Anachronisms

Stretch.

Read the following passage today from a book, The American Farmer's Pictorial Cyclopedia of Live Stock, et al, 1884:

"Under the old system of training, an animal was subdued by main force.  What he learned was acquired under the impulse of fear ... under the old system, the whip and spur, and "terrible voice," were the means used to drive and force him up to, and beyond, an object that might be terrifying to a young and inexperienced horse, however harmless in itself."

It goes on to add, after arguing that a less violent way of training an animal produces such and such results, that ...

"It is true that all this may [also] be accomplished by the whip and spur, which are, even now, freely and needlessly used by some brutal teamsters, as well as by many really humane persons, who have never sought to understand the intelligence of the horse, and far less that of the other domestic animals under their care.  Hence, to persons of this latter class, the horse is a slave, whereas, to the intelligent master, he is a servant ..."

I quote this so that it might be understood that adopting an earlier time in Earth's past as a setting, whether for game purposes or no, will occasionally produce an awareness of that time that needs addressing, and most probably adjustment.  The above has been written 140 years ago.  Imagine what the world must have been like to horses 370 years ago, when my world takes place, or 750 years ago, where at most medieval fantasy settings take place.  You and I, I fancy, would not comfortably stand by the player characters acting like brutal horse trainers ... it's certainly not my point here to argue that the game world should reflect the realities of Medieval and Renaissance times.  But it does it well to remember that those times were very, very different from the present.  In ways we've never considered.

In creating an elaborate, explanatory equipment list, I've undertaken the approach of what a list ought to include regarding the time frame between 1250 and 1650.  For example, today's tease on Patreon:

Manure ... 22¾ s.p. per half ton.

Among other things that cows produce, an ordinary cow produces about 62 lbs. of manure per day, needing a little more than 16 days to produce a half-ton of manure. By modern standards, a single acre asks for 10 tons of manure; such amounts did not exist in medieval times.

A single cow produces only 11¼ tons per year, which would mean a common peasant could not afford to spread more than one-third of a ton of manure per season over 30 acres of land, the common amount owned. Still, this helped offset the cost of keeping a dairy cow for two years before it could give milk.

In modern times, there'd be no question of there being enough manure to cover fields as we desire ... and of course we have products far more effective and practical than manure.  Yet as I've begun to write on these subjects, and earlier on like subjects connected to the wiki and the facilities to be found in thorps and hamlets, I've twice run into individuals who have recalled their own personal experience in a given field to explain why I've made a wrong assumption about something.

Anyone living who feels they have some understanding of what medieval life was like because they've personally worked in a farm or in a brewery, or as a tailor or a baker, is in a considerable state of delusion.  Any western farm that's existed in the last 75 years has as much similarity to a medieval farm as a Ford Explorer has to a horse-drawn cart.  Numerous times, discussing interesting details with offline friends, I've had to correct their suppositions about one thing or another with the phrase, "Not in the 15th century."  I'm rather surprised, in fact, how little sense people seem to have of the enormous changes that have gone on this last half-millennia.  Perhaps it's the fault of television stories, in which characters speak with accents and grammar that would make them incomprehensible to Shakespeare or Chaucer, while wearing clothes that appear to have been fashioned at some medieval Gap or Old Navy.  

Nothing about this world has been left unexamined these hundreds of years.  Cows are not cows, grain sacks are not grain sacks, wine is not wine, roads are not roads.  We've taken every living thing on the planet and altered it, until nothing we think of today as "it's been around since Jeebus walked the earth" is even what it was when the book quoted above was written.  Yet we, apparently, are unaware of it.

I've been working out a paragraph or two that needs to be included about anachronisms ... the sense that things we believe have always been true have not, in fact, always been true.  For example, until modern times, the last 170 years or so, it was impossible to keep wine from going bad.  The notion of drinking wine from a given year is a completely modern invention.  Who knew?

I haven't figured out what the wording of that paragraph would be.  Learning things has the side effect of making one feel stupid ... unless one is more interested in finding the truth than in cherishing some make-believe status of knowledge they think they've obtained.  I'm a truth-eater from a long way back.  I've spent 18 days now learning how many mistakes I've made with products, how stupid I've been, and how much I didn't know about cows and horses.  I'll keep at it.  But I still need some kind of non-abusive section (far less abusive than this post has been) to explain to people that where it comes to understanding the medieval world, for the most part they don't know dick.

Mistakes I've made with my trade table:  filbert nuts and hazelnuts are the same thing.  Tapioca and taro are the same thing.  Colza and rapeseed are the same thing.  Nectarines and peaches are the same thing.  Gram and chickpeas are the same thing.  I've been giving different prices for each of these things for more than a decade.  Because I didn't do my homework and because I'm stupid.  Well, a little less stupid now ...