Broad-brimmed Felt Hats: 1380-1415

From the top: Jacob increasing his herd, Bible historiale (BNF Fr. 9, fol. 32v), beginning of the 15th century, Tristan and the shepherds, Tristan de Léonois (BNF Fr. 97, fol. 136v), first quarter of the 15th century, July, in the Tres Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry, 1410s, Annunciation to the shepherds, fol. 52r Belles Heures of Jean de France, duc de Berry, 1405–1408/9, Illustrations of pilgrims bathing in the Jordan (fol. 129v), and traveling (fol. 142v) The Voyages of Jean de Mandeville and the Liber peregrinationis by Ricoldo de Montecroce (BNF Fr. 2810), c. 1410-1412, The Wife of Bath, The Ellesmere Chaucer, c. 1410, Gelre Herald, Gelre Armorial, Folio 122r, before 1396, St. Jerome, by Theodoricus of Prague, ca. 1380, St. Jerome ordained as cardinal Fol. 184r,  St. Jerome Extracting a Thorn, Fol. 186 v. Belles Heures de Duc du Berry.

As always, click to embiggen.

Broad-brimmed hats were popular with people who expected to spend a lot of time outdoors: shepherds, pilgrims and other travelers, and heralds. The conventional cardinal's hat also had a broad brim, perhaps because the owner was expected to take part in outdoor processions, perhaps because he was expected to travel on church business. The cardinal's hat gives an example of what an upscale broad-brimmed hat might look like.

Wax Tablets

I have completed upgrading two wax writing tablets to make them more like medieval tablets.

The first is a triptych, probably made by Gary Link. and purchased at Pennsic.  The second is a diptych sold by Historic Enterprises.

Tablets, Wood or Otherwise

The statutes of the Parisian tablet makers in the 13th century describe boxwood as the preferred medium for the tablet, although the wood of cedar, beech, ebony, brazilwood and cypress were also used, as well as ivory.

The wax cavity for the triptych had rounded corners, probably produced with a router.

I used a butter knife, heated in hot water, to push wax back from the corners of the tablets and squared them off with a wood chisel.

The process resulted in some splits in the wood. Even though I thought I had repaired the splits with glue, when I attempted to smooth the wax tablets by reheating them I lost a significant amount of the original wax, both through leakage through cracks in the wood, and because my oven racks were not perfectly level. Ultimately I got the best results by brushing on the hot wax and burnishing it smooth with a hot spoon. It does not need to be thick. If we had a hair dryer that would probably be useful.

The Historic Enterprises diptych was probably made from Sheesham or Shisham wood, often used in India.

Wax Medium 

Beeswax for writing tablets seems to have been mixed with resin, such as the terebinth resin added to medieval sealing wax.

Dammar resin is added to the wax for modern encaustic painting to add toughness, hardness and gloss, and to raise the melting point. A typical ratio for encaustic painting is one part Dammar resin to six parts beeswax, which yields wax that is harder than desirable for a writing tablet, hard to write on with a stylus and even harder to erase.

I have been unable to obtain terebinth resin, but I have experimented with mastic resin. Terebinth is produced by the terebinth tree, Pistacia terebinthus and Pistacia palaestina.  Mastic is produced by the mastic tree, Pistacia lentiscus. They are members of the same genus, and so closely related that Pistacia saportae is believed to be a hybrid between P. terebinthus and P. lentiscus.

Mastic and dammar have similar properties when used as a varnish or to temper wax, but less dammar needs to be added to the beeswax for the same hardness, and mastic is much more expensive.

I experimented with a mixture of mastic and beeswax, in the proportion of the above recipe. Mastic has a higher melting point than beeswax, so I melted it first on a pan with a digital thermometer, and then mixed in beeswax. The result, as expected, was harder than untempered beeswax, with a higher melting point. It seemed somewhat softer than a typical recipe for contemporary encaustic medium which uses one part dammar resin to six parts beeswax, but a dammar based recipe could achieve similar hardness by adding more beeswax.

Wax for wax tablets would probably use a higher proportion of beeswax than sealing wax. Artists' encaustic medium would serve well as sealing wax, but I believe from my experiments that three parts beeswax mixed with two parts encaustic medium would serve better for a writing tablet. This is based on my experiments with the Enkaustikos brand of wax medium.

A well stocked art supply store can provide encaustic medium, either premixed with pigment or not. I mixed this with yellow refined beeswax. Alternatively, you could buy Dammar resin, beeswax, and pigments as separate ingredients, and mix them. Dammar resin has a higher melting point than commercial encaustic medium, so the mixing process is tricky.

The wax used for the Historic Enterprises diptych is strange stuff; it is softer than natural beeswax, and smears easily. I used a heated plasterers spatula to remove it and replace it with tempered beeswax.

The Historic Enterprises diptych is thick, coarse and robust compared to extant tablets. It works best as a tablet for a young child, whose parents might well prefer robustness and sturdiness over the delicacy and finish they would want for their own use.

Pigments

Black wax tinted with some form of carbon black seems to have been the most popular choice for wax tablets, but red, green and yellow appear in iconography and written sources. Yellow was probably simply natural beeswax without any pigment.

Red and green tints in sealing wax were produced with vermillion and verdigris but other pigments may have been used for wax tablets. Vermillion and verdigris are highly toxic and/or unstable. They provide vibrant colors, but these may not be optimal for a writing surface.

Cadmium red, a 20th c. pigment, produces a similar range of hues to vermillion, also called China red or Cinnabar. Cadmium red is also toxic, but not as extremely as vermillion.

Venetian red produces less saturated and brilliant hues than vermillion, not necessarily a bad thing for a writing surface.

Green earth is less saturated and intense than verdigris, but more stable, less toxic, and frequently used in in medieval painting. A wax tablet tinted with green earth  provides a pleasant writing surface.

Binding

There were several ways to keep multiple wax tablets together. They could be housed in a leather holster, like playing cards in a box. They could be joined by a single rivet at the top and open like a fan. They could be bound by a strip of parchment or leather glued to one side of the tablets like perfect binding.

Alternatively, they could be bound with linen or other cord or thread, similar to the Coptic binding used since the second century to bind codices of papyrus, vellum or paper. This doesn't seem to have been the most popular method for binding medieval wax tablets, but the wood panels of both my sets of tablets was already drilled with pairs of holes close to the spine on each tablet, originally to bind the tablets with leather thongs, a method not seen in surviving medieval tablets.

However, some surviving medieval tablets do have holes in those locations, so I used waxed hemp cord to bind the tablets together in a way inspired by Coptic binding. It seems to work well.

Styli

I modified the Historic Enterprises bone stylus to more closely resemble the size and shape of surviving styli, shortening it and reducing the size of the broad end.

Documentation

As usual,  Karen Larsdatter provides many examples of tablets and styli in both contemporary art and extant artifacts. Her link to the wax tablets in Torun, Poland are currently broken. They can currently be seen here, here, here, here, here and here.  Randy Asplund has more on tablets and styli.

Reproduction Gauntlets: 1380-1415

These gauntlets are partly inspired by the carving of St. George in Dijon above, commissioned in 1390. The metacarpal and cuff plates, knuckle plates, and copper alloy decoration at the wrists are by Robert MacPherson, the leather gloves by Karl Robinson, and the thumb and finger scales and final assembly by Jeff Wasson. The reproduction gauntlets were photographed by Jeff Wasson.

Dmitry Nelson has collected a gallery of images of gauntlets that have partially survived from before 1361 to middle of the 15th century. Most are from 1380-1415. Some of the oldest pieces may have been old when they were buried at Visby in 1361: the losing side seems have died in armor that was far behind the contemporary state of the art.

Here are some images of medieval gloves or mittens, either fitted in gauntlets or for civilian use:

Churburg Gauntlets
A closer view
Yet another view
Gauntlets of the Black Prince
Another view
Civilian Gloves:
The gloves of Emperor Frederick II, worn at his coronation in 1220
A 15th century mitten in the Museum of London, showing the thumb inset, also here,, here, and here.
A 15th century glove
Medieval gloves and mittens from archaeological finds.
"Glove of Henry VI" However, Alison Weir believes the glove does not predate the 16th century.

Military Timeline Event: Cape May NJ, 2014

Here is my pavilion set up for the Cape May timeline event June 14-15 2014.  I spread the doorway by gathering  a bunch of fabric from each flap, wrapping and securing cord around the base of the bunch, and fastening the cord to the shoulder of the tent. I tried to create a bunch as high as possible, and as close as possible to the seam running upwards from the stake closest to the opening.  On my pavilion the loops for the wall toggles and loops for hooks for the roof guys are convenient attachment points.  I think it looks a lot like what is shown in illuminations from 1380-1415. My thanks to Shawn Wheeler for the photos.

The Oral Tradition Gets It Wrong. Again.

So. I am listening to a performance of the Highland ballad The Bonnie House of Airlie, which is sad and moving in a George R. R. Martin sort of way. There is sex and violence and bloodshed. The bit of historical grit in the pearl of the drama was a conflict in the 1640s when Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyll, raided Airlie Castle, the home of James Ogilvy, Earl of Airlie.

But the earliest version preserved was a printed broadsheet from 1790, and Child collected oral versions in the 1870s.

And the surviving versions transmute the historical Ogilvy support of Charles I to support for "Charlie" who is "awa'", referring not to Charles I of England but the young pretender Charles Edward Stuart a century later.

The oral tradition is slippery and undependable. If the Song of Roland can't even get the enemy right....

Recreating More Historical Formats for Deeds of Arms and Combats in the SCA

When I first joined the Society for Creative Anachronism in 1975, the default tournament format was a double-elimination tournament tree based entirely on modern sports events. Each round ended with a clear winner, based on the somewhat stylized standard rules for Society combat at that time. All blows counted as light (ignored), "kills" (powerful enough to end the fight even against an armored opponent) and "wounds"(blows that incapacitated an arm or leg, while leaving the victim otherwise unimpaired.)

In the late 1980s, I started trying to understand how medieval deeds of arms were actually structured., and how medieval armored combats were won or lost. I wasn't the first to attempt this: I know that David Friedman tried to recreate combats for an agreed number of blows much earlier.

It took about two decades to work out more realistic sets of combat  conventions that were still acceptable variants of SCA rattan combat, and formats for deeds of arms that better reflected how they were actually fought in the 12th-16th century.

Here is one set of combat conventions for armored combat from 2008. This focused on armored combat on foot in the late 14th and the 15th century, either singly or in small groups. We've used  other conventions to recreate large melees in the 12th and 15th century,  combat over the barriers in the 16th century, and recreate 16th century unarmored longsword sport combat with rattan weapons.

One key insight was figuring out that that in combats for a previously agreed number of blows, the sequence normally ended as soon as *either* champion had thrown that number. This avoided the unrealistic artifact of previous reconstructions when one fighter could hoard his last few blows until his opponent had thrown all of his, and then go on the offensive knowing that his opponent could do nothing but defend.

Another thing important thing I learned in the two decades after 1990 was that there were several different formats for consensual deeds of arms in the Middle Ages, and none of them were much like a modern double or single elimination tournament.

The third was that the classic default rules for SCA armored combat didn't recreate actual medieval armored combat well at all. Fortunately, the Society was willing to accept variant rules as acceptable variations for specific contests on a case-by-case basis.

The best and most authentic recreations of medieval combat and deeds of arms within the SCA have improved a lot since ca. 1990.

Stone Canal

I just finished Ken Macleod's Stone Canal, and enjoyed its whimsey and grandiosity.

I think Macleod's political biases have led him to imagine, writing in the 20th century, a 21st century in which the most dangerous state threats to peace and freedom will be about 180 degrees from the reality of our current timeline.

Perhaps more problematic, his story is written with a very optimistic view of the near term potential for personality uploads and downloads, cloning, and nanotech. I don't think this will age well.

It reminds me of the Heinlein's optimistic view of rocket technology while writing in the mid 1950s. It seemed plausible, until you looked closer at the contemporary state of the art.

If, in my lifetime, we succeed in uploading a crude, low fidelity emulation of a human personality to a computer, that would be an amazing achievement.  It would be a very big deal. Imagine a rover on Mars with brain that wasn't a robot, that wasn't quite human, but that was pretty close.

A near future in which we can reliably upload or download a complete human personality seems much less probable. Uploading a crude approximation of a human personality seems more probable, and could have interesting implications.

Artists, Art and Politics

The nominations for the 2014 Hugo awards include in the best novelette category, one work by the memorably odious racist sexist homophobic author writing as Vox Day.

Is this a big problem? I think not.

First, very bad people can still produce good art. For example, Francois Villon, Caravaggio and Benvenuto Cellini. Love the art, hang the artist.

Second, if the artist's false worldview damages their art, that should count against their art as art. The racism in Gone With the Wind and Stalinism in Alexander Nevsky were odious, and both works would have been far better without them.

Third, I think that Vox Day writes poorly enough that his work can and will be rejected on its merits.

Virtuous Redistribution

The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 was one of the great policy changes of 19th century Britain. It had the effect of lowering the incomes of wealthy landowners and raising the real incomes of most other people by lowering the cost of grain. Since it allowed Britons to buy grain from the places where it was cheapest to grow and concentrate on producing the goods where Britain had a comparative advantage, it was good for the overall economy.

If we see inequality as a problem, we should concentrate on policies that similarly increase the pie at the same time we redistribute income.

My candidates:

Reduce copyright term to the Berne Convention minimum. Current law is an expensive and inefficient way to hand excessive monopoly rents to a relatively small number of individuals.

Reduce or eliminate entirely the number of patents granted for software: again, this is a very expensive way to grant monopoly rents.

Lower the cap on the mortgage interest deduction: it's regressive and distorts the housing market.

Cap the tax exclusion of employer provided health insurance: it's regressive and distorting. Better yet,  replace it with a tax credit of the same total value.

Reduce and eventually eliminate agricultural subsidies and tariffs: they're regressive and distorting.

Charge market rates for all Federal mineral rights.

Reform immigration and zoning.

These are all policies that would be good for equality and good for the economy.

An Experimental Archaeology Experience

The evening of April 26,  2014 I had my reconstruction of a medieval hoop-spread pavilion set up at Marietta Mansion in Glenn Dale MD for a military history timeline event. The ground was soggy and a thunderstorm blew through, late on the 26th or early on the 27th.

One member of our group was on site. He heard but did not see the tent fail.  Examining the scene afterwards, it appears that the guy and wall stakes pulled out of the ground on the windward side, the tent center pole left the ground, and the tent blew downwind until checked by the remaining guy and wall stakes on the leeward side.  The tent roof landed with the inside facing upwards. In the second and third photo above, you can see the circular mat in the background that was in the center of the pavilion before it was blown down. Aside from removing the tent pole the pavilion is where it landed.

An adjacent rope-spread pavilion of about the same size survived intact. I attribute the difference to the rope spread pavilion using at least twice as many guy ropes staked down over a broader footprint, the hoop spread pavilion perhaps being more vulnerable to updrafts, and my own failure to stake the tent down as deeply as possible.

I seem to have reproduced a not uncommon failure mode for this kind of tent.