{"id":95038,"date":"2026-05-15T01:00:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T05:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=95038"},"modified":"2026-05-14T10:41:20","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T14:41:20","slug":"qotd-rediscovering-craeft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/05\/15\/qotd-rediscovering-craeft\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Rediscovering <em>Cr\u00e6ft<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:left; padding: 0px 25px 10px 0px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>Of course this isn&#8217;t just a book about hedging, that would be silly. There&#8217;s also haymaking, shepherding, walling, beekeeping, weaving, tanning, basketry, thatching, plowing, and the making of everything from ponds to quicklime, because Alex Langlands is obsessed with preserving (and if necessary recovering) the skills of the rural past. He wants you to understand <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thepsmiths.com\/p\/review-akenfield-by-ronald-blythe\" target=\"_blank\">what&#8217;s been lost<\/a> to industrialization, and how our <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thepsmiths.com\/p\/review-against-the-grain-by-james\" target=\"_blank\">contact area with the world<\/a> has shrunk, and why <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thepsmiths.com\/p\/joint-review-starting-strength-by\" target=\"_blank\">doing things with your body<\/a> is part of being human, and &#8230; oh wait I&#8217;m sorry I nodded off, because I&#8217;ve written this all like twelve times already.<\/p>\n<p>So why am I telling you about a book on how to do things by hand that you can do far more quickly and efficiently with a machine?<\/p>\n<p>Well.<\/p>\n<p>Langlands frames his book around the concept of <em>cr\u00e6ft<\/em>, which (as you can probably guess from that <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/%C3%A6sc#Old_English\" target=\"_blank\"><em>\u00e6sc<\/em><\/a>) is the Old English origin of our modern &#8220;craft&#8221;. The ancestral word is richer and more complicated than the modern one, though, pointing to far more than handmade tchotchkes and beer with too much hops. The <em>Dictionary of Old English<\/em> explains:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>&#8220;Skill&#8221; may be the single most useful translation for <strong>cr\u00e6ft<\/strong>, but the senses of the word reach out to &#8220;strength&#8221;, &#8220;resources&#8221;, &#8220;virtue&#8221;, and other meanings in such a way that it is often not possible to assign an occurrence to one sense in [modern English] without arbitrariness and loss of semantic richness.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Like the modern &#8220;craft&#8221;, it does convey a sense of ability, especially when it comes to one&#8217;s livelihood: the students in <a href=\"https:\/\/people.umass.edu\/sharris\/general\/Aelfric.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">\u00c6lfric&#8217;s Colloquy<\/a> use <em>cr\u00e6ft<\/em> as well as <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/weorc#Old_English\" target=\"_blank\"><em>weorc<\/em><\/a> when discussing what they do all day. But it can also mean might or power: when the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Old_English_Orosius\" target=\"_blank\">Old English <em>Orosius<\/em><\/a> tells us that the strength of the Medes failed them in battle, for example, it&#8217;s <em>Me\u00f0a cr\u00e6ft that gefeoll<\/em>,<sup>1<\/sup> and when Judah Maccabee&#8217;s foes join the fray, they begin to fight <em>mid cr\u00e6fte<\/em>. Of course, there are semantic connections among these varied meanings: the ideas of physical strength and physical skill blend into one another at the edges, and a word for a thing you&#8217;re good at doing with your hands can also be used for a thing you&#8217;re good at doing with your mind. (After all, we still refer to writing as a &#8220;craft&#8221;.) And ideally you&#8217;re fairly talented at whatever set of things provide your livelihood! So we can say that Old English <em>cr\u00e6ft<\/em> broadly means something like &#8220;a person&#8217;s ability to bring his will to bear on the world, and his skill in doing so&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s one more meaning, though, and it appears more or less exclusively in the writings of Alfred the Great: <em>cr\u00e6ft<\/em> as spiritual or mental excellence.<sup>2<\/sup> Anglo-Saxon scholars had mostly used cr\u00e6ft as a way of rendering Latin <a href=\"https:\/\/logeion.uchicago.edu\/ars\" target=\"_blank\"><em>ars<\/em><\/a>, but when King Alfred translated <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/On_the_Consolation_of_Philosophy\" target=\"_blank\">Boethius<\/a> into Old English he used <em>cr\u00e6ft<\/em> for Latin <a href=\"https:\/\/logeion.uchicago.edu\/virtus\" target=\"_blank\"><em>virtus<\/em><\/a>, virtue as in moral excellence.<sup>3<\/sup> A contemporary reader might be tempted to see this as merely an extension of the &#8220;mental skill&#8221; sense of the word (a virtuous person is one who is good at being good), but that would be misleading; the general meaning of <em>cr\u00e6ft<\/em> leaves the word freighted with powerful and inescapably physical implications. (Remember, too, that before the Reformation the Christian image of spiritual excellence universally emphasized <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thepsmiths.com\/p\/joint-review-starting-strength-by\" target=\"_blank\">asceticism<\/a>, which necessarily involves the body a great deal.) <em>Cr\u00e6ft<\/em> as virtue is not an internal moral condition, it&#8217;s an internal <em>activity<\/em>, a kind of doing or making of the soul.<\/p>\n<p>Or, as Langlands glosses his title, <em>cr\u00e6ft<\/em> is &#8220;a hand-eye-head-heart-body coordination that furnishes us with a meaningful understanding of the materiality of our world&#8221;. <\/p>\n<p>Langlands is now a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.swansea.ac.uk\/staff\/a.j.langlands\/\" target=\"_blank\">professor of archaeology at Swansea University<\/a>, but he got his professional start as a circuit digger, the kind of &#8220;hired trowel&#8221; real estate developers pay to quickly catalog all the ancient remains they&#8217;re about to turn into the foundation of a new Tesco. It was not a fulfilling job \u2014 &#8220;crude and expedient&#8221; is the line he uses for his commercial excavations \u2014 and he was beginning to grow disillusioned with archaeology as a field. So naturally he did what any sensible person would do if he didn&#8217;t like his job: he applied to be on a TV show. This was in 2003, and BBC Two was advertising for people to spend a year in 1620, living on and running a historical farm using reconstructed period techniques and equipment. Langlands got the gig (along with Ruth Goodman and another archaeologist <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Slow-Tech-Sustainable-Crafts-Manuals\/dp\/1785216163\/\" target=\"_blank\">whose book<\/a> I haven&#8217;t read), and had a wild year in the Stuart era and then a few more in the Victorian and Edwardian periods.<\/p>\n<p>The shift from examining the archaeological record to experiencing how it was made was an eye-opener, and the success of that first program took him by surprise: &#8220;I&#8217;d often wondered to myself who on earth would want to watch a bunch of cranky, oddball re-enactors and archaeologists bimbling around in costume, pretending to be in the past&#8221;, he writes. &#8220;But I didn&#8217;t care too much because I was spending nearly every single hour of every day immersed in historical farming. I was tending, ploughing, scything, chopping, sweeping, hedging, sowing, walling, slicing, chiselling, digging, sharpening, thatching, shoveling; the list was almost endless.&#8221; And the longer he spent doing all these things (he was on three more shows), the more he realized that the skills, and the knowledge they required, were slipping away.<\/p>\n<p>True <em>cr\u00e6ft<\/em>, in Langlands&#8217;s version, is a combination of know-how and make-do. It&#8217;s when you live on the Outer Hebrides and don&#8217;t have any trees, so you use whatever driftwood washes up as the ridgebeam for your roof. No timber for the rafters? No problem \u2014 a sufficiently strong rope, drawn tightly enough over the ridgeline and secured on both sides, makes something like a giant net on which you can lay your thatch. The straw left in the fields after harvest will do nicely for making both rope and thatch, but if (say) it&#8217;s the early twentieth century and you&#8217;ve abandoned cereal crops because cheap North American grain knocked the bottom out of the market, then you can make rope from heather and thatch with bunches of bracken. (On the Danish coast, they use seaweed.)<\/p>\n<p>Or it&#8217;s when you&#8217;re an early Anglo-Saxon who wants to boil some water. A few generations ago, some Romano-Briton on the same spot would simply have bought a beautifully thrown pot from any one of a dozen proto-industrial centers across the Empire, but these days that production has slowed or stopped and the trade networks that would&#8217;ve brought them to you are <em>kaput<\/em> anyway. All <em>you&#8217;ve<\/em> got is some lousy local clay, too weathered to be easily worked. You don&#8217;t even have the fuel to fire it hot. So you add organic <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Temper_(pottery)\" target=\"_blank\">tempers<\/a> like grass or chaff (or even dung) to make the clay more plastic, you shape it by hand without a wheel, and when you fire your pot the chaff burns away and leaves tiny voids in the ceramic. Your pot is soft, it&#8217;s brittle, it&#8217;s kind of lumpy, and fifteen hundred years from now <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Fall-Rome-End-Civilization\/dp\/0192807285\" target=\"_blank\">Bryan Ward-Perkins<\/a> is going to point to it as evidence that civilization collapsed when Rome fell \u2014 but it&#8217;s still a pot, and it still holds water. You&#8217;ve made ingenious use of the world around you to solve your problem. You are, in a word, <em>cr\u00e6fty<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>So when Langlands says <em>cr\u00e6ft<\/em>, he means the way people behave under conditions of scarcity and resource constraint. And when you&#8217;re in that kind of situation, of course you have to be intimately familiar with all your materials \u2014 you have to squeeze every last drop of performance out of them! And while Langlands is interested in preindustrial techniques, this isn&#8217;t just a matter for drystone wallers and <a href=\"https:\/\/utahfolkarts.omeka.net\/exhibits\/show\/thegrandbeehive\/buzzonbeehives\/skephives\" target=\"_blank\">skep-making<\/a> beekeepers; you can also be <em>cr\u00e6fty<\/em> with machines or computers. <em>Cr\u00e6ft<\/em> is the Havana mechanics who keep 1950s cars running on an income of $40\/month, or the engineers who fit all the computer code for the Apollo Guidance Computer into 80 kilobytes. It&#8217;s the defining feature of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pbm.com\/~lindahl\/real.programmers.html\" target=\"_blank\">Real Programmer<\/a> who &#8220;tuck[ed] a pattern matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter&#8221;. We rightly admire these <em>cr\u00e6fty<\/em> solutions for their elegance and their makers&#8217; skills, but aside from a <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Demoscene\" target=\"_blank\">few weird hobbyists<\/a> we don&#8217;t imitate them. You don&#8217;t spend days hauling rocks and building a wall to keep your sheep in when you have wire fencing. You don&#8217;t learn the skies so you can time your haymaking for clement weather when you can just wrap your machine-mown grass in plastic and make <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Silage\" target=\"_blank\">silage<\/a> instead. And you don&#8217;t work in <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Unreal_mode\" target=\"_blank\">unreal mode<\/a> when you have 64-bit processor. Technological advances have freed up our time precisely because they&#8217;ve freed us from the need for clever, thoughtful, material-aware solutions to our problems. No one is <em>cr\u00e6fty<\/em> in the midst of abundance, because they don&#8217;t have to be.<\/p>\n<p>Your reaction to that last paragraph reveals where you fall in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thepsmiths.com\/p\/review-the-wizard-and-the-prophet\" target=\"_blank\">Wizard\/Prophet divide<\/a>: are you pumping your fist for humanity, or are you a little sad that a kind of mastery has been lost? Is our ability to simply throw more resources at the problem and go on with our day a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thepsmiths.com\/p\/review-energy-and-civilization-by\" target=\"_blank\">blessed liberation<\/a> from the bonds of brute necessity, or is it a tragic separation of our thinking, making, doing selves from our world? Are our practical limitations something to be defeated or innovated around, or are they something to embrace because they are, in some sense, <em>good for us<\/em>?<\/p>\n<p>Langlands is, unsurprisingly, well over on the Prophet side. He warns that &#8220;while some machines are clever, the net result of our using them is that we become lazy, stupid, desensitized, and disengaged&#8221; \u2014 it&#8217;s not that a thing made by hand is better <em>as an object<\/em> than its mass-produced counterpart (although in some cases it is, and a stone wall does last longer than a wire fence), it&#8217;s that the making changes the maker. And while he likes to warn that climate change or Peak Oil or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thepsmiths.com\/p\/review-after-1177-bc-by-eric-h-cline\" target=\"_blank\">the fragility of international supply chains<\/a> make our <em>uncr\u00e6ftiness<\/em> a serious survival risk (think of those poor imported-pot-dependent Britons when Rome withdrew!), that&#8217;s not really the point. Even if our technological society never falters \u2014 even if we soar to greater and greater heights of prosperity and can afford to automate and mechanize more and more of our interface with the world \u2014 Langlands argues that would just mean more missing out.<\/p>\n<p>Jane Psmith, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thepsmiths.com\/p\/review-crft-by-alexander-langlands\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;REVIEW: Cr\u00e6ft, by Alexander Langlands&#8221;, <em>Mr. and Mrs. Psmith&#8217;s Bookshelf<\/em><\/a>, 2025-03-24.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<ol>\n<li><em>As in modern German and Dutch, Old English used the <strong>ge<\/strong>&#8211; prefix for past participles.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>For more on Old English <strong>cr\u00e6ft<\/strong>, especially in the Alfredian corpus, see <a href=\"https:\/\/sci-hub.ru\/https:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/44510517\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>. Langlands quotes from the late Peter Clemoes, who wrote extensively on the topic, but no obliging Kazakh has put that online for me.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>This is a <strong>fascinating<\/strong> word choice, because <strong>virtus<\/strong> is also a complicated and interesting word; it\u2019s derived from the Latin word for man, <strong>vir<\/strong>, and means things like &#8220;force&#8221; but also &#8220;manliness&#8221; or &#8220;bravery&#8221; (like Greek \u1f00\u03bd\u03b4\u03c1\u03b5\u03af\u03b1). In the classical world, it came to mean something like moral worth or excellence in a particularly masculine way, and though it was adopted as a western Christian term for something like spiritual \u1f00\u03c1\u03b5\u03c4\u03ae, it retained some of those echoes. <\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Of course this isn&#8217;t just a book about hedging, that would be silly. There&#8217;s also haymaking, shepherding, walling, beekeeping, weaving, tanning, basketry, thatching, plowing, and the making of everything from ponds to quicklime, because Alex Langlands is obsessed with preserving (and if necessary recovering) the skills of the rural past. He wants you to understand [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[32,7,41,15,487],"tags":[288,924,1140,1533],"class_list":["post-95038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-quotations","category-technology","category-tools","tag-archaeology","tag-farming","tag-handtools","tag-psmithreviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-oIS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95038"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102489,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95038\/revisions\/102489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}