the_miracle_aligner
Published Aug 17, 2024When your king Richard asks you after the battle why you singlehandedly charged at the Saracen lines before he gave the order.
“But my lord, ‘Freebird’ was playing …”
One of my favorites was a hit during the Third Crusade where the English were certainly the MVPs. A very big thank you to everyone involved who helped me bring this into the world 😂
(more…)
December 17, 2024
December 13, 2024
December 12, 2024
QotD: The “natural cycle” of empire
One of the recurrent concepts in the study of history is that of the “natural cycle”, and its most enticing form is that of “collapse”. The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. The Rise and Fall of Feudalism. The Rise and Fall of the British Empire. All of these are, of course, ridiculous oversimplifications.
Arguably the evolution of the British Empire into a Commonwealth of 70-odd self-governing nations, many of them with stable democratic governments, who can all get together and play cricket and have Commonwealth Games (and impose sanctions and suspensions on undemocratic members): cannot be considered much of a “collapse” when compared to say the Inca or Aztec civilisations. Nor can post Medieval Europe be considered a “collapsed” version. Even Rome left a series of successor states across Europe – some successful and some not. (Though there was clearly a collapse of economics and general living standards in these successor states.) The fact that the Roman Empire survived in various forms both East – Byzantium – and west – Holy Roman Empire, Catholic Church, Christendom, etc – would also argue somewhat against total collapse. Still the idea has been popular with both publishers and readers.
Yet the “natural cycle” theory has been revisited recently by economic historians in such appalling works on “Imperialism and Collapse”, as The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. [That’s the one where the Paul Kennedy explained how US power “has been declining relatively faster than Russia’s over the last few decades” (p.665) – just before the Berlin Wall came down.]
Nigel Davies, “The Empires of Britain and the United States – Toying with Historical Analogy”, rethinking history, 2009-01-10.
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December 1, 2024
QotD: Recording and codifying the land that William conquered
[…]
In brief, Scott argues that the process of making a society “legible” to government officials obscures social reality, to the point where the government’s maps and charts and graphs take on a life of their own. It’s recursive, such that those well-intentioned schemes end up first measuring, then manipulating, the wrong thing in the wrong way, to the point that the social “problem” the process was supposed to address drops out entirely — all you have, at the end, is powerpoint girls critiquing spreadsheet boys because their spreadsheets don’t have enough animation, and vice versa.
Scott doesn’t use the Domesday Book as an example (IIRC from a graduate school class 20-odd years ago, anyway), but it’s one we’re probably all familiar with. The first thing William the Conqueror needed to know is: what, exactly, have I conquered? So he sent out the high-medieval version of spreadsheet boys to take a comprehensive survey of the kingdom. Turns out the Duke of Earl’s demense runs from this creek to that rock. He has five underlings, and their domains run from etc.
The point of all this, of course, was so that Billy C. could call the Duke of Earl on the carpet, point to the spreadsheet, and say “You owe me a cow, three chickens, and two months in the saddle as back taxes.” It worked great, except when — as, it seems, is inevitable — the high-medieval equivalent of the spreadsheet boys did the high-medieval version of “ctrl-c”; just copying and pasting the information over. Eventually the tax situation got way out of whack, as it did for most every pre-modern government running a similar system — one of the reasons declining Chinese dynasties had such fiscal problems, for instance, is that the tax surveys only got updated every two centuries or so, such that a major provincial lord was still only paying 20 silver pieces in taxes, when he should’ve been paying 20,000 (and his peasants were all paying 20 when all they could afford was 2).
In other words: unless the spreadsheet boys periodically go out and check that the numbers on their spreadsheets actually correspond in some systematic, more-or-less representative way to some underlying social reality, government policy is being set by make-believe.
Severian, “The Finger is Not the Moon”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-14.
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November 19, 2024
QotD: The Reformation
Your hotter Protestants, your John Calvins and Oliver Cromwells and so on, saw all of this as mere ritual. And to be fair to them, late-medieval Catholicism was very elaborate, and very, very weird — slog through a few chapters of The Stripping of the Altars if you want the details. To the Prods, this was cheating — you can’t just go through the motions and expect to get into Heaven. They made a similar distinction between “natural magic” and the unlawful stuff — the one was undertaken only after deep study and the most rigorous self-purification, while the other “worked” entirely mechanically, because what the sorcerer was really doing was cheating; he was really making a deal with a (or The) devil, to short-circuit the natural processes.
Now, it’s important to realize that the Protestants were not saying anything close to “do your own thing, man”. They were NOT hippies, encouraging everyone to read the Bible and decide for themselves how best to commune with the Big JC. The German peasants thought that’s what Martin Luther was saying back in 1524, but Luther himself was out there urging the authorities to smash the peasants with extreme prejudice. The Protestants were, in fact, extremely concerned about ritual. It just had to be the right ritual, the Biblically sanctioned ritual, and nothing but that — that’s what “Puritanism” (originally an insult) means.
Severian, “Faith vs. Works”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-07.
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November 10, 2024
QotD: The low social status of shepherds in the ancient and medieval world
One the one hand, there is a robust literature, beginning in the Greek and Roman literary corpus, which idealizes rustic life, particularly shepherding. Starting with Theocritus’ short pastoral poems (called eidullion, “little poems” from where we get the word idyll as in calling a scene “idyllic”) and running through Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics, which present the pure rural simplicity of the countryside and pastoralism as a welcome contrast to the often “sordid” and unhealthy environment of the city (remember the way these “gentlemen farmers” tend to think about merchants and markets in cities, after all). This idolization only becomes more intense in Europe with the advent of Christianity and the grand metaphorical significance that shepherding in particular – as distinct from other rural activities – takes on. It would thus be easy to assume just from reading this sort of high literature that shepherds were well thought of, especially in a Christian social context.
But by and large just as the elite love of the idea of rural simplicity did not generally lead to a love of actual farming peasants, so too their love of the idea of pastoral simplicity did not generally lead to an actually high opinion of the folks who did that work, nor did it lead shepherds to any kind of high social status. While the exact social position of shepherds and their relation to the broader society could vary (as we’ll see), they tended to be relatively low-status and poor individuals. The “shepherds out tending their flocks by night” of Luke 2:8 are not important men. Indeed, the “night crew” of shepherds are some of the lowest status and poorest free individuals who could possibly see that religious sign, a point in the text that is missed by many modern readers.
We see a variety of shepherding strategies which impact what kind of shepherds might be out with flocks. Small peasant households might keep a few sheep (along with say, chickens or pigs) to provide for the household’s wool needs. In some cases, a village might pool those sheep together to make a flock which one person would tend (a job which often seems to have gone to either fairly young individuals or else the elderly – that is, someone who might not be as useful in the hard labor on the farm itself, since shepherding doesn’t necessarily require a lot of strength).
Larger operations by dedicated shepherds often involved wage-laborers or enslaved laborers tending flocks of sheep and pastured owned by other, higher status and wealthier individuals. Thus for instance, Diodorus’s description of the Sicilian slave revolts (in 135 and 104 BC; the original Diodorus, book 36, is lost but two summaries survive, those of Photios and Constantine Porphyrogennetos), we’re told that the the flocks belonging to the large estates of Roman magnates in the lowland down by the coast were tended by enslaved shepherds in significant numbers (and treated very poorly; when a Greek source like Diodorus who is entirely comfortable with slavery is nevertheless noting the poor treatment, it must be poor indeed). Likewise, there is a fair bit of evidence from ancient Mesopotamia indicating that the flocks of sheep themselves were often under state or temple control (e.g. W. Sallaberger, “The Value of Wool in Early Bronze Age Mesopotamia” or S. Zawadzki, “‘If you have sheep, you have all you need’: Sheep Husbandry and Wool in the Economy of the Neo-Babylonian Ebaddar Temple at Sippar” both in Wool Economy in the Ancient Near East and the Aegean eds. C. Breniquet and C. Michel, (2014)) and that it was the temple or the king that might sell or dispose of the wool; the shepherds were only laborers (free or unfree is often unclear).
Full time shepherds could – they didn’t always, but could – come under suspicion as effective outsiders to the fully sedentary rural communities they served as well. Diodorus in the aforementioned example is quick to note that banditry in Sicily was rife because the enslaved shepherds were often armed – armed to protect their flocks because banditry was rife; we are left to conclude that Diodorus at least thinks the banditry in question is being perpetrated by the shepherds, evidently sometimes rustling sheep from other enslaved shepherds. A similar disdain for the semi-nomadic herding culture of peoples like the Amorites is sometimes evident in Mesopotamian texts. And of course that the very nature of transhumance meant that shepherds often spent long periods away from home sleeping with their flocks in temporary shelters and generally “roughing it” exposed to weather.
Consequently, while owning large numbers of sheep and pastures for them could be a contributor to high status (and thus merit elite remark, as with Pliny’s long discussion of sheep in book 8 of his Natural History), actually tending sheep was mostly a low-status job and not generally well remunerated (keeping on poor Pliny here, it is notable that in several long sections on sheep he never once mentions shepherds). Shepherds were thus generally towards the bottom of the social pyramid in most pre-modern societies, below the serf or freeholding farmer who might at least be entitled to the continued use of their land.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part I: High Fiber”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-03-05.
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October 26, 2024
QotD: Henry VIII
Leaving all of Henry’s personal quirks aside — and his was a very strong, distinctive personality — that’s got to affect you.
So many of the changes in Henry’s reign, then, must have been driven in part by the fact that it was the same man, reflecting on a lifetime’s experience in a job he was never expected to have, wasn’t really prepared for, and didn’t seem to want (aside from the lifestyle). There’s been lots of pop-historical theorizing about what was “wrong” with the later Henry — senility, syphilis, the madness of power — but more naturalistic explanations of his later actions must take into account simple age. A man nearing the end of his life, knowing that his succession was very much in doubt and fearing for the state of his soul, will do things differently than a young man in the prime of life.
[…]
Life was hard back then, and cheap. When every other child dies before the age of five and the average life expectancy is 35, I imagine, you live your life cranked to 11 every waking moment. Accounts of grown men weeping like little girls at the theater aren’t an exaggeration; the whole age was given to extreme outbursts. And that’s just the baseline! Now consider that a guy like Henry never had a moment to himself, and I do mean never — not once, in his entire life. He even had a guy with him on the crapper, who would wipe his ass for him. The relationship between Henry and a guy like Wolsey, then — to say nothing of his relationship with the Groom of the Stool — must’ve been intimate in a way we can’t possibly grasp. Compared to that, you and your wife are barely on speaking terms. If Henry seemed sometimes to set policy just because he was pissed at Wolsey, we must consider the possibility that that’s exactly what happened.
The best you can do, then, is imagine yourself back there as best you can, and make your interpretations in that light, acknowledging your biases as best you can (I’m not a medievalist, obviously, but I’m a much better read amateur than most, and though Henry VIII is a very hard guy to like, he’s equally hard not to admire). Most of all — and this, I think, is the hardest thing for academic historians, more even than recognizing their presentist biases — you have to keep your humility. Perhaps Henry’s decision about ___ was part of a gay little frenemies spat with Wolsey. That’s sure what it seems like, knowing the man, and having no contrary evidence …
… but contrary evidence might always emerge. It might not have been the optimal decision, but it might’ve been a much better one than you thought, because Henry had information you didn’t, but now do. It makes for some restless nights, knowing that your life’s work could be overturned by some grad student finding some old paper at a yard sale somewhere, but … there it is.
Severian, “Writing Real History”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-18.
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October 23, 2024
QotD: Sheep shearing in the ancient and medieval world
The availability of iron for tools represented a fairly major change. Iron, unlike bronze or copper, is springy which makes the standard design of sheep shears (two blades, connected by a u-shaped or w-shaped metal span called a “bow”) and the spring action (the bending and springing back into place of the metal span) possible. The basic design of these blade shears has remained almost entirely unchanged since at least the 8th century BC, with the only major difference I’ve seen being that modern blade shears tend to favor a “w-shape” to the hinge, while ancient shears are made with a simpler u-shape. Ancient iron shears generally varied between 10 to 15cm in length (generally closer to 15 than to 10) and modern shears … generally vary between 10cm and 18.5cm in length; roughly the same size. Sometimes – more often than you might think – the ideal form of an unpowered tool was developed fairly early and then subsequently changed very little.
Modern shearing, either bladed or mechanical, is likely to be done by a specialized sheep shearer, but the overall impression from my reading is that pre-modern sheep shearing was generally done by the shepherds themselves and so was often less of a specialized task with a pastoral community. There are interesting variations in what the evidence implies for the gender of those shearing sheep; shears for sheep are common burial goods in Iron Age Italy, but their gender associations vary by place. In the culturally Gallic regions of North Italy, it seems that shears were assumed to belong to men (based on associated grave goods; that’s a method with some pitfalls, but the consistency of the correlation is still striking), while in Sicily, shears were found in both male and female burials and more often in the latter (but again, based on associated grave goods). Shears also show up in the excavation of settlements in wool-producing regions in Italy.
That said, the process of shearing sheep in the ancient world wasn’t much different from blade shearing still occasionally performed today on modern sheep. Typically before shearing, the sheep are washed to try to get the wool as clean as possible (though further post-shearing cleaning is almost always done); typically this was done using natural bodies of moving water (like a stream or shallow river). The sheep’s legs are then restrained either by hand or being tied and the fleece is cut off; I can find, in looking at depictions of blade shearing in various periods, no consistency in terms of what is sheared first or in what order (save that – as well known to anyone familiar with sheep – that a sheep’s face and rear end are often sheared more often; this is because modern breeds of sheep have been selectively bred to produce so much wool that these areas must be cleared regularly to keep the fleece clean and to keep the sheep from being “wigged” – that is, having its wool block its eyes). Nevertheless, a skilled shearer can shear sheep extremely fast; individuals shearing 100-200 sheep a day is not an uncommon report for modern commercial shearers working with tools that, as noted, are not much different from ancient tools. That speed was important; sheep were generally sheared just once a year and usually in a fairly narrow time window (spring or very early summer; in medieval England this was generally in June and was often accompanied by a rural festival) so getting them all sheared and ready to go before they went up the mountain towards the summer pasture probably did need to be done in fairly short order.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part I: High Fiber”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-03-05.
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October 20, 2024
Debunking the “Muslims saved the Graeco-Roman legacy” intellectual urban legend
In my weekly set of recommendations from Substack there was a link to A History of Mankind‘s debunking of what is described as an “intellectual urban legend”:
Islamic scholars at an Abbasid library in Baghdad.
Illustration by Yahyá al-Wasiti from 1237 via Wikimedia Commons.
Among the most popular of those legends, there’s one that can be summarized as “Arab scholars and translators saved the books of Graeco-Roman antiquity from being destroyed by the Christians and/or forgotten”. This a surprisingly widespread view. I’ve lived in several countries, and heard versions of this legend, often told in very simple terms over somewhat complicated drinks, from well-educated people often working in academia or the financial sector (which makes more sense than it appears — I’ve worked in the financial sector myself, and people there are highly educated as a rule).
I’ve even heard scholars (normally not Medievalists) express this view, and I’ve read views to this effect in multiple occasions. Just Google “did the arabs save graeco-roman books” and look at the top results, if you don’t believe me. Lots of well-educated people believe this, not to speak of history enthusiasts all over the Internet.
However, the truth is that Arab translators had only a modest impact on the transmission of Graeco-Roman texts to modern times. There are various reasons that explain this, but first let me provide some clarity on why Baghdad’s Medieval “House of Wisdom” — oft-cited, correctly, as the center of the Abbasid-era translation movement inasmuch as there was one — is one of history’s most misunderstood institutions.
The House of Wisdom functioned as a state library with a focus on the transcription and storage of manuscripts, and their translation to the court’s main language, Arabic. Based on a similar library patronized by the Sasanian emperors and staffed with some of its personnel from about the 8th century, the House of Wisdom employed Christian Greek speakers – very few Muslims spoke or read Greek fluently in this era and others, particularly Arabs – as well as Muslim and Zoroastrian Arabic or Syriac speakers who worked to translate and disseminate work.
[…]
Just to give a final touch of class to these absurd claims, Abu Sahl added the detail that the Greeks, dunces as they all are, forgot to actually steal many Iranian books, and simply memorized the contents before they torched them, so the actual Greek copies of Iranian greats are, by necessity, inferior versions diluted by the Greeks’ faulty memory.
Some Muslim scholars later came up with a new wrinkle that Byzantines were poor keepers of their own treasures, and their books were eaten by insects, as the bibliographer Al-Nadim (932-995) wrote in a second- or third-hand anecdote about some guy who visited Constantinople and was sad to see some ancient temple filled with neglected books, later widely quoted, and included in his Index of 987. The same Al-Nadim transmits from someone “trustworthy” that the Byzantines burned fifteen loads of books by Archimedes, which never happened.
Abdullah Ibn-abi-Zayd (922–998), a prolific North African writer on Islamic law, came up with a wrinkle for this wrinkle: that the Byzantine emperor gathered books and hid them in a secret building to prevent heresy among potential readers; and when Yahya, a prominent Bamarkid Persian in the Abbasid court, heard of the repository he asked if he could borrow the texts. The emperor agreed on the condition that they were never returned, so that they would never hurt the delicate Christian feelings of his subjects.
Others with less experience of the Christian West, like the Egyptian Arab Ibn Ridwan (988-1061), claimed that ancient sciences were forgotten there, and only survived in the Ummah because of the supreme wisdom and care displayed by Al-Mamun and their successors. Ridwan’s fable showing just how obscurantist and dumb Christians are proved particularly successful, being often retold with the kind of reverence typically reserved for hadiths:
The history of medicine begins with a brief account of the development in antiquity from Asclepius to Galen. After Galen, the community of the Christians emerged from and prevailed over the Greeks. The Christians considered it a fault to study intellectual matters and their kings cast away the care for medicine and failed to take care of its students. So its students ceased to commit themselves to the toilsome study of medicine and found reading Hippocrates’ and Galen’s works too tedious; thus, it fell into disorder and its condition worsened. Then came Oribasius, after the Christian kings’ lack of interest in the instruction [of medicine] was firmly rooted … When none of the kings any longer felt the desire to promote the teaching [of medicine] and the people found Hippocrates’ and Galen’s works on it too tedious and tended to compendia and abridgments, the most prominent Alexandrian physicians, afraid that the art would vanish altogether, asked those kings to retain the teaching [of medicine] in Alexandria and [to allow] only twenty books on medicine to be read, sixteen from Galen’s and four from Hippocrates’ works … The teaching stood on shaky ground until al-Ma’mun ‘Abd-Allah ibn-Harun al-Rashid became caliph, who revived and spread it and favored excellent physicians. But for him, medicine and other disciplines of the ancients would have been effaced and obliterated just as medicine is obliterated now from the lands of the Greeks, which had been most distinguished in this field.
I should also mention that it wasn’t just the Graeco-Romans who the Abbasid-era Muslims ripped off in bulk. The fact that Indian numerals came to be known in Europe as “Arabic” numerals, and chess was widely, and wrongly, believed to be an Arabic invention, gives an idea about the impact that Caliphate scholars had as synthesizers and popularizers of scientific knowledge.
Indeed, when the Iranian Al-Khwarizmi (780-850), head of the House of Wisdom from around 820, published the earliest Arabic text on Indian numerals, he chose a title of disarming honesty: “Addition and subtraction according to the Indian calculation”. Such honesty was rarely imitated by Al-Khwarizmi’s successors.
I think you are probably getting the gist of how the story about the Muslim salvage of Graeco-Roman antiquity came about, and was later embraced by every Atheist writer in the West, so that he or she could have nice laughs at the expense of those barbarian fools who never washed themselves, the Christians.
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October 10, 2024
QotD: Why did ancient China lose its early lead in science and technology?
There are all kinds of answers given to this question, from ones based around the concept of “agricultural involution” (which I briefly surveyed in my review of Energy and Civilization), to ones that blame the complexity of the Chinese system of writing and other more outlandish theories. But would you know it, this question is commonly referred to within Sinology as the “Needham puzzle” or the “Needham question”, so what does the man himself think? Needham got the credit for posing the question, not for answering it, but in the final chapter of this book, “Attitudes Towards Time and Change”, he drops some fascinating hints.
A belief common to the great civilizations of the Axial Age was that time itself was somehow unreal. Greek philosophers from the pre-Socratics to the Neo-Platonists all expressed it in very different ways, but all agreed that in some sense the world of mutability and change was an illusion, and that outside of it stood an eternal, absolute reality sufficient in itself, unchanging in its perfection, αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων. The Buddhist civilizations include this under the doctrine of maya (illusion), and traditional Hinduism also exhibits time as a dreamlike and incidental quality of the world.
If time is somehow unreal and nothing can ever change, then it’s easy to see the attraction of a cyclic conception of history. And indeed, in the ancient world these cyclic theories predominate. The Babylonians had their Great Year, and Greek thinkers as diverse as Hesiod, Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle all speculated about the eternal repetition and recurrence of the ages of the world. In the Mahabharata the great yugas and kalpas, the Days of Brahma, follow one another in an inevitable fourfold cycle of world ages, the profusion of Hindu and Buddhist sects have promulgated a thousand interpretations and variations on this basic pattern. On the other side of the world, the Mayans had their own Great Year, and countless other peoples besides. This cosmology almost feels like a human universal (at least for civilizations at a particular stage of development), and why wouldn’t it be? We open our eyes and all we see are cycles within cycles — the cycle of the day, the cycle of the moon, the cycle of the seasons, the cycle of the generations. As sure as day follows night, why wouldn’t we expect that the universe too, a grand mechanism made by the gods, must eventually return to its starting point.
Various philosophers of science have asserted that this view of history makes scientific progress impossible, because of its fatalism and pessimism. If everything that happens has happened before and will happen again, then why bother trying to change anything? It’ll just get undone in the Kali Yuga anyway. But Needham points out another connection: if time is cyclic, or worse yet somehow unreal, then it makes no sense to stretch it out into an independent coordinate. In this way, the entire metaphysics of cyclical time resists the mathematization of physics. One can imagine the analytic geometry of Descartes being discovered in ancient Alexandria or Tikal or Harappa, but would it have been possible for one of the coordinate axes to represent time? A Descartes was possible, but a Newton or a Bernoulli was inconceivable.
All of this changes with the advent of Christianity, for which the most important fact about the world, the Incarnation, takes place at a particular moment in history, once and for all, κατὰ πάντα καὶ διὰ πάντα. The cosmos is fixed around this central point, and cannot curl back upon itself. Kairos transfigures chronos, and in so doing makes it real, gives it force and meaning. History is not a cycle, but a story of creation, separation, incarnation, and redemption, speeding towards its culmination as assuredly as a stone tracing a parabolic arc through the air. Or as Needham puts it:
[In the Indo-Hellenic world] space predominates over time, for time is cyclical and eternal, so that the temporal world is much less real than the world of timeless forms, and indeed has no ultimate value … The world eras go down to destruction one after the other, and the most appropriate religion is therefore either polytheism, the deification of particular spaces, or pantheism, the deification of all space … For the Judaeo-Christian, on the other hand, time predominates over space, for its movement is directed and meaningful … True being is immanent in becoming, and salvation is for the community in and through history. The world era is fixed upon a central point which gives meaning to the entire process, overcoming any self-destructive trend and creating something new which cannot be frustrated by cycles of time.
Some historians of science have argued that without this linear conception of time introduced by Christianity, we lack the conceptual vocabulary for various things ranging from analytic methods in physics to the idea of causality itself. So is that the answer? Is the solution to the Needham Puzzle that China progressed as far as it could until, weighed down by the fatalism of cyclic history and the impoverished mathematical vocabulary of timeless metaphysics, it ground to a halt?
Unfortunately, the answer is no. This theory sounds great, but it’s totally wrong.
There’s a bad habit among Western historians and philosophers of engaging in a shallow sort of Orientalism that aggregates all of the exotic East into a single entity.1 But when it comes to attitudes towards time, change, and history; the traditional Chinese attitude is much closer to that of Christendom than it is to the Hindu or Buddhist view. Needham does a good job summarizing the basic Chinese outlook, but includes a lot of details I didn’t know, including that the view of civilizations as ascending through distinct historical stages (e.g. the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, etc.) is of Chinese origin! Needham also discusses the veneration, sometimes deification, of great inventors that saturates Chinese folk religion. All in all, the picture is one of China as a progress-obsessed society almost from its earliest moments, and as a society that was steadily progressing right up until it was suddenly and dramatically eclipsed by European science.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Science in Traditional China, by Joseph Needham”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-08-14.
1. I am infuriated by restaurants that advertise “Asian food”. There’s more culinary diversity inside some regions of China than there is in most of Europe.
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October 8, 2024
Making the Black Mead of Medieval France – Bochet
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Jun 25, 2024Black mead, or bochet, made with spices and wood chips
City/Region: Paris
Time Period: 1393Mead was very popular from Russia to England, but started to lose favor in part due to the rise of cheaper brews like vodka and hopped ales. Mead was often still drunk for its medicinal properties, especially when it was infused with herbs and spices.
This mead has some of those wonderfully warming spices, and I added wood chips from the local brewing store to mimic the wood barrels that it would have been fermented in. The burnt caramel scent softens and mellows out during fermentation, and the resulting mead is not sweet at all and is more complex than many meads I’ve had.
To make six sextier of bochet, take six pints of very sweet honey, and put it in a cauldron on the fire and boil it, and stir for so long that it starts to grow, and you see that it also boils with bubbles like small blisters which will burst, releasing a little bit of dark smoke. Then add seven sextier of water and boil so much that it reduces to six sextiers, and keep stirring. And then put it in a vat to cool until it is lukewarm; then strain it through a cloth, and put it in a barrel and add a pint of yeast from ale, because that is what makes it piquant, (though if you use bread yeast, it makes as good a flavor, but the color will be duller), and cover well and warmly so it ferments.
If you want to make it very good, add an ounce of ginger, long pepper, grains of paradise and cloves in equal amounts, except for the cloves of which there should be the least, and put them in a cloth bag and toss it in. And when it has been two or three days and the bochet smells of spices and is strong enough, take out the bag and wring it out and put it in the next barrel that you make. And so this powder will serve you well up to three or four times.
— Le Ménagier de Paris, 1393.
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October 6, 2024
The rise of coal as a fuel in England
In the latest instalment of Age of Invention, Anton Howes considers the reasons for the rise of coal and refutes the frequently deployed “just so” story that it was driven by mass deforestation in England:
An image of coal pits in the Black Country from Griffiths’ Guide to the iron trade of Great Britain, 1873.
Image digitized by the Robarts Library of the University of Toronto via Wikimedia Commons.
It’s long bothered me as to why coal became so important in Britain. It had sat in the ground for millennia, often near the surface. Near Newcastle and Sunderland it was often even strewn out on the beaches.1 Yet coal had largely only been used for some very specific, small-scale uses. It was fired in layers with limestone to produce lime, largely used in mortar for stone and brick buildings. And it had long been popular among blacksmiths, heating iron or steel in a forge before shaping it into weapons or tools.2
Although a few places burned coal for heating homes, this was generally only done in places where the coal was an especially pure, hard, and rock-like anthracite, such as in southern Wales and in Lowlands Scotland. Anthracite coal could even be something of a luxury fuel. It was burned in the palaces of the Scottish kings.3 But otherwise, the sulphur in the more crumbly and more common coal, like that found near Newcastle, meant that the smoke reeked, reacting with the moisture of people’s eyes to form sulphurous acid, and so making them sting and burn. The very poorest of the poor might resort to it, but the smoke from sulphurous coal fires was heavy and lingering, its soot tarnishing clothes, furnishings, and even skin, whereas a wood fire could be lit in a central open hearth, its smoke simply rising through the rafters and finding its way out through the various crevices and openings of thatched and airy homes. Coal was generally the inferior fuel.
But despite this inferiority, over the course of the late sixteenth century much of the populated eastern coast of England, including the rapidly-expanding city of London, made the switch to burning the stinking, sulphurous, low-grade coal instead of wood.
By far the most common explanation you’ll hear for this dramatic shift, much of which took place over the course of just a few decades c.1570-1600, is that under the pressures of a growing population, with people requiring ever more fuel both for industry and to heat their homes, England saw dramatic deforestation. With firewood in ever shorter supply, its price rose so high as to make coal a more attractive alternative, which despite its problems was at least cheap. This deforestation story is trotted out constantly in books, on museum displays, in conversation, on social media, and often even by experts on coal and iron. I must see or hear it at least once a week, if not more. And there is a mountain of testimonies from contemporaries to back the story up. Again and again, people in the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries complained that the woods were disappearing, and that wood fuel prices were on the rise.
And yet the deforestation thesis simply does not work. In fact it makes no sense at all.
Not out of the Woods Yet
This should immediately be obvious from even just a purely theoretical perspective, because wood was almost never exploited for fuel as a one-off resource. It was not like coal or peat or oil, which once dug out of the ground and burned could only be replaced by finding more. It was not a matter of cutting swathes of forest down and burning every branch, stump and root, leaving the land barren and going off in search of more. Our sixteenth-century ancestors were not like Saruman, destroying Fangorn forest for fuel. Instead, acres of forest, and even just the shrubs and trees that made up the hedges separating fields, were carefully maintained to provide a steady yield. The roots of trees were left living and intact, with the wood extracted by cutting away the trunk at the stump, or even just the branches or twigs — a process known as coppicing, and for branches pollarding — so that new trunks or branches would be able to grow back. Although some trees might be left for longer to grow into longer and thicker wood fit for timber, the underwoods were more regularly cropped.4
Given forests were treated as a renewable resource, claiming that they were cut down to cause the price of firewood to rise is like claiming that if energy became more expensive today, then we’d use all the water behind a hydroelectric dam and then immediately fill in the reservoir with rubble. Or it’s like claiming that rising food prices would result in farmers harvesting a crop and then immediately concreting over their fields. What actually happens is the precise opposite: when the things people make become more valuable, they tend to expand production, not destroy it. High prices would have prompted the English to rely on forests more, not to cut them down.
When London’s medieval population peaked — first in the 1290s before a devastating famine, and again in the 1340s on the eve of the Black Death — prices of wood fuel began to rise out of all proportion to other goods. But London had plenty of nearby woodland — wood is extremely bulky compared to its value, so trees typically had to be grown as close as possible to the city, or else along the banks of the Thames running through it, or along the nearby coasts. With the rising price of fuel, however, the city did not even have to look much farther afield for its wood, and nearby coastal counties even continued to export firewood across the Channel to the Low Countries (present-day Belgium and the Netherlands) and to the northern coast of France.5 A few industries did try to shift to coal, with lime-makers and blacksmiths substituting it for wood more than before, and with brewers and dyers seemingly giving it a try. But the stinking smoke rapidly resulted in the brewers and dyers being banned from using it, and there was certainly no shift to coal being burnt in people’s homes.6
1. Ruth Goodman, The Domestic Revolution (Michael O’Mara Books, 2020), p.91
2. James A. Galloway, Derek Keene, and Margaret Murphy, “Fuelling the City: Production and Distribution of Firewood and Fuel in London’s Region, 1290-1400”, The Economic History Review 49, no. 3 (1996): pp.447–9
3. J. U. Nef, The Rise of the British Coal Industry, Vol. 1 (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1932), p.107, pp.115-8
4. Oliver Rackham, Ancient Woodland: Its History, Vegetation and Uses in England (Edward Arnold, 1980), pp.3-6 is the best and clearest summary I have seen.
5. Galloway et al.
6. John Hatcher, The History of the British Coal Industry: Volume 1: Before 1700: Towards the Age of Coal (Oxford University Press, 1993), p.25
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September 11, 2024
⚔️Parry! ⚔️Parry! 🗡️Thrust! 🗡️Thrust! GOOD!
Jill Bearup
Published Jun 3, 2024They’re MEN. They’re men in TIGHTS (tight tights!) Please enjoy the extended edition of this video with many random digressions that will mostly be cut for the public version 😀
00:00 Robin Hood: Men in Tights
00:50 The Plot, It Goeth Thusly
03:03 Prince of Thieves/Men in Tights/Maid Marian and Her Merry Men
04:50 What kind of fight do you like?
06:19 Setup for the ending fight
07:03 The Prince of Thieves fight
07:38 The Adventures of Robin Hood fight
07:53 FIGHT!
08:53 My favourite thing (compare and contrast)
10:03 The first phrase
10:39 The second phrase
11:24 The third phrase
11:43 The fourth phrase
12:29 The fifth phrase
12:40 and FIN
13:13 I love it, I really do
14:17 Book chat
15:52 Men hitting each other with sticks
17:40 Matching vibes
18:46 Just Stab Me Now audiobook update
(more…)
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September 8, 2024
QotD: Life in pre-mechanical times
The thing you’ll notice right away if you read them is how utterly tedious life was pre-electricity. Actually, no, tedious is the wrong word, since in our usage it implies “mindless” and that’s exactly the opposite of Victorian and especially Tudor life. A much better word is “laborious”, maybe even just “hard”. Life was hard back then. Even the simplest tasks took hours, because everything had to be done by hand. You had a few simple machines, of course — simple in the mechanical sense, though nearly every page brings its “gosh, I never would’ve thought of that!” surprise — but mostly it’s muscle power. If you’re lucky, a horse’s or a donkey’s muscles do some of the heaviest work, but mostly it’s straight-up human effort.
And it’s far from mindless. How to be a Tudor has a long section on baking bread, for instance, and it’s fascinating. There’s a reason bakers had their own guild and were considered tradesmen; it takes a lot of well-honed skill to make anything but the coarsest peasant stuff. And of course that coarse peasant stuff takes a decent amount of skill itself, which is just one of a zillion little skills your average housewife would have. If you read the section on bread-baking and really try to imagine doing it, you’ll find yourself almost physically exhausted … and that’s just one minor chore among dozens, maybe hundreds, that everyday people had to do each and every day.
In other words, everyday Tudor people were “simple”, in the old sense that means “unsophisticated”, but they were never, ever bored. Even the relatively well-off, even when everything was peaceful and prosperous and functioning perfectly, were constantly mentally engaged with the world. They had to be. Imagine if getting your daily bread took not just two hours’ labor, but an actual plan. If you didn’t start your day figuring out how you were going to get fed that day, you wouldn’t eat. They had dozens, probably hundreds, more daily tasks than we ever have, and while any one of those tasks can probably be performed on autopilot if taken in isolation, they were never taken in isolation. Maybe the housewife could bake bread on autopilot, but while her hands were doing that seemingly of their own volition, her mind was lining up the zillion other things she had to do that day. Her mind was constantly engaged.
And “housewife” was a deeply meaningful term back then. The next thing that strikes you, after the sheer amount of effort everything took, is the necessity of communal life. Just the basics of day-to-day living pretty much requires a nuclear family — husband, wife, a few kids. And that’s your hardy yeoman type on the edge of starvation on the forest’s fringes. In any larger settlement, everyone knows everyone, intimately, because your very life depends on it — not only do you know the miller personally, you’ve got a major, indeed mortal, interest in how he lives his life, because if he’s shorting you, you die … or, at least, your already hard life gets a whole lot harder. There’s basically no such thing as privacy, because there can’t be.
Severian, “On Boredom”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-17.
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September 1, 2024
QotD: “Yellow China” versus “Blue China”
The first is the polarity between North and South or, if you want to sound pretentious, between “Yellow China” and “Blue China”. “Yellow” represents the sandy but fertile yellow loess soil of the North China Plain and the Yellow River valley, heartland of traditional Chinese civilization. But “yellow” is also the ripe ears of grain that grow in that soil, because the North is a land fed by wheat rather than rice. “Yellow” also, by extension, refers to the mass irrigation projects required to make the arid North bloom, to the taxation and slave labor required to dredge and maintain the canals and water conduits, to the sophisticated and officious bureaucracy that made it all happen. And since there is no despotism so perfect as a hydraulic empire, “yellow” is absolute monarchy, centralization, and militarism. But “yellow” is also the military virtues — plain-spokenness, honesty, physical courage, stubbornness, and directness — the traditional stereotypes of the Chinese Northerner.
Far away, across the wide blue expanse of the Yangtze, lay the wild and untamed South. A land of rugged mountains and dense rainforest, both of them inhabited by tribes that the waves of migrating Chinese settlers viewed as both physically and spiritually corrosive. So those intrepid colonists built their cities by the water — clinging to the river systems and to the thousands of bays and inlets that crinkle the Southern Chinese coast into a fractal puzzle of land and sea. And thus they became “blue”.
“Blue” are the blue waters of the ocean and the doorways to non-Chinese societies, blue also is the culture of entrepreneurship, industry, trade, and cunning that spread from those rocky harbors first across Asia and then across the world. The Chinese diaspora that runs the economies of Southeast Asia and populates the Chinatowns in the West is predominately made up of “blue” peoples — the Cantonese, the Hakka, the Teochew, the Hokkien. “Blue” is independent initiative and innovation, because beyond the mountains the Emperor’s power is greatly attenuated. But “blue” is also corruption of every sort — the financial corruption of opportunistic merchants and unscrupulous magistrates, and the spiritual corruption of the jungle tribes and other non-Chinese influences. “Blue” is pirates and freebooters who made their lairs amidst the countless straits and islands and seaside caves. “Blue” is also unfettered sensuality — opium came to China via the great blue door, and more than one Qing emperor took a grand tour of the South for the purpose of sampling its brothels (considered to be of vastly higher quality).2
If you know nothing else about the geography of China, know that this is the primary distinction: North and South, yellow and blue.3 But this neglected period, the “time of division” after the collapse of the Jin, is when that distinction really started. Settlement of the South began under the Han Dynasty in the first couple centuries AD, but it was still very much a sparsely-populated frontier. What changed in the Middle Ages was that after the collapse of central authority and the invasion of the North by nomadic barbarians, a vast swathe of the intelligentsia, literati, and military aristocracy of the North fled across the Yangtze and set up a capital-in-exile. For the first time the South became really “Chinese”, but the society that emerged was a hybrid one that retained a Southern inflection.
It wasn’t just courtiers and generals and poets who fled to the South: millions and millions of ordinary peasants did too, which finally displaced the jungle tribes, and also altered the balance of power between North and South. For the first time in Chinese history, the South had more population, more wealth, and an arguably better claim to dynastic legitimacy. So when the North emerged from its period of anarchy and foreign domination and looked to reassert its traditional supremacy, the South said: “no”. The Southern dynasties, chief among them the Chen Dynasty,4 were able to maintain an uneasy military stalemate for almost two hundred years, thanks to the formidable natural barrier of the Yangtze River, and to the fact that Southerners were better versed in naval warfare and thus able to prevent any amphibious operations on the part of the North.
This only ended when the founder of the Sui Dynasty learned to fight like a Southerner, and assembled a massive naval force in the Sichuan basin, then floated it down the Yangtze gorges destroying everything in his path. The backbone of this force were massive ships which “had five decks, were capable of accommodating 800 men, and were outfitted with six 50-foot-long, spike-bearing booms that could be dropped from the vertical to damage enemy vessels or pin them in positions where they would be raked by close-range missile fire.” After breaking Southern control of the great river, the Sui founder assembled an invasion force of over half a million men and crushed the Southern armies, burned their capital city to the ground, and forcibly returned the entire aristocracy to the North.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900 by David A. Graff”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-06-05.
1. The Chinese Middle Ages and the European Middle Ages aren’t actually contemporaneous — “Medieval China” generally denotes a period just before and after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
2. “Blue” China is also the origin of a different sort of disordered sensuality — the culinary sort. Almost from the dawn of Chinese history, Northerners have been horrified by the gusto with which Southerners will eat anything. Scorpions, animal brains and eyeballs, you name it, Southerners are constantly upping the ante with each other. Northerners have also generally been horrified by the sadism that attends some Southern culinary traditions, with many animals being eaten alive, or partially alive, or after prolonged and deliberate torture. One usually unstated Northern view is that a lot of these customs were picked up from the jungle tribes that lurk in the Chinese imaginarium like the decadent ancestor in an H.P. Lovecraft story.
3. Confusingly, in the context of modern Hong Kong politics, “yellow” and “blue” represent the pro-sovereignty and pro-China factions respectively. This split is almost totally orthogonal to the one I’m talking about in this book review, and to the extent they aren’t orthogonal, the sign is flipped.
4. “Chen” is the most quintessentially Southern surname, but I’ve never been able to figure out whether that came before or after it was the name of the most famous Southern dynasty.
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