. Not Medieval, but covers late 19th cent. American Frontier and Southern Appalachia: areas where people were cash poor and had few specialist craftspeople. I would guess that many basic skills had not changed much in 500 years.
Ms. Wilder's "Farmer Boy" has a whole section on sheep shearing, (the entire flock got washed a stream the day before shearing).

Might as well list my 5 favorites:

1. fire starting and tending
2. tool sharpening
3. currancy/Medieval math skills
4. basic cooking (no butchering)
5. processing wool/flax into thread.

My aversion to butchering is this: too long, to messy and as noted earlier, how can we be sure how it was done?

very interesting topic,
Stewart

I know that some of our fellow members have little respect for it, but Lost Country Life by Dorothy Hartley (sp?) has some good, basic information on subsistance living skills related to the period.

(Hmmm, time for another browse.)

A basic understanding of agriculture, livestock, and forestry would be vital to a knight or lord. Land was wealth not for any intrinsic worth but for what you can produce from it. The grant of land was a license for production and creation of wealth. A hide of land (~120 acres) was considered the minimum to support a mounted warrior, and it took five hides of land to support a thegn. Similar considerations applied to a later period.

It helps people understand why "land for service" was the basic building block of feudal society. If you don't know how to make the land productive, you may not be able to maintain your station.

(...and I'm trying to keep 1 and 1/3 hides going in Southern Maryland; no easy task. [There's three other siblings involved. ])

It seems everyone liked my suggestions.
They seem to have taken them in their entirety. That's new.
But, oh...I forgot one really important topic.

Time-telling...before the clock or the pocketwatch, how did people tell time?
I saw a modern friar at an event once who had as medieval rotary-slide timepiece.
How do I describe it?
It was in two parts and was kind of like a circular slide-rule. I can't remeber how it worked, but it was a little like a sundial, and a little like a calendar. Since the sun's position in the sky varies with the seasons, he had to tune the piece to the correct time of year for the time of day to be accurate.
But I would imagine that most people would not have these...and I hardly think they lugged masasive sun-dials around with them either.
So how'd they know what time it was?
By their stomachs? Could be.

You might start the class off with several period methods of time-keeping and then finish it off with a refresher in medieval catholocism....since any town-dweller would probably know the approximate time due to the church bells that rang periodically throughout the day to announce "mass", "evens" and "vespers" and the like. Now I don't know what most of those mean...but I would assume that they are calls to worship and reminders to recite different kinds of scheduled prayers, much as the Muslims do today.

And what is up with that damn song that all modern clocks play? There must be a historical reason that that song was chosen! Supposedly there is a way to tell time simply by how much of the song is played on the hour....even if the bells are not rung to toll the hour. On some clocks I think that the full song is only played at 12:00 am and 12:00 pm.

One other thing. Many of ther methods of period time-keeping were also used for navigation...you could toss that out there as well.

[This message has been edited by Abaddon (edited 11-26-2003).]

Outdoor skills anyone?
http://www.inquiry.net/outdoor/skills/index.htm

Maybe, along the lines of a series, you could teach the seminar from the point of view of a single, tropic sort of persona. For instance, you could teach the class from the point of view of a 14th cent. English peasant or something. Then, the next go around, you could switch it up a bit. Of course, you have to find that happy medium between too vague and too specific when creating all this. Certainly, this wouldn't apply to all the kinds of personas at an SCA event, but I don't think there's any way you could do it and address everyone at the same time. I think that maybe doing it that way would be inspirational, even for people whose personas don't fit the seminar.

Maybe that approach is a little middle-schoolish, but I think it would get people thinking and feeling inspired.

"A Day in the Life of a Peasant" I like it, and Lord knows some of the nobility need to understand the folk who put the bread on their tables!

It would be a fun way to go over the skills that all should have held in common, and the peasant could be presented, within a Scadian context, as an exotic species.

Next: A Day in the Life of a Seaman; A Day in the Life of a Knight; A day in the Life of a Huntsman...