How much did a tunic cost in the Roman Empire? (2021)
bookandsword.com
bookandsword.com
So translating to modern wages (in US/Western Europe) somewhere between $500 and $1500 for the simplest tunic, or between $7000 and $21000 for the finest quality.
That certainly puts the practice of robbers to take people's clothes into perspective.
Also probably the source of the "they'd take the shirt of his back" saying.
If you give someone a $20 shirt, causing yourself a little embarassment, that's not quite the same commitment to charity as giving them your $20,000 car.
That's what the phrase conveys.
How did women earn these - were linen garments a form of payment to effective prostitution?
YES: Source; Kimono.
So yeah, DIY all the way.
Dollar analysis like 'how much did X cost in a pre-industrial economy' is incredibly unsuitable for answering these kinds of questions.
The answer is - most people weren't wage workers. Most people didn't have money. Most people were subsistence peasants, and they paid taxes, rent, and for many services in goods. What money they had would usually go towards buying things they couldn't make.
Most people wore homespun. Clothing a typical Roman peasant family[1] would take ~3,000 hours of domestic labour a year - every year, most of it devoted to spinning flax. Being domestic labour, done by the family, for the family, most of it, was, of course, unpaid. Being the kind of labour that you can do on-and-off throughout the day, as you are waiting on other tasks, it was mostly done by women. [2]
[1] https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t...
There was a post on HN `2013 or so, about a wiki for instructions on how to rebuild civilization through plans to start with primitive farming equipment up through more modern equipment...
We need this.
The prices in Diocletian's degree don't really make much sense, e.g. for 40 Denarii you could buy ~5 pounds of beef or only 8 pounds of rye/barley. So likely the price for tunics is quite a bit higher than the real market price. Based on 1st AD prices/wages a tunic cost 15 sestertii which is equal to around 3-4 days wage (a "worker" likely earned ~ 4 sestertii per day)
Cloth was so valuable that the words for both the robber and the extremely valuable robes they stole and plundered share a common origin:
Go look at the price for a nice suit, or a designer dress. Those numbers are not terribly high.
The cost of those luxury items don't come from the cost of making them. They come from the fact that they are luxury items -- it's the exclusivity and signaling that you're paying for. For more on this phenomenon see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
Wedding dresses?
That's not entirely true, especially when it comes to haute couture. For example, clothes made by a French fashion house may take tens/hundreds of hours to make, at Western European salaries. Yes, agreed, the markup puts the cost into the stratosphere, but the point is that clothes made like this would need to cost thousands of dollars at minimum just to cover the labor (instead of the tens of thousands they sell for).
I interpreted the parent's comment of "not terribly high" as meaning not terribly high when compared to modern day clothes that take a similar amount of labor. When you think about it, the amount of manual labor that would need to go into a tunic (shearing wool or picking cotton, washing and spinning the fibers, weaving the cloth, sewing and cutting the garment) is enormous without modern day machines. The reason stuff like fast fashion today is so cheap is not just that it's put together in poor countries (though that's obviously part of it), but that the total amount of labor that goes into something like a shirt or dress is in the the ~10-15 minute range, not the 30-40 hour range.
It's not that onesided, good linen trousers are usually somewhat more free-fitting, and usually don't chafe as much as typical jeans models. But still.
Also superior water vapor exchange is superior.
Something that's stuck in my mind is how prosperity in India, not that many decades ago, meant that women could wash one Sari in the river without being naked, since they now owned two.
When I see people complaining about too much "disposable" clothing, I am not impressed.
That includes things like clothing, but it also includes more staggering ideas like hand-spinning all the fabric for sails for ships, which is a seriously nontrivial amount of time!
Try building a musket in Ancient Greece, you’d need to start with building the steel supply chain - which means drilling into granite with wooden and bronze hand tools…
Sourcing of the ingredients for black powder might have been harder.
In general, with these scenarios, another variable is do you just wake up in another time or do you have time to prepare, maybe have reference books/artifacts, figure out what you can do given technology and material availability, maybe learn the language, etc.
The elevator pitch for the musket will sound like black magic.
It would be fucking dangerous to operate and might not be all that effective. But my understanding is that the early cannons mainly worked by striking so much fear into people, that they surrendered without resistance.
The machines used to bore cannon holes into logs (lathes) would probably be nearly as profitable as the cannons themselves. And one could presumably use their cannon production business to finance their lathe-building business.
Oh, and there's always dynamite.
One low-hanging fruit would be sterilization and hand-washing for medical operations, at least.
Significant steam power (so not that ancient Greek toy) might prove too difficult for the engineering of the era, but a pressure cooker might be possible as it’s allowed to leak.
Screw cutting lathes, and in particular the guided toolpaths to make the output reliable and consistent, would be a big deal.
Might be able to bootstrap enough magnets and wires for basic electricity, at which point you can make much better compasses — the Chinese were the first to go beyond lodestones and that was about 1000 years ago — and electricity makes electroplating possible and some acids (e.g. hydrochloric) and alkalis (e.g. sodium hydroxide) basically trivial.
Float glass would radically increase the size and quality of individual windows panes. Knowing that lead oxide reduces the melting point would make manufacture much easier.
Wikipedia’s list of medieval technology has some interesting surprises: apparently wheelbarrows are only about 850 years old, hourglasses and segmented arch bridges only about 680 years old.
Having a modern high school math education would make you the greatest mathematician in history up to about Newton, but more practically speaking I'm thinking that if you understood the principles behind good charcoal, a wood lathe, and how concrete and mortar actually work you could probably kick civilization up at least a few hundred years.
I'm envisioning something like this -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IShxXtAev9U although they do rely on 18th century metals there you could start from less.
There's a great clickspring series where he thinks about what kind of knowledge and tools would be required to build the antikythera mechanism, I think that's a great example of "master tradesman that got surprisingly far by dedication to a few small areas, but then that knowledge was lost".
>how concrete and mortar actually work
Would you tell Roman engineers how to deal with those?
(they actually invented it, and - for certain applications - their concrete is still superior to modern one)
Now that said I have my doubts that there are that many people on earth who could build better concrete for a given application than the Romans with no store to go buy pure materials from, I'm certainly not one of them.
That's also why I didn't talk about modern steel -- In my head I vaguely understand that there's a chain from copper to wire to a rotor/stator to electrolysis to oxygen gas to the Bessemer process, but I'd be amazed if there's anyone on earth who could bootstrap it in one lifetime, even with an ancient king's resources.
Anything that requires a long technology tree to implement effectively is going to be hard.
Drilling also isn't necessarily so hard. Neolithic Chinese built perfectly circular discs out of jade, an extremely hard stone. They had no metal tools. It's possible that they could have developed more sophisticated equipment for mining rock, if they realized what they could do with it once they extracted it. https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/myster...
For those who find the general idea enticing, there was a book written about 80 years ago on this idea. What if a time traveller got sent back to Ancient Rome? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_Darkness_Fall
A couple friends and I are big fans of the book, and premise. We always figured it was far too optimistic. Most likely you'd die of dysentery or be sold off into slavery. But assuming not, I figure the real path to power wouldn't be brandy, but strong acids and electroplating.
Edit: It turns out they could produce their own for trig functions and wouldn't have been all that impressed by the log table because they didn't have logs.
In general (I'm sure someone's dug incredibly deep on this topic and can tell me exactly why I'm wrong), the pre-digital/electronic-computer era of engineering seems to have been really focused on doing log based calculations, which makes sense -- a good design has tolerances such that you only have to be right in the order of magnitude, right? This seems like it would much more appropriate to share with ancient civilizations. No need to waste precision when the implementation is going to be done with an hammer and chisel.
I will only be useful if you can convince ancient Greek computers to go out to E-15, haha.
I'd suck at "inventing" anything impressive & practical -- so it'd be hard to get heard about germs, etc., etc., which I do know.
Sure you could. The antikythera mechanism shows more than enough skill and precision to make a small one. It might only be a toy for the rich though. I'm not sure if you could afford enough metal to make one large enough to do useful work, and even if you could the fuel required might kill it (coal wasn't really available at the time, though knowing it is useful might be enough to find and use it). The metals of the time where not up to a modern high pressure (and thus efficient) steam engine, but a large low pressure steam engine is perfectly possible.
That said, water or wind power would be a much better invention to focus your efforts on. I'm not sure how much of that they had though.
Irrespective of whether it was possible for the Greeks to make them, what would be the economic incentive for them to build large low pressure steam engines at scale? In our timeline, the only serious application of large low pressure steam engines was pumping water out of mines, from after 1720 or so. Even with the incentive of the industrial revolution, it took almost a century to get small high-powered engines, with the first public steam train in 1825.
Water wheels have no fuel costs, and very little ongoing maintenance costs. A steam engine that could be built in antiquity would be incredibly expensive in both respects. So even if the technology existed, there would be little economic incentive to use it over a water wheels, since transportation is cheaper than fuel and maintenance.
As recently as 1900, steam engines were so expensive that most farmers rented equipment by the day.
Some generals would likely find a mobile mill stone quite useful. When your centuria loot a conquered land they can now take raw grains in addition to processed flour without being tied down to the local stationary mills.
Not in the slightest. The legion on the march has no use for a millstone because nobody's eating bread. They would never carry processed flour, because it spoils quickly. They carried raw grain and made porridge from it.
I thought they primarily consumed bread (both hardtack and leavened), watered down wine/vinegar, and meat (when available.)
https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/roman-army/food-in-roman-army/
https://www.comitatus.net/research_files/rations.pdf
Those both seem like decent writeups which cite to several classical sources. The first one mentions porridge (stating that bread was preferred); the second explicitly makes the assumption that all grain becomes bread. We can safely ignore that assumption.
More from that first writeup:
> The daily grain ration (wheat or barley)for one legionary was on average 830 grams and was in the form of unground grain; This was mainly due to the fact that grain spoiled slower than flour.
> The meals of the Roman legionaries were mainly based on wheat, from which two types of food were made:
> mash, called pulse. It was an easier-to-make food that required a mixture of cooked wheat grains, water, salt, fat, and olive oil or milk. Sometimes vegetables or spices were added.
> flatbread (pane). It was the more popular use of grain. The soldiers threshed out the grain, ground it with a device or stone, mixed it with water, salt and spices, and then roasted it over the fire.
So, what's true:
- The legion isn't going to carry a millstone. They're huge and there's no way to justify it.
- The legion isn't going to make itself dependent on the location of local mills. That would defeat the purpose of being a military force.
- The legion isn't going to carry flour, because it spoils. They carry raw grain.
- But they also carry hardtack, which is prepared so as not to spoil quickly.
- A foraging legion already takes raw grain. That's their primary foraging objective. They are not limited to robbing granaries; they're happy to harvest it directly from the field.
- Food preparation is done at a very low level - if the grain is going to be ground, it will be done in parallel by a large number of soldiers personally grinding small amounts of grain each, not by a mill.
- The soldiers often do eat bread. But if you're going to eat bread, you make it from raw grain the same day. This has to occur wherever you happen to be, so you'll be using something like a mortar and pestle.
- Despite the fact that bread is preferred to porridge, sometimes you make porridge anyway. It's much easier to make.
> it will be done in parallel by a large number of soldiers personally grinding small amounts of grain each, not by a mill
I'd had it in my head for some reason that a mill stone was the only reasonable way to turn grain into flour. This was the main factor I wasn't considering. The weight/effort to handle a portable mill certainly wouldn't beat hand tools. Even if to just help keep soldiers busy.
EDIT: I expect that if one were to analyze an army's flour requirement as some form of equipment weight + work-hours / grain-throughput * army size there would be a point at which it made sense to haul a portable mill. But it definitely would not make sense to power it with steam engine compared to having soldiers turn it by hand. I would also expect that a force large enough to utilize that efficiency would be unheard of in roman times.
... makes the brigade/regiment/whatever far less mobile for no real benefit.
Of course practical over land transportation is a massive change, and a large part of why our civilization can advance so far. (without tractors 90% of us wouldn't be born because our grandparents would have starved, and the rest would be tillers of the ground - as in physically running a shovel)
Are these actually feasible with a large low-pressure steam engine of the sort that the Greeks could have actually constructed? Remember that the early real steam engines were only just powerful enough to slowly lift buckets of water.
[Edit] - good answers below - thanks! But I think the question of economic viability still stands. As pointed out elsewhere, a waterwheel is easy to construct and doesn't have ongoing fuel costs. A steam engine requires a reasonably well developed iron/steel working industry (including skilled artisans), which in turn requires a fair amount of iron ore and fuel to support smelting. The finished steam engine would require a lot of wood as fuel, or coal, which wasn't widely available in ancient Greece, or easily transportable without a lot of effort. Ancient Greek metallurgy was definitely not sophisticated enough to build a steam train and as for for building a railway 1) they could barely build graded roads and 2) they would have needed a phenomenal amount of mass-produced steel for the tracks.
You can do the same thing with fireplace and water and it's certainly doable with ancient technology, but I'm not sure it's worth it when you have more running water than industry needs anyway.
Another thing they could do is Heron's steam turbine geared in such a way that it does useful work. Also not sure if it's worth it.
This trick (using low power to lift the hammer slowly and dropping it quickly) can be adapted to use any inefficient power source - hamster powered mills are possible ;)
In order to get this, there are a lot of steps involved, including the ability to sand cast and bore iron of sufficient quality to take a reasonable amount of pressure.
If you got to that point, you might want to build a Stirling engine instead, it's far less likely to explode and kill people.
There was no danger of a Watt engine exploding.
I learned something new today, thanks for pointing that out.
Lack of precision means worse efficiency, crude steam engines with careful handfitting can work well enough. Though this adds times, and as the other replies note it isn't clear if the Greeks had the fuel to run a modern steam engine if you gave them one with a boiler.
The printing press seems to be far more complex than just "carve some wood". Otherwise I find it hard to believe that it took until 1400AD for people to figure out how to make large stamps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press#Gutenberg's_pre...
The prerequisite for economic printing is paper, and the tech tree for paper is reproducible from Roman conditions. The production of vellum is measured in years, scribes were barely the limiting factor on text production.
A lot of existing inks at the time where suitable for writing not pressing.
My understanding is that while parchment (vellum in particular) was used in early printing press printings, such as the Gutenberg Bible, the use of paper was more common because it was so much cheaper, if less durable.
People need to solve all of those, and have some reason for solving each one independent of the others, before the written word can even start to proliferate widely.
[1] Cf. this sample from his bible: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/Gutenber...
It was supoposed to have been opted for a movie... and then douchebagery ensues and it never made it to light...
So could a Roman or Greek. He'd just need a counting board and some stones. He could probably do it faster than you, as well. Anyone using an abacus today could perform almost exactly the same algorithms, with the added convenience of having beads on rods in a frame instead of an unwieldy counting board and stones. The algorithms are the same, and you can also do division and square roots with a counting board or abacus. When done deftly moving stones around on the counting board (and Aristotle makes clear that this goes so quickly that it's possible for the person calculating to cheat an onlooker, like in a con-man's shell game), one might choose to write the result down on a tablet, and he might just finish writing before you do.
Indeed, the biggest advantage of paper arithmetic is that it leaves a written record: each step in the algorithm can be checked for mistakes afterward. It is otherwise significantly slower and not inherently more accurate than a counting board.
The other advantage that paper arithmetic has is that it can be easily reproduced in printed books, making learning more advanced techniques more accessible / easier to spread to anyone literate, without requiring an expert teacher.
(And finally, paper arithmetic [eventually] has the advantage that it can be more conveniently extended and generalized to include more kinds of operations and structures, in a way that is easier to explain and teach than adding new kinds of counting board rules. Paper arithmetic is a more natural precursor for symbolic algebra than counting-board calculation.)
The big disadvantage of paper arithmetic is that it depends on widespread literacy and cheap access to paper (or similar material). In a context where paper is expensive or unavailable, written arithmetic is not very compelling.
Greek and Roman students typically used wax-coated boards and scratched them with styli. The surface could be heated or rubbed to restore its unmarked form.
My point was that there were cheap alternatives to parchment and paper for quick work.
The thing that really spread Hindu numbers around the world was access to paper.
My impression is that in India “Hindu” numerals and arithmetic were developed using some kind of erasable board, but among Arabic speakers (and later Europeans) the spread of Hindu numerals went along with paper as a prerequisite technology.
This looks relevant https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.ucsc.edu/dist/f/704/file...
Here is a relevant looking book: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300089554/paper-print
In e.g. Britain, the transition to Hindu numerals did not occur until 1600–1800, depending on the place.
It's hard to have double-entry bookkeeping without books.
I'm unsure if he used Arabic or Roman notation... Though the dedication page of Summa Mathematica in fact does include recognisable Hindu / Arabic numerals:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_de_arithmetica#/media/Fi...
Wikipedia's article has several illustrations, but none of the actual bookkeeping notation itself, which is ... a curious oversight. Continued on the double-entry bookkeeping article as well FWIW.
But there are certainly plenty of mathematical ideas and tools ancient people didn’t know about: they didn’t have a convenient method of manipulating algebraic expressions and equations; they had only the most rudimentary version of differential/integral calculus; they didn’t have group theory, linear algebra, complex analysis, etc.
Many people don't realize how fast it is to work on abacus (or soroban in Japanese). Here is an example of what a 7 year old can do
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQtqlB-jXO0
For many years I always did my taxes and other accounting using an abacus because it was sooo much easier than longhand (this was before calculators).
There is the famous Feynman story as well:
https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html
But you wouldn't impress an ancient Greek very much by taking cube roots quickly because there wouldn't be much call for that.
The Greeks had steam engines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
It's just that slaves were vastly cheaper. In Britain early steam engines were price competitive with horses only at the coal mine for the first century of their operation.
The first engines were atmospheric pressure, e.g. they used a vacuum to work. They were not closed cycle and they did not care about wasting water seeing as their purpose was to be a water pump. They didn't care about wasting coal as they worked at a coal mine. For the first century of their development they were stuck in the one niche where both the things they required were free.
https://etc.usf.edu/clipart/77500/77524/77524_newcm_stmeng.h...
An illustration that shows how they removed waste water from the piston. It was a century before high pressure engines were used, which were also open cycle and why steam trains released great plumes of steam when they moved.
The Aeolipile is exceedingly easy to reduce the steam outflow by having smaller nozzles. Given that they are basically a solid sphere made with four pipes sticking out they would have been the easiest form of high pressure engine to keep from exploding if there was a demand for mechanical work. They would however still explode, unlike the atmospheric engines.
The first book from the 17th century series, 1632, is downloadable for free from Baen books.
The less optimistic version would be this https://grapevine.is/mag/articles/2014/10/08/the-american-so...
on edit: removed a not that should not have been there
And there's always sand! It's probably apocryphal but the legend is that Archimedes was slain by a Roman soldier during the taking of Syracuse when he objected -- "Don't disturb my circles!" -- to how the soldier marched through his trigonometry problems.
I thought it would be a silly story about a guy who get sent to the past but it is incredibly dark and pessimistic. The Yankee’s knowledge wows everyone, he’s put in charge of a war machine and creates an industrialized hell hole.
Will find a friend when I'm finished, as well.
As a modern educated man I'd turn much of my attention to "women's work" first - in large part because there is low hanging fruit there that would make my life better. The spinning wheel and looms would be a great changer, and something I think just having seen one in a history museum and a few weeks to watch how women work would allow me to make things work, then a few months in the woods to make a prototype.
For "men's work" things are harder because society allowed smart men to think about improvements. Maybe I could create gunpowder, but I would prefer to focus my war efforts on a good defense. I know good steel has controlled amounts of manganese and carbon in it (I'm sure more than those two), but I don't know how to control those amounts and my visits to museums and chemistry classes haven't given me enough information to think I could create those from scratch. That is before we consider the amount of labor needed to get the ore. (though if metal is available I'd make a steam engine)
Note that the above assumes I end up in or near Europe. I have no idea if any of societies on the other continents could support the above efforts.
For example he makes rails but no locomotives because pulling standarized cars with standarized containers along low-friction rails already brings most of the benefits of modern transport network and is much easier than designing a steam locomotive in 1230s.
There's a lot about industrializing cloth production there, too and it's quite detailed. I liked it despite all the awful stuff.
Also along the same lines is "The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm", which I also enjoyed and keep a copy around just in case.
What is this about drilling into granite? The Egyptians were drilling into granite a thousand years earlier using copper tube drills and quartz sand, which they probably could have drilled a lot faster if they'd known about emery, but I don't understand where granite drilling fits into the steel supply chain.
But with freedom and some way to survive you can get pretty far. In only four and a half years, apparently without using modern materials other than a video camera and writing instruments, John Plant was able to bootstrap from sticks and stones up to celt axes, coarse pants (spun of course with a drop spindle), a centrifugal blower, iron smelting powered by it, fired bricks, several huts, ceramic tile roofs, underfloor heating, cob construction, bow and arrow, atlatl, lime cement, wood ash cement, crawfish traps, rock-heated soup pots, charcoal burning, a pump drill, and a monjolo.
He hasn't yet been able to smelt enough iron to make so much as a fishhook, though, and Australian law doesn't allow him to hunt animals for sinew, leather, catgut, bone, and bladder.
A thing he's missing so far is metrology, which is very important for chemistry and for muskets and other machines. He also doesn't have much in the way of chemical resources on his land: no saltpeter and no concentrated salt, though he could perhaps purify them from urine.
Still, imagine how far he could get in 40 years with all the knowledge from the present and without those restrictions. It's an amazing contrast to what most of us have achieved in modern life with much more resources.
Now, getting a perfectly round shaft... also tough.
From skimming around online, it seems that expert spinners get extremely fast with a drop spindle, and can produce higher quality yarn. But I can’t find a definitive answer about the comparative speed.
Even modern spinners who prefer a drop spindle often have a wheel on hand for plying. Spinning a thread out of a blob of fluff can be engaging and interesting, while plying is a tedious process that's hard to get wrong without falling asleep in the middle. There's not really an art or skill to plying. A wheel can knock out this boring part of the spinning process much more quickly.
Consequently, spinning thread may have been the single most frequently performed work-task in the ancient world (the various farming tasks being more varied and more seasonal, while spinning was being done continuously all year round). We tend to think of the pre-modern world as a world of farmers (and it was) but we ought just as well to think of it as a world of spinnners.
I had no idea! From https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t...
The spinning wheel started out being three times more productive (at a somewhat reduced quality) and then, within a century or two, ten times more productive than the previous method.
Needless to say, a reduction in labor time potentially close to an order of magnitude in the most labor-intensive part (again, c. 80% of the labor time!) of textile production had enormous economic impacts (...). English cloth production tripled (measured by weight) between 1315 and 1545 and cloth produced per capita increased five-fold.
The problem is that there is push and pull.
The Cotton Gin is quite famous about this. Anyone could have invented the cotton gin--and lots probably did. The problem is that nobody needed an order of magnitude more cotton--until they did. And once they did need more cotton--hey, presto--the cotton gin becomes widespread.
I know some very … enthusiastic … knitters who are keen to tell me how old knitting “really” is, but it smells a bit like “well, obviously…!” special pleading.
I have a naalbound and then felted cap. It is absurdly warm: unwearable with regular exertion in temperatures above -9C or so.
One way to compare wealth is to see how many people's labor an individual could purchase. It differs across time and countries (labor is cheap in India currently for example). This book is a careful historic look by an economist - using evidence from literature, history, etc. Branko uses a variety of ways to compare individuals across history.
https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/branko-milanovic/the-haves...
"Viking Age sail 100 meters square took 154 kilometers (60 miles) of yarn. Working eight hours a day with a heavy spindle whorl to produce relatively coarse yarn, a spinner would toil 385 days to make enough for the sail. Plucking the sheep and preparing the wool for spinning required another 600 days. From start to finish, Viking sails took longer to make than the ships they powered."
Fabrics and sewing, gathering and prepping those materials and the tedious work seems enormous.
Wood work deals with big pieces comparatively.
My hunch would be the reason shipbuilding is faster is it is easier to scale to multiple workers, and there are parts you can do in parallel.
I think that might take a bit more than 154 km of yarn.
Presumably you meant 100 square metre. :-)
Also, they didn’t dry the wood. https://regia.org/research/ships/Ships1.htm:
“Timber was used green – in other words, shortly after felling. This is different to more modern practice, where the timber is "seasoned" – left to dry for several years. Green wood is easier to work, and more flexible, which can help with some of the more complex shapes found in Viking boats. Wood can be kept "green" for several years by keeping it immersed in water – a stem (or stern) of a Viking style boat was found on the island of Eig in what, a thousand years ago, had been a lake. As it had never been used – there were no indications of rivet holes – it was probably made up when the boat-builder had got a spare piece of suitable timber, and he was waiting for a similar bit for the stern (or stem) which never arrived.
It is also possible to steam green wood without complex equipment like the steam boxes used today. Simply by heating a plank over a fire, the moisture inside the wood heats up and causes the fibres to loosen. This means that – for a few minutes – it can be twisted into shape with less danger of it splitting and breaking. It is highly likely that this was done during Viking times – we know the technique was used to make "expanded" log boats, for example.”
https://picryl.com/media/framkorning-av-timmer-fran-skogen-m...
You shear sheep, not pluck them. If you're experienced you can sheer about 100 sheep per day. You can skirt and wash the fleece of those same 100 sheep on day two. How are you spending the remaining 598 days?
While I'm not an expert at spinning (although my spouse may be), I would venture that 12 or 15 village women carding and spinning 10 to 12 hours a day would be able to go from sheep to sail in about 3 months. Spindle spinning is very portable and something a woman would do during pretty much every spare moment when her hands were not busy doing something else. Making sails would have been a drop in the bucket when it came to yarn consumption since she also had to make all the clothes and cloth for other uses like sacking, ticking, blankets, etc.
“The sheep were shorn using very basic tools, such as metal, or sharp glass, fashioned into an implement to take whole clumps of wool off at once. Over time, the tools were adapted into scissor-like blades to make the job easier.”
I think you can call that plucking. People use tools to pluck grapes, too.
And 100 a day without a powered tool? Is that realistic?
http://samlingarna.gotlandsmuseum.se/index.php/Detail/object...
https://historiska.se/upptack-historien/object/364462-sax-si...
https://www.chassagne.ca/index.php/the-croft-mainmenu-30/the...
"Before the invention of shears, the sheep were plucked or “rooed”, a Scandinavian word for plucking, and this tradition was still carried out on the Shetland Island until about forty years ago."
154 km = 95.7 mi
With regard to debt collection, what is interesting is the Bible requires that cloaks that were taken as collateral had to be returned by sunset so the person could sleep in them.
Exodus 22:26 - If you take your neighbor’s cloak as collateral, return it to him by sunset, because his cloak is the only covering he has for his body. What else will he sleep in?
Just the other day was an article about how Agatha Christie was considered middle class even though she had a live in maid and nanny, because she couldn't afford a car, because the cost of the car was the same as 5 years of salary for both workers.
Executioners in the past would often be paid by the people they were set to execute or their families. That payment included the cost of taking care of the body afterwards, and in many cases a fee for services as the alternative to an executioner was usually much more grim and painful, whereas a good executioner guaranteed a quicky and nearly painless death.
There's a fascinating video on YouTube by a channel called Weird History with more on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQqdoJ5rfT4
Since “maintained” workers earned half of “unmaintained” workers, we can extrapolate that the pay was approximately equal to the cost of food, fuel, and housing, which would point to discretionary income at a much higher rate vs basic costs of living than contemporary laborers.
Many other factors are involved of course, including services and automation which greatly increase quality of life while reducing the need of discretionary spending, and also the comparative wage hierarchy of textile workers, but it is an interesting comparison nonetheless.
• Prices and wages in Medieval England (2014) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29882389> 2022-01-10, 119 comments
• Medieval Price List <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21669787> 2019-12-01, 147 comments
• List of price of medieval items <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15680005> 2017-11-12, 48 comments
• List of prices of medieval items (2009) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11613093> 2016-05-03, 38 comments
https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-...
The word “rob” comes from a proto-indo-european root meaning to “tear” or “strip”, and has apparently been used in the modern sense of taking things by force for thousands of years, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic...
The word “robe” is the derivative word, originally meaning the spoils of robbery, e.g. a stolen garment. It has only meant a specific kind of long loose garment for hundreds of years.
The English words “rip”, “reave”, “bereave” also come from the same origin.
He is also not a software engineer or in tech in any meaningful way, so his 'tip to total income' ratio is probably off the chart compared to, say, me.
As an aside, now that everybody is asking for 'tips' of some sort, it is getting quite difficult to figure out for whom these tips are essential (i.e. him) and for whom they are just gratuities. I wish I had a good answer for this.
That's a good point. On twitter, I see very often people asking for money for a surgery, an accident, or just in general. I feel like I see this way more often than before, but I don't have any hard data to back this up. Just like you, I don't have any good answer to that.
Maybe your network is growing or, more realistically, the global pandemic we happen to be in is causing issues than normal. IMO, the answer to this would be voting for politicians who support a welfare system where an accident doesn't bankrupt you (regardless of things like employment status).
I think the issues funding open-source are very similar to the issues funding writing.
Not really comparably. Lots of externalities and some weird market distortions, sure. But still, we're an order of magnitude or two cheaper now at minimum. Especially if you are comparing day-to-day functional clothing, where it's more likely 3.
i.e. the GP has a valid point but it doesn't undermine OP article at all. I expanded a little.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4b/80/d6/4b80d65a7d8ebf737eed...
The actual input cost of fossil fuels is ~5 million times the market price based on the time-cost of formation.
See Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine", 2003.
Yes you can find “tragedy of the commons” and other concerns for modern production. Realize the tradeoffs, that ancient circumstances denied many benefits enjoyed today, that were we to subject workers today to those circumstances you’d be far more outraged.