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Comment by WFHRenaissance | Hacker News Reader

Definitely a blacksmith in almost every city, but probably fewer blacksmiths per city than the other jobs. Metal tools are built to last, and are expensive, so it was probably often a low volume high cost kind of business where production could be covered by a minimal number of smiths.

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My Dad was born before WW2 in a village in Eastern Europe, which was probably closer to a medieval village than to a 21st century one. He told me that a blacksmith would ask for 3 plum trees to do a certain job, presumably in order to make charcoal. I don't think there was anything special about plum trees, other than the local availability: people were (and still are) growing plum trees in order to make spirits. Giving up 3 plum trees meant giving up the spirits you could get from them for six years until the new trees would grow to maturity. So, yes, you wouldn't go to the blacksmith very often, if you could help it.

Of extraordinary interest is the fact that the blacksmith made his own charcoal and presumably other consumables and tools. From whence his anvil?

Would you mind sharing some more details, such as where was the village? This is exactly the type of history story that I enjoy telling my children.

If you'd prefer to share privately, my Gmail username is the same as my HN username. Thank you!

> Of extraordinary interest is the fact that the blacksmith made his own charcoal

True. In medieval Europe charcoal burner was typically a very specialized profession.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charcoal_burner#Medieval_charc...

"During the Middle Ages, charcoal burners were ostracised. Their profession was considered dishonourable and they were frequently accused of evil practices. Even today there is a certain denigration of this former occupation."

> True. In medieval Europe charcoal burner was typically a very specialized profession.

This thread reminds me of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a computer RPG which has done in incredible job recreating aspects of life in medieval Bohemia. It has a fantastic level of historical accuracy and things like charcoal trading as a dependency to a forge are integral to one of the DLCs of the game.

While barbecuing last summer one afternoon I fell down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole and for a few days afterwards I was an expert on the chemistry, physics, history and economics of charcoal.

Sadly now all I've retained are a few dirty smudges.

Both of those lines have no citation so while I wouldn't doubt it, that page seems unreliable.

I always knew there was something off about all these Traeger enthusiasts.

Correct. They want to smoke meat using electricity, buttons and timers. Like an oven.

Give me an offset stick burner, that I have to fiddle with constantly. That is the proper art of smoking.

I'm not sure if the blacksmith was making his own charcoal, or exchanging the wood for charcoal from someone who specialized in that. My Dad's village was about 250 km from this village [1] where people make charcoal even these days (one of the last remaining charcoal burning sites in the world). It's possible back in the day there were much more numerous such sites, so one would not have to travel far.

But even if they had, trade over large distances was surprisingly common. When I was a kid and spending summer vacations on the countryside, my grandparents were involved in a business of selling timber that was felled in some forests about 500 km away. The lumberjacks would bring the logs during the summer months, lots of it (maybe hundreds of cubic meters), and my grandparents would sell it to whoever needed it throughout the year. This was happening during Communism, so I guess it was some form of under-the-tables Capitalism at work. I imagine similar arrangements existed throughout the Middle Ages.

[1] https://wanderingcows.wordpress.com/2014/05/02/the-charcoal-...

Sounds like a wholesaler/retailer arrangement.

While it might be one of the last charcoal burning sites locally, large-scale charcoal burning is an active problem - https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/charcoal-burning....

Last I heard, fully half the air pollution in the Los Angeles basin was blamed on barbeque restaurants. It may be a higher proportion, now, as the cars have got cleaner, but the leaf blowers may have taken up the difference.

> or exchanging the wood for charcoal from someone who specialized in that

This is actually an interesting example of a market state that's sort of intermediate between barter and full monetization. Not everyone is going to want wood, making it a bad currency. Except that The Charcoal Guy always does want wood, so transactions that somehow involve him suddenly can use wood as currency.

> From whence his anvil?

As to that specifically, I'd guess (based on not much) that he inherited it.

What was the purpose in making the customers give up the opportunity to make spirits, if the charcoal wasn't any more special? Was demand high and the blacksmiths wanted to reduce the volume of low-priority requests?

I think the blacksmith simply needed that charcoal in order to do the job. Since people didn't have charcoal themselves, the blacksmith would take wood instead. "Three plum trees" was probably one option, the most relevant for the local population. I guess the blacksmith would have been happy with "one large oak tree", but that could be used for timber, while plum trees not so much.

The venerable ACOUP blog says that in order to produce 1 kg of iron, you would need 14,6 kg of charcoal, which translates into 105 kg of raw wood.

https://acoup.blog/2020/09/25/collections-iron-how-did-they-...

I bet most of a blacksmith's business was shoeing horses and making nails, not making tools.

They must have been quite prolific then. There's a reason Smith is the most common surname in the English speaking world.

Maybe it was such an honorable craft that people were more likely to name themselves after it compared to other trades?

I have that surname but not for the reason that a blacksmith was in my family. My great grandparents took the name Smith at Ellis Island to Americanize themselves. I suspect this backstory is probably quite common in the US, especially amongst Irish and Italian immigrants in the late 18 to early 1900's.

Ive heard the possibly apocryphal reason for this is that invading armies would kill or appropriate workers in other professions but keep around the trained blacksmiths working the forge and producing weapons and tools for war. Smiths survived the waves of conquerors.

Wouldn't be true for England which has gone the last millenia (almost) without invasion.

Duchies etc still changed hands quite frequently

There were technically invasion attempts up until the 18th century, but even discarding most of those as insignificant, we can hardly neglect the War of the Roses and Henry Tudor's (successful) invasion in 1485...

TBF there are many types of smiths, so maybe that's why: blacksmith, goldsmith, tinsmith, coppersmith, etc.

Probably not; the odds are very high that the name "Smith" (or any analogue like "Kuznets") originally refers to a blacksmith. Most metalwork is ironwork.

According to Mencken's The American Language any metalworking job qualified one for the surname.

Note that when surnames came into existence, they were intended to distinguish their bearers from other people in the local area with the same first name. There's no point being called John English if you live in England and everyone else in your village whose name is John is also English, which is why the surnames English and England (and variants like Inglis) are more common in Scotland than in England.

Similarly, Smith is a common surname because smiths, while relatively common, were rare enough that a given community was unlikely to have two with the same first name. There were almost certainly more shepherds than smiths in England when surnames started becoming heritable, but the surname Shepherd is less common.

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