I’ve just got back from living as a medieval person, AMA

[TheCountessofFitzdotterel]

First time in my life I’ve ever done anything worthy of an AMA!

Nothing with less than a 3 day incubation period but it’s early days yet, I will keep checking for buboes just in case.

Did you get chosen for this because you were already into reenactments and (it sounds like) have skills in brewing and spinning?

Bra and pants, or did you go full medieval servant in sartorial terms?

(Amused by the aristocratic @TheCountessofFitzdotterel being a serving wench…)

And thanks for the reply on biphasic sleep, which was very interesting. It’s the logistics of something like that (whether you keep a light or have to rekindle one somehow for any activity that required light) that makes experimental archaeology earn its keep. Easy to theorise about what you might get up to in a regular waking period mid-night without thinking of what it requires.

Yes it is all true.
Not at this event though. We were wearing too many layers, the hormones would have had to find their way through 4 or 5 layers each of wool and linen and besides there was no privacy.

I wish I had some wild stories to share but mostly it’s just people getting into really really ill advised relationships which they regret once they get back to reality 😂

wow....soooo interesting. I love the idea of re-enactments. As a history buff, it sends tingles up my spine. How far did you take the re-enactment? I mean how strict were you? Could people wear glasses, for example?

I would love to set up an Anglo-Saxon village and have everyone live there for a few months in the strictest possible conditions. I mean where literally everything has to be as it was in 600AD – no contact lenses, no matches, nothing

Not really quite the same, but I lived on a sherpa farm in the Himalayas for six months on the 1990s. At that time there was no internet or mobile access and life was pretty medieval. No electricity or plumbing or vehicles of any kind, and we only ate what we could grow or swap. No meat other than chicken as Sherpas don't kill anything though they do eat meat. Basically lived on lentils, potatoes and corn, a bit of some brassica-type veg. We did have tea though (home-grown) though we mostly drank chang. I walked for an hour every week to phone home, but actually only got through 3 or 4 times as the Maoist Guerrillas kept sabotaging the line (landline).
It's amazing how you adapt and no, nobody really smelt, other than of wood smoke and spices. We had chapati, but it was bread that I really missed.
This is such an interesting thread OP. Thank you.

Totally agree with your choice. Tbh I think the lesson is that the best tv history recreation programmes are the ones with capable and knowledgeable people working together like adults to do a job, not the ones where they deliberately select incompetents who will hate each other in order to produce conflict for the cameras.
Did you see the awful remake they did of the Iron Age village using some of the children of the original team together with people with no practical skills? They couldn’t even get organised to wash up properly and ended up getting food poisoning and having to end the filming early.

I would love to set up an Anglo-Saxon village and have everyone live there for a few months in the strictest possible conditions. I mean where literally everything has to be as it was in 600AD – no contact lenses, no matches, nothing

The irony being it would be a worse standard of living for most than 200AD,

Yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

What did you use for loo roll?

Did you miss reading?

Fascinating! Thank you so much!

I think it would be alright while you're physically able to work and provide for yourself. There are reasons people didn't live as long.

I was at primary school in the 70s with children who were in the original 1978 Living in the Iron Age tv programme. So interesting - but also all these experiments make me glad I am in the 21st century in a developed nation!

Pale barley malt, no hops. At this point (1461) hops are known about in this country but imported rather than regularly grown so they are not used in a household ale like I did, which is brewed in small quantities so the keeping qualities imparted by the hops aren’t important.
I could have added some oats or wheat if I had wanted.
I mashed and fermented using the same two gallon wooden bucket (was meant to have two buckets but one broke) and strained it through a cloth of loose weave linen. Temperature was kept up by standing it next to the fire wrapped in a blanket.

Yeast - I used kveik so it could start the fermentation warm. It did slow down overnight and I had to warm some of the wort gently in a cauldron to kickstart it.

Definitely some bacteria got in because it was described as sour in a good way, like a Belgian sour beer. I forgot to taste the wort before adding yeast (bear in mind I couldn’t measure anything) but I suspect it cooled too fast during the mash and didn’t get all the sugars out, hence was not very strong.

tbh I was pretty chuffed it worked at all given how cold the environment was! It ended up nice and drinkable. If I had another bucket I would have done a second running through the malt and made a small ale as well, but it was weak so didn’t matter.

Home made soft soap (lye and fat). We did have a brush, and a handful of straw makes a good scrubber.

Are you mad? 😂

What a fascinating thread- thanks OP!

Pretty much all my questions have been answered already although I am not sure anyone has asked yet !bout children- were there any taking part in it?

We live near Weald and Downland and visit quite a lot - along with Butser Ancient Farm, have you done any reenactments there as well?

Dp and I would love to get in to it some day but probably when the kids are older and we have a bit more time...

Oh one last one, was Ruth Goodman there? :)
We saw her at the museum once...

We had modern toilets so no need for anything other than normal toilet roll. If we had been doing it properly most likely big leaves, given the joke in the Demands Joyous, the first English joke book:
Q. What is the cleanest leaf?
A. The holly, for no man may wipe his arse on it.

Re hair, you tend to just plait it and shove it under a kerchief and forget about it.

A fascinating read, and surprisingly similar to life in rural Subsaharan Africa - I spent time in villages in Tanzania, in the highlands where it could be frosty. No running water or electricity, and no access to modern toilets either - one thing I noticed was how tricky it was if you were disabled. Using a long drop toilet at night when you're unwell really isn't fun.

Someone asked about the smoke. Sadly it really isn't good for you - where I lived, food was usually cooked on a wood fire in a room with no chimney, and most middle aged women had lung issues. I wasn't cooking for myself, so it didn't affect me, but I know all too many who it did.

Women used old rags when they had their period - I took a supply of modern sanpro . A good water filter meant that having clean water wasn't too difficult for me, but beyond the means of most.

Where I was we did bathe every day, and because it was cold, there was a specific room for doing so, with a sloping floor. The water had to be fetched and heated, really time consuming.

Interesting that OP didn't want to leave - I'm very grateful for many modern conveniences, starting with washing machines....

Yes.
Reenactment can be divided into first person, in which you actually pretend to be the person from the past and speak and answer questions as they would, and third person in which you are yourself and talk about how ‘they’ did things.
In first person reenactment people sometimes attempt the appropriate language, though this is only really feasible for early modern onwards because speaking Middle English or Anglo Saxon or whatever is just too challenging and most visitors wouldn’t understand you even if you could.
This was third person, because we wanted to be able to talk honestly to the visitors about the experimental aspects.
Also, if you are assuring a visitor that you really did sleep in here, if you have just told them you were born in 1410 then why should they believe you on the sleeping? They will think it’s all part of the game. Whereas because we were just ourselves we were able to go, ‘yes, and it wasn’t as cold as I expected!’

It’s come a long way!
It depends on the period you do as well, there are more blokes with swords in the Roman groups, or the early medieval.

It went very well indeed thank you, he is a very happy and proud Ian, and so he should be.
Having your event make national tv is always nice.

Are the other people taking part generally easy to get along with?
I find the idea of this fascinating, but would be concerned that it could get easily spoilt by one of the others being difficult, particularly as its so close contact and immersive.

I was going to ask about tooth brushes etc as modern people can probably do it for a short time but we like to clean our teeth properly

Almost all the events I have done have had vegetarians and vegans, and this one was quite unusual in not having, but we were quite a small group which may have been the reason.

It’s surprisingly easy to cater for non meat eaters in medieval food because although there weren’t actual vegetarians there were lots of fast days when nobody was allowed meat and consequently substitutes like almond milk for milk and cream. Obviously that’s at the upper end of the social spectrum but at the lower end, plenty of peas and beans. By the early modern period people even seem to have known that you can use pea water to substitute egg whites, like aqua faba. Maybe seasonality also drove this- you can’t bank on getting eggs year round.