A Commonplace Book

I would now like to give thanks to the time-binding bipeds, now dead, who gave us: The plant we now know as Corn The plant we now know as th...

This post describes a careful estimate of the size and distribution of the economy of the Roman Empire at its greatest demographic extent i...

Perfect for the season, but discontinued. Shown here.

Here is an interesting series of tests. There seems to be a consistent bias towards minimizing the effectiveness of armor. A jack test pi...

(This has been a trend for years--sometime around 1993, I recall a professor telling me that there was a sort of boomlet in dissertations o...

In 1412, Henry, lord Beaumont agreed to two indentures. The first granted land rented at 40 shillings a year to a trumpeter, on the conditio...

The Black Book of Edward IV describing the domestic houshold economy of the squire who can spend fifty pounds a year, may be compared with H...

The widow lived on her manor at Acton in Suffolk from around 1400 to her death in 1435. Her detailed household accounts for 1412-13 survive....

MSL leaves for Mars . And there it goes . This is harder than it it looks. The cold equations are unforgiving of any error. The team tha...

The mad antics of the Knights of Mayhem inspired me to do some research into pre-1600 lance construction. I doubted that they used 1 5/8...