Breaking the shackles of time: Books, Writing, and Practical Paleography

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are printed lots of funny squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."   

                                                              - Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980)

You knew we'd get to this eventually, right? Before any other label I may affix to myself, I'm a novelist, a writer, a storyteller. The world I see around me isn't a world of atoms and elements, it's a world of stories waiting to be told.

And we have unfortunately forgotten more stories than we remember. Because we only remember what was recorded.

The constant struggle with this project isn't tracking down the right tool or the correct material. The real struggle can be forced into the old Journalistic construction of the W's: "What do we know? Who recorded it? When did they record it? How did they know it? Why was this saved when all else was lost?"

This was almost a "Thoughts from the peeler" post, but then I remembered that there was an actual guild or two involved in the transmission of the Elizabethan Culture from pen to posterity. The "Who" in the above question is primarily focused through the Worshipful Company of Stationers and the Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks. These two groups are responsible for the lion's share of what we know about our period of study.

As Carl Sagan said at the top of the page, it all boils down to dark squiggles on dead trees (or dead animals in many cases).

Most of the information we have from the 16th century was recorded under the auspices of two groups: The Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks (who aren't really a livery company at this point), and the Worshipful Company of Stationers.

All records of births, deaths, and christenings were recorded by the local parish clerk. Books and broadsheets were printed on the presses of the Stationer's Company.

Yes, I'm working on a letterpress demonstration, but I'm not sure what form that will take. I've put some feelers out locally and will probably be working with someone who has already built up the necessary setup for printing with movable type. I'd wager though, that we're going to be extrapolating from a modern setup.

To keep things within the period constraints we've set for ourselves, I'll be binding a book in a manner that's correct for our period. There's an astonishing amount of gear involved in binding, though, so we'll be doing some preparatory projects in wood and metal just to get us to the starting point for that project.

In the meantime, I am at work preparing quills and teaching myself a new hand.

The preparation of a quill will be the focus for a near-term post, but I've demonstrated that craft many times at renaissance faires and events, so I'm not really learning anything new while doing it.

Yes, a new hand. This is where the "practical paleography" comes in. For our purposes, a hand is a method of rendering the alphabet in a culturally-specific way. I'll write more about this as I go along, but the method of writing used to record important documents in the 16th century was known as the Secretary Hand and it's damn near illegible to modern eyes.

Translating any manuscript documents from the period into is so time-consuming that the Folger Shakespeare Library and Oxford University have  put out a call for help from the internet to translate more period documents faster than they can alone. Part of my goal with this specific project will be to help in that effort. Not only will this effort increase the number of available records from the time of Shakespeare, you can also contribute to the new edition of the Oxford English dictionary!

You too can help out and learn more about this project at shakespearesworld.org

Anyway, that's where I am at the moment and what I'm working on during the rainy season which is in full effect hereabouts. My old back injury flared up this week as the result of a minor mishap, so I think I'll be spending some time indoors anyway, cutting quills and reading about the chemistry of ink and the denaturation of collagen in parchment... nerd heaven.

- Scott

Further Reading:

Advice for Reading Secretary Hand, Folger Shakepeare Library (PDF)
http://folgerpedia.folger.edu/mediawiki/media/images_pedia_folgerpedia_mw/2/21/Alphabet_Abbreviations.pdf

Bonus Video:

I thought this was especially appropriate since we kicked off this project with a quote from Anthony Bourdain. As part of a project he's working on with Balvenie Scotch Whiskey, he paid a visit to Arion Press in San Francisco. They are one of the last of their breed, printing and binding fine books with movable lead type. Their methods are modern by our measure, but very old fashioned and very cool by modern metrics.

Peeling and pondering

Sometimes, you have to grab a pile of fruit and a knife and make a pie. But really, you just... just... want to peel something.

More even than wood carving, taking knife to fruit is a supremely meditative act of creative destruction.

Care is needed lest you cut yourself, of course, but even if you mangle the fruit, who cares? It's going into a pie anyway, so make with the blade, kiddo, and let your mind wander.

I've been doing a lot of peeling recently, trying to decide how best to proceed with this project.

2015 has been a tumultuous year. My book was published and I was riding high. Then my mother died suddenly and I was left feeling high and low at the same time.

Knife to peel.
Spiraling.
Lengthening.
Try to get it all in one.
Meditate.
Don't cut yourself.

So here I am at the close of the calendar, trying to decide whether I care much for calendars. It's tempting, oh-so-tempting, to think in these discreet blocks of days, months, years. It tempts you to take up the blade.

Peel away the questionable bits.
Cut around the bruises.
Save the good fruit, dispense with the bad.
It's just a pie, it doesn't have to be pretty.

To think in calendars is seductive. It makes it easier to just pretend you can bin the entire year at will or pick or choose in phases of the moon or turning of the seasons. Hell, this entire project is and always has been dependent on calendars for its framework.

In January, can you really begin again? Boot the old man to the curb and pick up the baby in the tophat?

Time is seductive but false.
You can't time a pie, it's done when it's done.
Density, moisture, relative humidity, too many factors at play.
Keep an eye on it and yank it before it burns.

I am about to pick this project back up again. For those of you who have waited patiently while I run off to be an author and have family tragedies, I thank you for your time. I hope you don't feel I've wasted it.

Going forward, we're going to take a more meditative approach and we're going to ignore the calendar. I was wrong about the artificial frameworks for this. I was wrong to think I could just peel it and pop it in the oven and set a timer and it would be done when it dings.

We're going to carve around the worst bits and bruises and try to use the best of the fruit. And we're going to watch the food and let the pie tell us when it's done and time to move on to another pile, another peeler.

Our knives will be sharp and our pies will sometimes be ugly.

I hope you'll join us.

In the meantime, have a happy Christmas or a happy whatever celebration brings you together with your kith and kin this winter's turn. Draw near to those you love and remember those who are missing. Share food and companionship and warmth and remember that they are the only real light that matters in the winter's darkness.

And volunteer in the kitchen when there's stuff to peel.
It'll be good for you.

- Scott

What I did on my summer vacation, or "How this project got stepped on by a giant robot"

For the past little while, I've been distracted from this project by an overwhelming surge of The Other Things that make up my life. For this I apologize because I've been less than communicative. Sometimes I get so far into my own head that I'm out of cell range. My wife and I went on our first vacation in years and I saw parts of my own state that I've never had the privilege of exploring before.

Sometimes you just have to get in the car and go for a three-day drive.

No leather was worked, no wood was carved, no sheep were sheared. I did clean out my shop before it started raining and we built another oven and baked some bread, but that was revisiting a guild that already had its checkmark.

For all intents and purposes, the Renaissance Artisan was 'out' for most of the summer.

Which isn't the same as saying that I've been idle...

As you probably know that before anything else that I do, I am a writer. I make sense of the world by telling stories about it. Whether it's history or fantasy, it's all words to me. When I'm lucky, I get to share those stories with others. Writing is my vocation and my first love. This means that at any given moment, I have more than one project on the docket and often when a deal is being considered, it is confidential until all the papers are signed.

Which is a long way to go toward saying that this week, I signed a contract with a small UK-based publisher called Crooked Cat Publishing to bring my humorous science fiction novel Howard Carter Saves the World to bookstores. The official announcement was made by my publisher yesterday via social media.

I've been bouncing off the walls ever since.

Howard Carter is a novel that I just sat down and told the first story that occurred to me, taking it wherever my fancy led, no matter how bizarre. Aliens who learned about earth by watching Sesame Street? Done. Secretive government agencies? Mysterious universities? Mad scientists? Got it all. Giant robots? Oh, the giant robots...  I wrote it all in public (rather like I've been doing here) posting chapter-by-woefully-unedited-chapter on a blog, writing live and in front of a studio audience. No laugh tracks allowed!

If you want to read a bit of it, here's a free short story that gives you a general sense of the storytelling and characters from the novel. 

Which is a long way of going about telling you that I'm sorry I dropped this to run off and do that, but I will be back in the workshop in a week or so. I have a half-finished costrel and a shoemaking project in the wings. I've also been making connections to get a proper handle on the life of the Worshipful Company of Woolmen, plus the weavers, spinners, mercers, and tailors that lie at the end of that supply chain. 

In the meantime, I have some up-front work to do on getting Howard Carter ready for print and I'll be ducking in and out as my editor and publisher need me. If you would like to join me on that part of the journey as well as this one, I'm inviting you to come with me on the next step of the journey as we prepare Howard for his debut at Amazon and other online booksellers.

Side note: Would it be cheating to use this as part of a study of the Worshipful Companies of Stationers and Clerks?  Just a thought...

However it goes, my goal in that project and this one is to put out a story that is good enough for you to read and enjoy, one that you love enough to not only read but to recommend to your friends. I've worked in publishing at enough different levels to know one thing for certain: positive word of mouth is how success happens.

There will be much, much more later.

- Scott

Kill It With Fire, Part Five: Cleaning the kitchens. . . summary and wrapup

"Cooking is a craft, I like to think, and a good cook is a craftsman -- not an artist. There's nothing wrong with that: the great cathedrals of Europe were built by craftsmen -- though not designed by them. Practicing your craft in expert fashion is noble, honorable and satisfying."

- Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

This blog began with that quote.

No one begins something like this on a whim. And if I'm honest, the quote that started this insanity was just one of many pebbles that contributed to the avalanche. It might have been the first pebble, but I can hardly blame Mssr. Bourdain for all that followed...

I am tired. More tired than I have been in a long, long time. My new regimen of archery practice didn't help, and for my Elizabethan alter-ego, the invention of Advil is 390-odd years in the future.

Thankfully, I live in that future so I'm not reduced to gnawing on the trunk of the nearest willow tree.

I was an art major, which is a roundabout way of saying that I spent a lot of time working in restaurant kitchens. There wasn't much in Bourdain's book that really surprised me. Of all the oddball jobs I took through the 'starving artist years' that are so fondly spoken of by people who've never lived through them, the restaurant jobs were my favorites.

Was it noble, honorable, and satisfying, as he promised? I dunno. I wasn't a chef, the highest I ever got was prep cook. I certainly didn't make it to culinary school; I spent too much time as a dish dog, really. Nevertheless, the exposure to finer foods and the people who prepared them than I could afford on what they were paying me taught me to appreciate, to taste, food differently.

But this isn't a foodie blog any more than it's intended to be Scottie Goes to Ren Faire. I never really meant for the baking demonstrations at the Washington Midsummer's Renaissance Faire to change so drastically how I thought about this project.

I'm still slightly ashamed to admit that it didn't occur to me earlier to set up and attempt one of these trades at anything close to full production level.  How could I ever hope to understand the lives of my craftsmen forebears if I never stepped fully into their shoes?

We'll get to shoes soon, this is about... I almost said it's about bread. It's actually not at all about bread.  Anthony was right about that. It's about craft.

The WMRF demonstrations were always intended to be a sort of safety valve on this project. The faire was scheduled just past the midpoint in the project and I knew that by that time I'd have a fair idea whether or not I thought I'd make it by the end of December. (Though to be honest, I still don't know and you'll see why I've stacked projects as I have in the coming months.)

Like archery, baking was not something I ever thought to enjoy. In my home, I do all the cooking, but The Engineer did all the baking. Baking was too fussy for me, too much like science and not enough like art... or so I thought. It never occured to me that it would be baking that finally put me over to the noble, honorable, and satisfying side of the kitchens.

Those are The Engineer's hands in that photo above. It was also the first time in quite awhile that she and I cooked anything together. Until the recent remodel began, our kitchen was inhospitable to more than one person at a time.

There's finally room for craftsmanship. 

Photo & Digital Manipulation by Dan Hill - © 2013 Used with permission

By God, Tony was right about that. When Dan Hill posted that photo manip above, one of the first comments posted below it (by someone I have never met, mind you) was two words: "Naturally happy."

Bourdain spent the rest of Kitchen Confidential talking about how dog tired he got working the line, how strung out he was on various substances, how much the food business was a scam and how much was genuine, and how arduous the restaurant biz is is, but even now you can see in his shows how much he loved it.

I'm starting to feel that way about bread and baking.

Baking turned out to be more art than science, not as slavishly dedicated to the arcane formulae of moth-eaten texts as I once believed. When my hands were in the dough and our friend Becky had the ovens blazing and Kristin was scooping flour into the bowls while Becky's husband Douglas was working the rope line, charming the tourists with his English accent and well-rehearsed dialogue about the history of English baking... here was an element of jazz. 

And always the crowds lined up at the edge of our area, asking questions and carrying away my card or the address of this blog scribbled on a bit of paper. At one point, we scrawled a diagram and the URL for this project on a chalkboard and folks were taking photos of it with their phones.

I hope you found your way here without any trouble. I hope that you learned something that day at the faire when you stumbled across our mad adventure in the land of yeast and flour. God knows that we certainly did.

That Corgi was an excellent student...

The Oven's End...

The oven at the Washington Midsummer's Renaissance Faire site was never meant to last. Not only did we build it from the cheapest materials, we taxed them to their uttermost extremes. By the end of the last day of the fair, the cracks were no longer superficial. The ceiling and the framing around the door were beginning to deteriorate and I decided to bake a few final pies and call it a day.

We let the oven cool and went our separate ways to enjoy the fun and frivolity that we'd missed the other weekends of the faire due to tending our breads.  When the final cannon sounded the end of the faire, we gathered one last time around our hearth...

The Engineer had the honor of the first whack.

Then Becky and Douglas, who were so eager to leave they were already changed into civilian clothes...

Then it was left to me. It felt a little wrong, like putting down a family pet. It had stood us in good stead, generated far in excess of its capacity and kept going strong. But the heat and desolation of the days standing in front of it got the better of me and I let the hammer swing.

And soon it was all over.  It arrived at the faire site in buckets and would leave by the shovel full, loaded in the bed of my truck...

The final tally for our little wood-fired bakery: 220 loaves, eight pies, nine scones, two loaves of soda bread, and 1 apple tart, utilizing 1/2 bushel of apples, 80+ lbs of flour, and several gallons of ale. 

Thanks to my partners in floury crime: Kristin Perkins, Kelsey Fahy, and Becky & Douglas Norton. Thank you to Pat, Tracy, and Amy of the Washington Renaissance Arts & Entertainment Society (WRAES) and all the cast and crew of the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire.  I hope you enjoyed the bread we dispersed to your tables each day from our bakery.  Thank you to all the photographers that documented the events and kindly sent me their photographs and videos.

There is, as always a sense of melancholy as we end one thing, and a sense of hope as we embark on the next.

Stay tuned to this channel. I doubt this is the last time we will see the fruit of an oven such as this. I still have the one in my back yard, after all...

~ Scott

Simple Simon met a pieman, going to the fair...

As previously noted, this past weekend an old back injury flared up (cough-anvil-cough) and I was a bit stuck. I couldn't sit down and got tired of laying down, so I decided to do some food-borne experiments standing at the counter.  An excellent opportunity to explore the cuisine prepared for the high and the low by the Worshipful Company of the Cooks of London. After poking around the internet (the cookbooks were on a shelf too low to reach, something I'll need to address soon) I settled on making a classic pork pie.

Except that no one on the web could seem to decide what that meant.  Which is perfect territory for me because I never know what anything means until I get there.

Thankfully, enough of the kitchen is done to give me some space for my lab equipment, but which I mean a notebook and a laptop.

What I like most about this is that it gives you a sort of mid-race look at how things work in behind the scenes. First I look to see if anyone else has done this before. If so, what did they do? Do I like what they did? Can I do it differently, or better, or in some way contribute to the discussion in my own way? Has it been done to death? Is there a better project?

Then I begin to experiment, carefully recording my results and noting where I deviated from the standard profile. Note taking is of paramount importance. I lost my notebook with all my notes on the history of brewing and it quite literally set me back a month on that project.

To quote Adam Savage from the Mythbusters: "Remember kids, the only difference between doing science and screwing around is writing it down."

So... pies.

I know going in that pies were often used as simple ways to create fare for the working stiff. Which is right up my alley. A pie wrapped in cloth will stay hot for quite awhile after the working stiff gets to his workshop, a portable hug from his family kitchen. Pies were served to all walks of life, differentiated mainly by the expense of their ingredient list.

My cupboard holds enough spices that to the 16th century cook it would seem that I'd purloined a king's ransom, so I must be careful. I want an upper-middling sort of pie, perhaps around a festival time when purse strings were loosened by gaiety or in hopes of impressing an important client. The clove and cinnamon especially come to us from the far Orient by way of many middle-men, each taking a cut of the high price I paid to show off the wealth of my kitchen... all six square feet of it that are finished enough to be in the photos.

Yes, pain and painkillers do make my imagination run a bit wild, but as long as I don't hurt anyone, who does it hurt?

After a bit of trial and error, I cobbled together the following working recipe for a spiced pork pie in a standing coffin, complete with photos of carefully-staged food (which was weird for me, because I'm not the Instagram breed of foodie).  Though I use some spices that would cost our Elizabethan cook a pretty penny, the nicest thing about a pie is that it's a scalable application and could easily be made for more money or less depending on what you put in it.

Hang on... you put what in a coffin?

A coffin is a period term for a pie crust and in general they were edible but not necessarily meant to be eaten. It's a curious bit of nomenclature and it illustrates handily the gallows humor of a people who lived much closer to the line between life and death than moderns like myself are accustomed to. When I can reach my Oxford English Dictionary (too heavy, too low of a shelf... now I know why dictionary stands were invented) I'll try to figure out whether the box for dead people or the crust for a pie was named that first.

I sort of like the idea that it was the pie first.

Please note: Bad back means no chopping wood, so this one's done in the modern oven inside, but would easily translate to the wood-fired oven or to baking in a cauldron placed next to carefully-tended coals. I really should find myself a couple of apprentices...

Let's get cooking!

To make a simple pork pie in a standing coffin

Serves: 4 (Makes four pies)



Coffins...
3 cups of flour
2 tsp creme of tartar
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp of salt
1 cup of water
8 tbs lard
2 tbs unsalted butter


filling...
1 lbs ground pork (plus reserved liquid)
1/4 cup chopped onion
1/4 cup bread crumbs
1 tbs spice mixture
     cloves
     allspice
     cinnamon
     black peppercorns  
6 cloves of garlic
pinch of salt
1/4 tsp flour

Additional...
One egg, beaten

Making the coffins...

Combine dry ingredients in a work bowl using a sieve or whisk. Make a well in the middle of the mound of dry ingredients.

Meanwhile, heat the lard and butter with 1/2 cup of water to a boil. Remove from heat and wait for it to stop bubbling, then pour slowly into well in the dry ingredients. Begin to combine the hot wet mixture into the dry using a wooden spoon, working outward from the center, being careful because the wet ingredients are just off the boil. Sieve additional flour as needed until your paste takes on the consistency of Play-do.

Turn out onto a floured board and divide into six equal parts. Use a rolling pin to flatten into disks about a half inch thick and stack the disks with waxed paper between them in an open bag.  Counter for at least four hours or move to the refrigerator and chill for at least two hours. (If you decide to chill, bring to room temperature before you start to work the dough again.)

Making the filling...

Your spice pack is basically mulling spices minus the star anise. (The licorice flavor of anise overwhelms the pork in my opinion.) Candied ginger or orange peel is a delightful addition if you get a whim. Combine the spices in a mortar and pound into powder. If you must use an electric spice grinder, I won't judge you.

Well... maybe a little.


Combine spice pack, onions, garlic, salt, and ground pork in a pan and cook on medium heat until it starts to come together.

DO NOT DRAIN.

Once the pork is brown, mix in bread crumbs and a 1/4 teaspoon of flour to thicken the drippings.  Set aside to cool and congeal. Yes, congealing is a Good Thing.

Deviation from the norm: This gets pretty thick, but it makes a rather loose filling by meatpie standards. In traditional pork pies, you would often make a gelatin by boiling down trotters (read: pig feet) and then combine that to make a filling that could stand up on its own. For a modern approach, you can substitute unflavored gelatin, which you use according to the package instructions.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
If you are baking these in a wood-fired beehive style bread oven like mine, these are introduced in the baking sequence after the bread is finished cooking.

Raise the coffins...

When your crust dough has aged, allowing the fats and the proteins to form a strong melange (and it's back to room temperature if you chose to refrigerate) roll out the first disc on a floured board. Place a pie mold in the center of the dough disc and begin to smoosh the dough up the sides, forming a little bowl.

On the subject of pie molds: Pie molds are not often seen these days in even the best stocked kitchen store. Anything cylindrical will do. I've seen everyone including some very serious reenactors do this with an ice tea glass. I use a 4-inch cut from the middle of a thrift store rolling pin. This is the cheapest source I could find, short of turning one on a lathe and even then the raw materials would cost more than Goodwill's old rolling pins. Just remember to grease the mold so you can get it out.

Whatever you choose to use, raise four coffins in this way, making what amounts to four tall, doughy ramekins, leaving two rounds of dough on the board. The bottoms of your coffins should be at least a 1/3 inch thick and the walls should be sturdy at the bottom and taper at the tops.

Divide each of the remaining disks in half and flatten into thin rounds with your rolling pin to make lids. Scoop a bit of the filling into each, mounding the middle, but leaving the lip clear. Smear a bit of beaten egg around the inside lip and lid them up, pinching the edges decoratively if you so choose.  Be sure to cut vents for escaping steam or the coffins will get gooey instead of staying sturdy.

Add a bit of water to your beaten egg to make an egg wash and slather the tops liberally with the egg mixture.

Bake for 30 minutes or until the tops are golden brown and flaky.

Serve hot or cold, alone or with a nice salat (that's a "salad" to you and me) and a complementary beverage. For my part, I like any nice amber ale that I had nothing to do with brewing.

Learning Curves and the State of the Project: I know now why apprentices are a Thing...

Part One: History and Hubris 

“History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of kings’ bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. That is the way of human folly.” – Henri Fabre

That sounds familiar.

That quote, attributed to Henri Fabre[1], sits at the top of page one, chapter one in the book Six Thousand Years of Bread: Its Holy and Unholy History by H.E. Jacob. The book is a vast and noble attempt to fix Mssr Fabre’s problem, and it goes a long way toward doing so. It is the latest of many books I’ve found and wished I had and/or read before we embarked on this journey. At risk of stacking quotes, an old adage that’s often attributed to Abraham Lincoln says that the purpose of reading is to remind us that our original ideas aren’t all that original.

Touché, Mssrs. Lincoln, Fabre, & co. A hit, a palpable hit...

What 6,000 Years of Bread really does well, though, is map out a very reasonable twenty-years spent by the author trying to understand the origins of bread. And it reminds me that what I’m doing here has become less and less about the world, trade, and tools of the renaissance craftsmen and more and more about their tools.

In other words, I’ve gone about this entire thing in entirely the wrong way. 

For instance, when I ventured into the world of the Worshipful Company of Turners, I spent quite a while trying to figure out what kind of lathe to build, how it operates, and how to build one. Then I built one. From scratch.

Now, while I knew this would be part of the process, I wildly under-estimated how long it would take to build all of these tools. (Or perhaps underestimated the size of my own creative ego, you be the judge.)

The next project includes baking and cooking.

Now, I don’t know about you, but my house didn’t come equipped with an Elizabethan spec kitchen any more than it came with a wood shop, which means there’s a cob oven and hob rising from nothing in my back yard. And I’m doing everything myself except baking the bricks.

And I really ought to be baking the bricks except that I haven’t found someone with a large enough kiln yet who will let me near it. 

Which all sort of argues that my project has veered more toward a re-imagining of the renaissance as something that was invented from nothing. Or perhaps springing from some post-apocalyptic hellscape where each piece of technology has to be re-created from stuff I find lying around. 

 Mad Max, circa 1560.

Part Two: Tools and Their Users

Sometimes I feel like I’m not so much learning how an Elizabethan artisan lived his life as reenacting the 1600 odd years that preceded his life as we moved from whittling to bow lathes to springpoles and treadles and onward. Sometimes it’s a bit like studying the lives of Indy drivers and starting by learning how to make tires from scratch...

Because I’m almost literally reinventing the wheel with every one of these projects, it eats into the time I can spend actually learning about the craftsmen and the things they made. Which is fine, studying the tools is a fine thing and I’m learning a mind-blowing amount of information about fabricating my own tools. But I think that the key thing I’m learning is that this should have been two projects: a yearlong preparation stage where I build the tools and then a second year when I learn to use them to create standard period artifacts and study the people who used them.

Which isn't the worst idea I've ever had, actually.

There's an inherent drawback to inheriting your tools. You were either not alive or too young to care when they were purchased. (Actually, in my case, my grandpa was either not alive or too young to care when some of them were purchased.) So you don't have a really close relationship with that punch to the wallet that accompanies some tool purchases.

Seriously, I bought my first new hammer ever just this year.

When I first embarked on this project, I thought that with easy access to the internet, I could get my hands on anything I really needed to get a project done. Going out into the community to see if I could source things locally was a bit of a lark because I could always just order it online. And that's certainly true, as it turns out... but there's a hitch.

Take this adze for instance.

If you've never seen one of those before, that's okay; it's not exactly a common tool in modern America. An ancient tool, the adze is sort of a sideways axe, used to dig out hollows (as with a dugout canoe) or smooth a surface (as shown above).

The adze in the image above was an adze-shaped ball of rust when I found it in the bottom of a bin at a flea market. The seller thought it was a gardening tool, and priced it at the princely sum of $5.99. In the past couple of months, I've procured three adzes in precisely the same manner, and in the same state of disrepair. As followers of the Facebook feed know, I recently spent the weekend bringing them back to life.

That one tool took six hours to bring back to life. I worked the sun into and out of the sky and still wasn't finished with the smaller of the three, a cooper's adze.

It was time well spent and it makes my heart glad. This tool is truly a joy to use, as are the other two.

My forbears left me a big box of serious tools because they took their tools seriously. And even if that wasn't true, standing opposed to the disposable aesthetic is part of maker culture.

Part of what makes me... me.

I also refuse to spend the money on anything that won't survive regular use. (Except computer equipment, which is a rant for a different time.) There's no economic sense in spending a $100 for a tool that will last five years (maybe) when you can buy a thirty or hundred-year tool for $200.

This is complicated by the fact that at the outset of this endeavor, I had to agree not to bankrupt us in my quest. The Engineer is smarter than I am and always has been. She's followed me into many a woodworking store and while I was oohing and ahhhing over the figured cherry, she was flipping price tags. She knew this would not be cheap and extracted a promise from me before I caught on.

See? Smarter.

Everything I could ever possibly need is indeed available to me via the internet, but there's a catch. Real tools cost real money.

Three: The Internet & the Deep Blue Sea

As we've discussed before, when Henry VIII's flagship Mary Rose went down on July 19, 1545, she sealed for the ages a time capsule of life in Henrician England. The artifacts preserved included the tools of the ship's carpenters. Eight chests of period tools, preserved by the waters of the Solent and a strange quirk of unkind fate.

Despite there being eight chests of tools, this is not by any stretch an elaborate or even complete example of a wood worker's trade. The tools aboard Mary Rose were specific to the task of keeping her upright and fighting. Nevertheless this gives us that rarest of gifts for a project like this one: an intact example of a 16th century tradesman's tools.

Which made me wonder what it would cost if I just went out and bought the modern interpretations of those classic hand tools. Hewing as closely as possible to their historical counterparts, of course, and bearing in mind the quality standards already outlines, I pretended I had a Hollywood budget under my belt, composed a selected list of key tools from Mary Rose, and went window shopping.

Broad Axe (Woodcraft).... $300.00

Broad Hatchet (Amazon).... $125.00

Carpenter's Adze (Lee Valley).... $250.00

Hand Adze (Lee Valley)... $50.00

Wimble (A wooden brace or hand drill)... Metal varieties are a dime a dozen. No one seems to sell wooden ones anymore and anyone that wants one, makes one. Antiques are priced from $50 up.

Spoon bits (no spiral bits in the 16th Century - Lee Valley).... $80.00 for a set of five

Bow Saw (Gramercy Tools).... $150.00

Wooden Smoothing Plane (Closest I could find to the Mary Rose example - Lee Valley).... $239

Wooden Rabbet Plane (Or what looks like one in the few pics I can find online - Lee Valley).... $39.50

Marking/Mortise Gauge (Rockler)..... $49.50

Dividers (Lee Valley).... $23.00

Ruler (Primitive).... It's a stick with marks burnt into it. Can't imagine buying one from someone.

Draw Knife (Daegrad).... £ 27.99 (Call it $43.00 at today's exchange rate)

Handsaw (Northwind Toolworks).... $275.00

I stopped when the total hit $1600.00 and remember that he would also have had various nippers, pliers, clamps, and miscellaneous whatnot which were made primarily of ferrous metals and therefore lost to time and tides.

I'm not saying that my tool chest is worth anywhere near that much (because it isn't), or that these are worth that much (though they are) you can see why I rely heavily on the antique stores and flea markets. And why I jumped at a carpenter's adze for under $6.00, even if it was a lump of ferrous oxide.

Also, bear in mind that this list would just cover tools for the carpenter's portion of the project. Leaving aside the overlap with the coopers, joiners, and turners which would still add to the total. There's also cooks and bakers and embroiderers and knitters and spinners and weavers and woolmen...

Thankfully, I am only metaphorically doing this on a stage, so there's no reason for me to go out and buy the perfectly period versions of these tools unless it genuinely affects the outcome in some way. Even Peter Follansbee, the joiner at Plimoth Plantation advises aspiring joiners to get close and get on with it.



So that's what I'm doing, but it's still slow-going.

Which is why a large and growing portion of this project has been about tools. Hunting, creating, rehabilitating, tools. And if at the end of the year all I've learned or earned is about the tools and toolmaking, I suppose I'll just have to spend another year learning about their users.And I'm going to call that a win.

With that settled, rest assured I will be posting more often in the coming weeks.

See you soon!

- Scott

----------------------
[1] Though the quote is attributed to Henri Fabre (inventor of the sea plane) in the book where I found it, I suspect that it’s actually attributable to Jen-Henri Fabre, entomologist and social commentator who also said “The common people have no history: persecuted by the present, they cannot think of preserving the memory of the past.” Which I find similarly germane to my mission.

Time-Traveler: The man from nowhen...

"I bet you think you were born in the wrong era," she said. I smiled grimly and shrugged. I didn't want to point out to her that Everyone Says That. And it drives me just a little nuts.

As a writer, I spend a lot of time delving into the past and exploring what life was like at various points in history. I've written about WWII, Prohibition, the Great Library of Alexandria, and Shakespeare. So "Do you feel like you were born at the wrong point in history?" isn't an uncommon or even unreasonable question.

Frankly, I'm a little disappointed that since I wrote Howard Carter Saves the World no one has asked whether I felt I might've been born on the wrong planet.

It annoys me at times, but it's a fair question because if anyone was ill at ease in the modern world, it's me. Let's face it, I have a lot of skills that aren't of much use in the 21st century.

By the metric of the rest of the country, my childhood was more on like my dad's than it was like the rest of my peers. We didn't have a video game system or a computer of any kind. Dad didn't believe in video games and didn't like computers. I learned to type on a typewriter (as is right and proper) and only saw digital systems when I went to a friend's house or a mall.

My friends refer to this as a 'sheltered upbringing' but I'm not sure I'd agree.

I spent a lot of time at my grandparents' farm where grandpa taught me woodworking to keep me out from under foot and where I made a lot of my own toys. I built rafts because I read a lot of Huck Finn. They all sank or broke apart, so I swam to shore and built new ones. It was a world of pocket knives, toy guns, frogs, wooden airplanes... I played with GI Joe while we listened to Fibber McGee & Molly on the radio. I watched Star Wars like every other kid of my age, but read voraciously from a library that was stocked mostly with books written over a half century before I was born.

My childhood was a Mark Twain novel ghostwritten by Ray Bradbury, filtered through an Archie comic.

The world that was shown to me on TV seemed distant and somewhat surreal, simultaneously more modern and less than the world around me.

I still prefer hand tools to electric, my typewriter to my laptop, and a printed book to a digital one. I have no real attachment to those wonders of modern technology that people around me can't live without. I don't own a cell phone, though The Engineer has one. It's not inarguable that I really am a man out of my era and I wouldn't blame you if you thought that if given a time machine and license to use it that I'd be off like a shot.

I certainly used to think so. I may have been misplaced several centuries! I said as much to my dad once. Dad, who had very little tolerance for bullshit, looked at me and kind of snorted and said "Take off your glasses."

Touché, Dad. 

I have allergies and poor eyesight and I have an asthma inhaler in my pocket as I type this. Even when I join in a historical reenactment and try to sink into a past age, never far from my mind is the fact that I never would have survived childhood in these past worlds.

Books are my time machine along with projects like this one. This is my preferred method of time travel. If someone offered me a trip through time I might not take them up on it if I cannot close the cover and return to the modern era any time I wish.

And it's not at all about the asthma inhaler. The women around me are valued as highly as the men. My wife is an engineer. My boss is a woman.  I can see someone passing me on the street and talk to them without my judgement of them stopping at the color of their skin. I can say whatever I want here and as long as I don't libel anyone, no one can stop me.

Because honestly... the 'good old days' weren't that good.  The Elizabethan era may have birthed the modern world, but it was still firmly anchored in the medieval. The streets stank of the latrine, death stalked the streets, the laws were Draconian and the punishments cruel, the cast system was becoming porous, but only just.

So until the man in the Blue Box comes to escort me to the opening night of Hamlet and then safely home again... I like this time period just fine, thanks.

Frankly, I like it here. The people are mostly friendly, the medicine is pretty good, and I don't have to worry about people teleporting into my house unannounced yet.

---
This post first appeared in a slightly different form on my writing blog Pages to Type Before I Sleep... in February of last year. People keep asking the question, though, so I find myself continuing to answer it.    ~Scott

Tools of the Trades: If you can't inherit them, buy them

Without a doubt, the best way to get tools is to inherit them. Not because it means you lost a loved one, but because inherited tools usually (hopefully?) come to you after years of tutelage in how to use and take care of them. Which is also to say that tools inherited tend to be in better shape than antique tools tend to be when you find them for sale somewhere.

A sad old Bailey No 5 awaiting rebirth as a usable tool. Rescued yesterday
for $12.00 from the shelf of an antique store.

I really feel you should mourn and doff your cap when you find a pile of old tools in a state of disrepair at a thrift store or in a flea market. It is the sign of a craftsman who failed to pass on his craft to the next generation. Rusted tools given away are the spoor of a dead craft lineage.

Then put your cap back on and buy them.

Apply some elbow grease to rejuvenating these treasures and apply them to keeping the craft alive in new hands that will appreciate them.

For me, this has been especially true with hammers and hand planes.

As you'll know if you've been following along for awhile (or will find out shortly if you're new here) I am something of a tool addict. From the antique stores, thrift shops, and flea markets, I have added to the hoard of 19th century tools I inherited. Or as I see it, I have given new life to tools that were destined for premature retirement on the walls of some kitschy restaurant or the shelves of some "Flea Market Chic" home.

Nothing annoys me more than to see tools used as bric-a-brac except maybe books abused in the same way and for the same reasons. I think tools are beautiful too, but as functional art, not inert sculpture to molder on your shelves. Use them or by God, give them to someone who will.

If you are a crafter, I hope you feel the same way when you see elements of your craft on the shelves at the local Goodwill. My wife supplements her inherited sewing implements with the same fervor I apply to woodworking and leather tools.

As always, the fall of one noble line gives room for new houses to rise and replace them. A quick tour of woodworking blogs will tell you beyond the shadow of doubt that the pursuit of handcraft is alive and thriving. While an increasingly mechanized world has undoubtedly managed to drive many to set aside the love of good tools meant to last generations in favor of ease and speed, the rise of the internet has also brought together communities of those who are fighting to keep their handcraft alive.

I mentioned Ravelry the other day as a gathering place for knitters both historical and modern. For the carpenter and joiner, there is LumberJocks and Sawmill Creek, for leathercrafters there is Leatherworker.net and for other crafts there are many more besides that I've forgotten or just haven't found yet. One of the great elements of these places is the sharing of resources and advice on rejuvenating these thrift store finds.

The wood body hand plane you see to the left is one of many that I've rescued from oblivion. The seller didn't know what they had. They'd duct taped the throat of the thing for some reason (without actually covering the protruding blade, so I've no idea what it was supposed to accomplish) and jamed the blade in backwards with enough force that it took some doing for me to remove it.

Because I do my research before heading out to go looking, I identified by its maker's marks right away as an English-made mid-nineteenth century Varvill & Sons plane. The plane iron (that's the blade) was original and in decent shape with plenty of good steel under all the rust. The tote (that's the handle) is solid with no cracks, a common flaw with antique planes, and just needs to be tightened a bit. It's a bit rough, but where weren't any cracks or splits that went deeper than a quarter inch, which meant I could fill them during the restoration and have a perfectly sound tool to leave to my heirs and they to theirs.

All of which ends with me buying it for $14.00.

If you look hard enough, these things are out there. Even though I really do live out in the middle of nowhere, I can drive less than thirty minutes and find a trove of antique tools. In fact, the closer to the middle of nowhere you get, it seems, the more likely you are to find these things. I've done this all over the United States, and I can tell you that these tools are to be found everywhere if you're looking for them.

I think it's definitely worth noting that if you don't want to restore antiques you can buy new ones that are being lovingly handmade by modern toolmakers. Specialty retailers like Lee Valley and Woodcraft are filled to the rafters with historically-inspired tools. If you want to talk to people making their own, there's St Thomas Guild, and if you want to buy them, there's even a group in England called Daegrad Tools that has begun reproducing museum-quality tools for the reenactor market, based on archaeological finds. I don't have any of their tools yet, but I'm hearing great things about them.

The toolmakers are really the unsung heroes of the craft guilds and the modern crafts movement.

One of the "projects in the background" for this blog has been to procure and restore almost all of the tools I haven't built myself.  At some point I'll do a full series of posts on 'how to evaluate antique tools you intend to use' but I haven't the time to devote to really doing it right at the moment. So you have that to look forward to.

Two important notes, however, that I do want to mention:

1. Antique blacksmith hammers are best avoided. While I do use antique hammers in wood and leatherworking, a hammer intended to use metal-against-metal can be over-hardened by years of use, and thus prone to chip or crack and throw the broken bits in your direction. You'll note as we go forward that all of the metal and forge work I do will be using new hammers.
2. I tend to avoid buying planes that don't have blades unless I'm ready to add $40-$50 (or more) to the purchase price to get a decent replacement that will fit.  When we get to the Worshipful Company of Joiners, we'll discuss what goes into making our own plane blades, and you'll get a better idea of why they're so expensive.

In the meantime, the sun is out and my workshop is calling. I've a tankard that needs hooping and some horns that need to be cut and shaped into useful items. Not to mention a workshop in dreadful need of clearing-out before I can hope to do any joinery worthy of the tools I inherited.

~ Scott

Making Light: The meditations of a powerless artisan...

As I noted on Facebook, sunset yesterday for the Puget Sound area was at 4:32 pm. Which meant I was standing over a boiling pot of bones in the freezing rain and dark of night. I told my wife that if it started snowing or sleeting, the US Post Office would be sending me a paycheck. Needless to say, I was thanking my stars I had a warm home to retreat to when I was finished.

I managed to make that observation via Facebook minutes before the power went out.

I burn the candle at both ends, I'd light the middle if I could...

The Engineer and I had headlamps, warm blankets, and lots of books to read. It wasn't that big a deal; these things happen when you live on an island. Contemplate, though, a world in which that situation isn't just a vexing part of life in the country, but a daily aspect of your life. An obstacle to every effort you make to get food on the table. For the sake of comparison, sunset in London yesterday (a few points north of here) was 4:07 pm. Thirty minutes earlier (relative to their GPS coordinates, of course).

It certainly illustrates a knotty problem for working class schmoes in a time before Edison and his light bulb made lighting well nigh a civil right rather than a luxury.

I wasn't going to really get into this until we got to the Chandlers' companies, but I see that fickle fate had other plans.

Fine work like pinmaking, embroidery, and sewing was heavily dependent upon the available light. If you imagine a work space lit by lanterns or torches or anything you might see come out of Hollywood, you'd be wrong. Tallow candles and rush lights give off a dim, flickering and smokey light at the best of times.  A rush light is a piece of straw dipped in animal fat and held in a metal clip as it burned.  Fitful light at best. Beeswax candles were beyond the reach of humble pinners. If you picture children and small-fingered adults clambering onto windowsills and jockeying for the best of the available light, you'd be closer to the mark.

Yes, most pinners were children. As Tony Robinson noted in that TV show I mentioned the other day ("Worst Jobs in History: Tudors") this pin making thing is an incredibly fiddly business and small, dextrous fingers are necessary to do it well. I spoke with one of the researchers he used and she made it clear that it was work that was often done by children, but mostly by the poor and desperate, quite often by crippled soldiers.

Rachel Jardine, who worked with Robinson on this episode of his television series (you can see her name in the credits as "special thanks"), contacted me via Facebook and kindly provided some of her research into pin making in the early modern period. I am still poring over most of it, but what I have digested thus far is amazing.

"In the constant protestations of the Pinners in the early seventeenth century that many 'poore and impotent people' gain employment through pinmaking, that lame soldiers, children and cripples find this their only means of employment it is similarly made clear that the majority of pinners are extremely poor.[1] It is therefore unclear what extent the technological developments which occurred during the sixteenth century were adopted for widespread use. It seems likely that most pinmaking continued to operated using the simplest of tools."

"Pinning down production: Pin manufacture, technology and the market c.1500-1610"  by Rachel Jardine

[1] See, for instance, BL Cotton MS Titus BIV f. 304/314, Lansdowne MS 84, no. 21.

I think I've expired the length of blog post that my waning laptop battery will allow, so that's all for tonight. More from Rachel's amazing research and on the process of pinning this weekend.

The bones are de-fleshed, boiled, and scraped. Now they are sitting in an antiseptic solution that will also bleach them white (health & safety). They should be ready to start making pins soon.

- Scott

I've a bone to pick with my butcher...

"What I really need is a bovine metatarsus," I said.

The butcher was silent for a moment, staring at me as if sizing me up for a styrofoam tray and wondering if he had enough shrinkwrap to do the job.  Finally, he said, "You want a what?"

"A cow's metatarsus. It's the lower leg bone," I explained. "Any is good, but front is best because they'll be a bit more manageable."

"Soup bones are over there." He gestured vaguely toward the meat cases.

"All you have are ham bones and ox tails. I need a meta... a leg bone,"  I insisted. "From a cow."

"Why?"

"Can I just come back there and look?" I craned my neck around the corner toward the door of the walk-in cooler, just out of reach of curious customers. "I grew up on a farm. I'll wear gloves, a mask, whatever I need."

"We don't do that kind of thing here; we're a grocery store."

"It's for a project." I gave him my best academic look on the off chance it would make a difference. "It's educational."

He shrugged and averted his gaze, obviously hoping the strange man with the cow leg fixation would just go away. Finally I did.  No use asking him to direct me to a proper butcher. I knew when I'd been beat.

This was going to be harder than I thought.

The part about growing up in farm country is true. I'm from a small town in rural Missouri. The part about growing up on the farm was stretching it a bit since it was my grandpa's farm, but suffice to say that I was around a lot of cows and a lot of dairy farmers from an early age.

If I needed a cow bone in Missouri, I'm pretty sure a couple of phone calls would get me one without too much fuss. May be true here too, and I just don't know the right numbers to dial.

Tacoma, Washington (where my wife and I work) is not in dairy country. It's a city, urban by any definition, and the butchers around here don't get whole sides or ever really see the whole cow. They're mostly in the backs of grocery stores. Which more properly categorizes them as meat cutters, I think (feel free to check me on that) as opposed to butchers in the classical sense -- their meat comes precut into primals from the packer and they slice it into steaks or grind it or whathaveyou.

All of which means no legs.

No pinner's bone.

I should explain. As I explained yesterday, a pin maker used a bone as a sort of specialized tool bench for making pins. The metatarsus of a cow or sheep were preferred because they are large and dense and can be grooved in many directions to allow for different dimensions of pin.

In all honesty I have no idea whether or not it matters whether I use a pin or a block of wood or the anvil of my vise. They used a bone, so I want a bone if I can get one.

One of the biggest obstacles to period crafts as a general rule is the simple fact that modern urban-dwellers do not have the access to the same materials as our early modern predecessors. Now, as then, every part of a butchered animal is used from hoof to moo, but that doesn't mean I can get at it. At least not very easily.

So I called around and discovered what happened to all of them. It's the dog's fault.  The first pet store I called said "Yeah, we have cow leg bones. C'mon over and take a look!"

Frickin' dogs.

So after work, to the pet store we go. There, I find a display of procine and bovine bits sawn down to manageable sizes for all walks of dog. About half of them are bleached white and filled with some sort of meaty corn syrup goo (yes really) and I didn't want anything to do with those. The rest were apparently smoked with a bit of the meat still on them and I bought a selection to experiment with.

A lot of things in the Elizabethan world were made of bone and horn, so this is going to be a learning experience that will pay dividends later on.

I bought two sections of a sliced-up joint because the pinners apparently liked to slice planes off the bones to make a more stable work surface (one of the reasons they favored the lower leg bones, no doubt) and a hunk of a bovine metatarsus, just because I could.

They cost me about $6.00 and I didn't even need a dog to share them with.

Tomorrow evening I will go outside and see if I can clean them with a nice, gentle boil or if I'm going to have to try something more drastic. It's going to be cold, but the Engineer insists that bone boiling is not an inside task. Bother.

I'll let you know how it goes.

In the meanwhile, here are some resources on pinner's bones:

• A pinner's bone cataloged at the UK Finds Database: http://www.ukdfd.co.uk/ukdfddata/showrecords.php?product=24059
  
• Another pinner's bone at the Museum of London, probably turned up by a Thames mudlark and recorded at the Portable Antiquities Scheme: http://finds.org.uk/database/images/image/id/230498
  
• An article about bone objects - including pinner's bones - posted by the York Archeological Trust. http://www.dighungate.com/content.asp?id=176

- Scott