Lessons from Historical Recreation

what I have learned

I have been an active member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, a group that does historical recreation, mostly medieval and Renaissance, for more than fifty years. I have written and performed poems, told stories from medieval sources, fought with (non-lethal) sword and shield, made pavilions and armor and medieval furniture and jewelry, cooked from medieval cookbooks (the oldest from the 10^th century), slept for most of a cumulative year in a pavilion on a rope bed based on an early medieval ivory carving, written, with my wife, a 357 page book on our medieval interests containing a cookbook with more than three hundred recipes.

My web page lists my four worlds: family, academic work in economics and law, libertarian writing, recreational medievalism. That fairly, if incompletely, describes my life. What have I learned from the last of the four?

They Were Not Stupid

I, like some others in the hobby, invented a rope bed and built it. Years later, some friends pointed me at a picture of an early medieval ivory carving, currently in the Victoria and Albert Museum, showing the scene where Jesus tells a man to take up his bed and walk. The design of the bed it shows is easier to make and use, more comfortable to sleep on, more transportable, than the ones we have invented.

Heimskringla is a saga history of the Norwegian kings. It starts with a careful discussion of sources, how one can know what happened in the past — written by Snorri Sturluson in the 13^th century. Another 13^th century saga describes an experiment to determine whether consciousness is located in the head or the body.

A fourteenth century account by a North African world traveler describes an experiment to test a miracle.

People in the past were not stupid.

What Everyone Knows is Frequently Not True

There are a variety of widely believed factoids about the past that turn out to be false. For example:

Medieval food was highly spiced:

Our forefathers, possibly from having stronger stomachs, fortified by outdoor life, evidently liked their dishes strongly seasoned and piquant, as the Cinnamon Soup on p. 59 shews. (Thomas Austin, Introduction to Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books)

Turning to page 59, one discovers that the cinnamon soup is not a recipe but an item on a menu. Austin apparently believed that the fact that a soup had cinnamon in it showed that the cuisine was “strongly seasoned and piquant.” That tells us more about English cooking in the 19^th century, when he wrote, than in the 15^th century.

Even a recipe would not tell us how highly spiced the soup was because the recipes in that book, like most medieval European recipes, do not include inessential details such a times, temperatures, or quantities; they tell us what spices were used in the dish, not always the ones a 19^th c. Englishman would expect, but not how much of them.

It is, however, possible to get information about quantities of spices, not always from recipes. One source is Du Fait de Cuisine, a fifteenth century cookbook from Savoy that describes a two day feast for, by my estimate, several thousand people. The recipes do not give quantities but the book starts with a shopping list:

And first: one hundred well-fattened cattle, one hundred and thirty sheep, also well fattened, one hundred and twenty pigs; and for each day during the feast, one hundred little piglets, both for roasting and for other needs, …

The list includes spices, letting me estimate the ratio, by weight, of spices to meat, not for a single recipe but for the entire feast. I compared it to the ratio in recipes that we had worked out to our taste. The two figures were similar.

A second source of information is a recipe for Hippocras, spiced wine, in Le Menagier de Paris, a 14^th century household management text. It gives sugar and spices by weight, wine by volume. I found it too sweet and too highly spiced so cut sugar and spices in half, only to discover that the quarts “by Paris measure” in the recipe were about twice the volume of a modern quart. By adjusting to taste I had gotten the spicing back to about the correct value.

From those and other clues I conclude that while medieval dishes used different spice combinations than modern cooking the quantities were consistent with modern tastes — at least mine.

Overspiced to hide the taste of spoiled meat.

That factoid is implausible on its face, quite aside from evidence on spicing. Spices were expensive imports, meat a local product that could be slaughtered on site as needed. A cook who routinely fed his employer and guests spoiled meat would be unlikely to keep his job.

Pasta was introduced to Europe from China by Marco Polo.

The recipe for Rishta, my favorite medieval pasta dish, is from a middle-eastern cookbook dated to 1226, almost thirty years before Marco Polo was born. Other pasta recipes can be found in a 10^th century collection.

Inputs to My Other Worlds

Many years ago I got involved in an exchange between two University of Chicago economists and two law professors on a proposal by the economists to revise criminal law to make its enforcement more nearly incentive compatible, in effect privatizing law enforcement. Reading the exchange, it occurred to me that there had been a real-world system structured along those lines, one I was familiar with through my reading of the Icelandic sagas, one of my sources for stories to tell in the SCA. I ended up contributing two articles to the exchange, one of them on the Icelandic legal system, and being invited to come to the University of Chicago Law School to argue with its professors at shorter range. That is how my professional specialty shifted from price theory and public choice to the economic analysis of law, with the result that I spent the final thirty-one years of my career in law schools. My work on the Icelandic legal system also ended up as a chapter in the second edition of my first book and a contribution to libertarian literature, an example of a real world semi-stateless society. It was part of the inspiration for, and a chapter in, my most recent book, Legal Systems Very Different from Ours.

To better understand the Icelandic system I needed some measure of how severe the punishments to compare it to criminal punishments in our society. The money in which punishments were defined was ounces of silver. The other money in that society was Wadmal, wool cloth, and there was a known exchange rate between them. Cloth was a labor intensive product so if I knew how many hours it took to spin and weave an ell of Wadmal I would have at least a rough estimate of wages.

I knew someone who had done it, spinning with a drop spindle, weaving with a warp weighted loom, the technology used to produce cloth in saga period Iceland. Her report of how long it took gave me what I needed.

Another part of my medieval hobby, my interest in medieval Islam, provided my law school writing and teaching with two medieval Islamic law and economics stories, one on the implication of unenforceable contract terms, one on the ability of a ruler to get around constraints on his ability to change a law.

Seeing Through Different Eyes

Members of the SCA adopt personas, choose the role of someone from a specific time and place in the pre-17^th century world. For many the persona only defines what kind of clothes they wear, for some not even that. But there is the alternative of trying, while at an event, to be your persona, to represent, as best you can, what that fictional person would have done, said, how he would have seen the world. That is how I prefer to play the game.

My persona is a North African Muslim, a Berber, from about 1100 AS or, as he sees it, the late fifth century after the Hejira. Works written by medieval Muslims give me some idea of how the world looked to them. I do not know what Mohammad or the early Caliphs were really like but I have a reasonable idea of how my persona would have viewed them — and his world. I have learned, very imperfectly, to see out of his eyes. That gives me a valuable perspective on not only the past but the present, where a considerable number of people still believe in that religion — just as writing by C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton gives me, an atheist, some understanding of how it is possible to be a believing Christian.

The Second Caliph

Umar ibn Khattab was his name,
Who bore us on beyond the double loss,
Both Prophet and Successor under moss,
A big loud man among the first who came
To warm his heart at Mahmouds holy flame.
He spoke the truth and had no friends. The toss
That gave him rule the Lands of Peace across
The wisest act of Abu Bakr's fame.
He was a man who, once the truth was known, 
Followed to death, beyond all limits brave,
Neither neglected, no nor magnified
His power. Going out on that dark tide,
He left us leaderless, at last alone,
The luck of Islam buried in his grave.

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