History for Fantasy Writers

Very enjoyable read!

Re travelling distances to buy the millstones, a lecture I attended talked about a Birmingham miller who came down south to Southampton to buy two stones, something over 100 miles, but the stones themselves had been made in Yorkshire a good bit further north, and shipped down here, so a round trip of easily 300 miles for the stones Overland Trade -- Southampton

One point about people grinding their own grain, in some places it was an offence -- the Gies in their Life in a Medieval Village note some villagers being fined and their hand grindstones confiscated. That kind of detail would easily be incorporated into a fantasy story.


There are quite a lot of old mills still in existence here in Hampshire -- apparently over 240 watermills and another 100 windmills -- though relatively few of them are still working, of course.

A later use for mills was for animal feed, which kept some mills going, including our sole surviving -- and working again -- tide mill https://www.elingexperience.co.uk/eling-tide-mill I imagine there were a lot more down the coast here, since we have double tides.

We had some paper mills here, including one which made the first bank notes for the Bank of England in the early C18th. We also have a working silk mill. It was never a grain mill, but was purpose-built for fulling cloth around 1800 and converted to silk weaving some years later.
 
Were shoemakers lazy? What's the difference between a shoemaker and a cobbler? Were they always poor and did they always have elves?

The latest installment in my series History for Fantasy Writers is now up at Mythic Scribes.

History for Fantasy Writers: Shoemakers

Because everyone needed shoes, shoemakers had a certain amount of power.
mythicscribes.com mythicscribes.com
 
Another info-packed article! But you missed out the proverb that the shoemaker's son always goes barefoot -- though whether that's from poverty or from miserliness in not wasting leather which could be used to earn money, who knows!

I have shoemakers among my ancestors, though only from the early C19th, and there the terms shoemaker and cordwainer appear to be used interchangeably in parish records and census returns, with bootmaker added occasionally. Only one passing reference to a shoemaker in my WiPs, though shoes get more page time, since they're so important as indicators of wealth/rank/fashion, as well as for comfort.

Re wooden shoes, I was always taken with the idea that the word "sabotage" came from the French throwing their sabots into machinery to disrupt work, and was so disappointed to find it was a false etymology! (I gather it has a relationship with the sabots, but more along the lines of making a lot of noise while walking, then morphing into doing things clumsily, before taking on the current definition of having a malicious/deliberate intent.)
 
Thanks. Yeah, I did ought to 've mention that parable. It was quoted to me often enough by my old IT boss. It was always said in the sense that everyone else got served first (because they were customers), so the shoemaker's son got what remained. So no, I couldn't have that shiny new computer.

(actually, and completely OT, over my career I found I was treated far better in IT--which was called the Data Center when I started there--than any of my colleagues were over in the History Department. I got sent to conferences; they had to pay their way. I got subscriptions to professional publications; they had to buy their own. I got trained at company expense; they had to pay and pay and pay. I was never expected to work for free on my own time; the professional historian is expected to spend however much of his free time it takes to keep publishing, which usually means pretty much all of it. I was always glad I got hired at the Data Center--the university's first PC support tech--rather than at the History Department)
 
My latest installment in History for Fantasy Writers is now online. This one's on journeymen. Have any of you folks used a journeyman--not an apprentice!--in a story?

History for Fantasy Writers: Journeymen

There are more story-telling possibilities for the journeyman than either the apprentice or the master.
mythicscribes.com mythicscribes.com
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Interesting! When I first heard the word journeyman, I thought it arose because he did indeed journey from place to place seeking work. But a definition I read much later said it came from journée, meaning a day's work, and he was so called because he was hired on a day-to-day basis, not a fixed annual or longer contract, so I assumed journeying -- ie travelling from place to place -- wasn't actually relevant. So now I've come full circle back to the travelling man!

And having re-checked the Online Etymology Dictionary I see that as early as 1540 it had a deprecatory sense of hireling or drudge.
 
It absolutely means journeying. In German it's the Wanderjahr. Which doesn't mean wandering jar. <g> (though that could make a fun short story)
 
Brian G Turner said:
I'm curious - what would you say was the typical age range for a journeyman?
Click to expand...

It varied by trade, country, and time period. (you have my permission to use that as the answer to any and every question about the Middle Ages!)

In trades that had apprentices--not all did--the young man went out some time after the apprenticeship was over. England is different--in this as in just about everything medieval--and apprentices might be in that status even into their twenties and enter mastership without journeying. For many trades and times we just don't have enough information. Where we do, it's often inconsistent.

Anyway, figure apprenticeship is over around age fourteen or so. Apprenticeship meant the boy went into another household and was raised there. So the boy was not yet old enough to live on his own. Once the apprenticeship contract ended, he returned to his own family. The father would typical get the boy enrolled in the local guild, but not always. The boy might not be suited, might want to enter a different trade, whatever. Somewhere in the mid- to late-teens was the journeyman stage.

As the German term Wanderjahr implies, a typical time for journeying was one year, then the young man returns home, becomes a citizen and a master (the two often went hand-in-hand), gets married, and establishes his own household. As you might guess, there were any number of ways this could go wrong. By the 15thc, economic conditions were making it harder and harder to become a master. Guilds tightened entry requirements, which meant that young man continued in journeyman status. He basically became a hired hand, a contract worker, waiting for someone to die off so he could gain a mastership.

This got worse in the 16th and 17th centuries. Among shoemakers it got to the point where there was a general strike among journeyman shoemakers all across Germany in 1724. Other such actions cropped up in France.

Augh. I've gone into Prof Mode. I'll stop now. <g>
 
So, in other words, someone could finish their apprenticeship around age 18, then be a journeyman until their thirties or forties? Or is an apprenticeship likely to take longer? My original presumption would that it would taken them into their early twenties, but you've got me thinking now. :)
 
>someone could finish their apprenticeship around age 18, then be a journeyman until their thirties or forties?
Yes. This happened more and more frequently as we move through the 15thc to the 18thc.
An apprenticeship likewise could vary, not least because the terms and conditions of apprenticeship varied by country, trade, and time period.

To speak *very* broadly, though, there's a fundamental difference between apprentice and journeyman. The former is in someone's household, while the latter is an independent contractor. Now append about a thousand amendments and codicils to that, but it's at least a starting point for thinking about this.

By this definition, you would tend not to find a 30-year-old apprentice because they're not living in the household of another. They're not being taught the basics of life. An apprenticeship was about more than just learning a craft, or at least that was the expectation. The master's family was sort of raising the boy, teaching them about the trade, who did business and how. Ethics, values, discipline.

A journeyman was expected to know all that. They were also expected to know the basics of the craft. They were going out into the wider world in order to learn nuance, tricks, techniques, as well as make business connections. I don't know that it was ever said explicitly in the Middle Ages, but late teens into early twenties is prime time for a young man to take on a mentor, so journeying could also provide that.

To put it another way, the apprentice left his home to encounter his town. The journeyman left his town to encounter the world.
 
I have a new entry on History for Fantasy Writers. This one is the second in a series on time. It's about short periods of time like minutes and seconds.

History for Fantasy Writers: Do You Have a Moment?

How hours, minutes, and seconds were perceived and measured in ancient and medieval Europe, in the age before mechanical clocks.
mythicscribes.com mythicscribes.com

The first entry is here. It's on years, months, weeks.

History for Fantasy Writers: Time Was

How time was perceived and measured in ancient and medieval Europe.
mythicscribes.com mythicscribes.com
 
Three score and ten is not the average lifespan of a human, that span is actually much, much higher. It is predicted one in three children born now will reach of the age of 100, for instance.
Any society with a lack of effective vaccines will see a high infant mortality rate AND a high adult mortality rate, unless it is so remote AND small sanitation and disease would not be issues.
These things that kill infants also kill adults, though not in as great numbers generally, diseases can be specific to age groups but generally diseases effect infants much worse than adults.
 
Aurora Nights said:
Three score and ten is not the average lifespan of a human, that span is actually much, much higher. It is predicted one in three children born now will reach of the age of 100, for instance.
Any society with a lack of effective vaccines will see a high infant mortality rate AND a high adult mortality rate, unless it is so remote AND small sanitation and disease would not be issues.
These things that kill infants also kill adults, though not in as great numbers generally, diseases can be specific to age groups but generally diseases effect infants much worse than adults.
Click to expand...
I have no idea where you get your data, because the latest I can find puts the current global average lifespan at 72 years, so very near three score and ten, and that's the highest it's ever been.

It may well be that in a hundred years this figure will rise, especially as a lot of the developing nations will hopefully catch up with the developed ones, and we may well continue to make huge strides in medicine and other positive factors. But that's assumptions that may or may not be correct, and other factors, say climate change, could have big negative impacts on food sources and economies, leading to less properous nations and therefore no rise, possibly even overall declines, in average lifespans. (or may not, who knows?)

Also it is interesting to note that lifespans in the US, the number one economy and with - on paper - the best healthcare system in the world, have actually declined since 2014: bad lifestyle choices, for example giving rise to obesity and all that entails have been well documented; poorer citizens may be shunning medical care because of cost (?); and a growing number of drug deaths.

So I'd be much more cautious on these predictions of where we will be in a hundred years. A great many of these predictions seem to merely extrapolate current trends out in a linear fashion.

However I'd agree with you if you meant that in theory the average lifespan of a human should easily be bigger then 70. We have, after all whole nations like Japan with an average lifespan of 85, and we sort of know the basics to try and attain this for an individual: diet, activity, medical care and what not to do (like drug use). But getting there is another matter, there are a huge number of factors, some clearly out of our control, outwith these that will influence the actual figure.
 
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