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Comment by codezero | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, there is a huge dearth in the day to day lives of average people throughout history.

This sounds really stupid, but I am still generally vexed as to how people, say, 500 or a thousand years ago managed to get their first outfit.

If you're barely scraping by a living, how can you afford hand made items like clothing, which requires precious natural resources and time to create. Those outfits must have had to last a very long time as well, what did they look like, what was the total flow of the transaction?

How did the weaver get the raw materials? Was it all exchange based? I'll make you a shirt if you give me enough material to make two?

Considering a lot of people didn't own the land or crops they farmed, how did the workers get the money or raw materials to obtain something as simple as a shirt, especially if they were, say, 8 years old.

Anyhow, I'm rambling a bit. It's really easy to take for granted a simple thing like your shirt :)

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Making & mending clothing, fashioning tools, etc... that was part of barely scraping by a living. In many climates clothing was necessary to survive.

This is also part of why people worked 16+ hours per day. Washing clothes, mending tools, caring for animals, washing dishes, cleaning the house, ... washing machines, dishwashers, electric ovens, all these labor-saving devices are the big difference between subsistence families with no time, and you today with lots of time.

Originally you did it all yourself. You have a sheep; you shear it, your wife spins it to thread and knits, your children help along the way.

This, by the way, is really where the family unit comes from. Running a household plus making a living used to be a full-time job for several people.

Then, yes, the weaver appears. Maybe the weaver is a shepherd. I have wool; I'll make you a shirt if you give me enough potatoes and cabbage to eat for a week.

The freedom to not grow/gather your own food is how the trades came about.

To my understanding, at least.

My mom told me how her grandma used to cut flax and then leave it in a marsh where it would rot/decompose and make the fibers easier to process. Then from fibers would be threshed (I think that's how it is called) and spun into a string. String was somehow processed into fabric (sorry don't know how). Well clothing and carpes were sown out oit.

Anyway to kind of answer your question this wasn't the middle ages and it was you know 1800s or so. And the process could be done almost all manually.

Also the way it was desribed some people from the village knew how to do some things better than others and they would barter or work together in groups. So maybe those that knew how to spin fibers would exchange it for milk or grains and so on. So yet, it was a lot of work. People maybe had a few outfits but didn't have walk in closets full of clothes. Pillows, carpets, bed sheets were prized posession would last for a long time, being patched and repaired of course.

People didn't just abandon their children (which I don't think is a revelation, just saying it conversationally).

Knitting and animal skins are both pretty well known as ways of obtaining cloth (or skin as it were), and getting skins wasn't such a big deal in times when there was no one saying that all the animals belonged to him.

I think it is less well understood how straightforward felting is; still not necessarily fun, but available to many people in an agrarian society. Also, we don't see weaving every day anymore, but a loom can be a very simple thing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:VerticalLoom.JPG

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp-weighted_loom

(Simple especially in the materials necessary, I guess I wouldn't want to promise to build you one tomorrow)

Yeah, I still think that it takes resources and I'm interested in that complete economy.

As for hunting, in the UK as early as 1200AD, peasants couldn't hunt on much of the land, the largest game they could hunt was probably not enough to provide much in the way of skins. Of course, the UK isn't the whole world, so this doesn't apply universally, but it's still an issue that plays into it I think. It's also really hard to bring down animals like deer, even if you have a bow and arrow. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_hunting

This is the kind of stuff that fascinates me though, that loom looks simple, but could you just go out in the woods and get all the components with your every day, 1000 year ago equipment? Maybe, but still, that takes some time, resources and knowledge. Then once you have the darn thing, how do you even make clothes! I guess you just make a big square and cut holes in it? Either way, all of this really fascinates me.

UK (or England in 1200) was definitely a wool-based economy, leaving us the Wool Churches (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wool_church) and the Woolsack still sitting in the House of Commons.

how do you even make clothes

Tailoring is a thing. You'd learn patterns in your apprenticeship, then tailor to the body of the person who will be wearing it. Basic outlines would be marked in your workbench for daily use, but obviously the exact size needs to be adjusted.

Thanks for that link! I also kind of wonder what the non-tailor traded that tailor for their garments, and where the tailor got their tools/equipment/raw material, the whole shebang, so to speak.

As others have said, back then, everyone worked as much as possible just to get by, so I guess if you weren't a tailor, you were X, so there was something you could offer to exchange.

The economy of the Middle Ages has been studied (here, for example: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~mkohn/orgins.html), and it had one distinguishing feature: there was no small coinage; the smallest denomination that people would generally accept was a day's wage.

One can guess how people dealt with this: they extended credit to each other. A village's general store served as its bank. Tools and workmen's boots had to be ultra-reliable. In generally, the economy back then looked surprisingly modern (Cicero talks about letters of credit in his letters, the risk in long-distance trade was spread by buying shares in a voyage), the only thing that was missing was advertising.

Having studied historical advertising, there was plenty of it, all the way back to egyptians in xxxx bc.

Could you share any examples? I'm really interested in this.

Was credit something extended to peasants though? It seems like that would mainly apply to people with some wealth or assets to back the credit up. I'm mostly interested in the complete bottom of the rung of society and how they managed in those environments.

I'm not a historian, but the bottom class seems toke a lot of debt. That's a common way for a free man to become a slave. Also, debt relieve (or the lack of) was always a big reason for mass movements or riots. As for peasants, I'm not sure about Europe, but in China they are one of the biggest client group. They would take out loans in planting season and pay it back in harvest. The standardization of these loans' terms and making it a government monopoly is a big part of Wang Anshi's[1] reform.

[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Anshi

It would be more an extended-family or small social scene kind of credit. You know Bob. Every week he buys ale from you. Some weeks he doesn't have cash on the nail. So you let him pay next week. It's not like he's going to run off and you know where he lives. This is a kind of credit, although with bookkeeping no more complicated than a slate (hence the "clean slate" idiom).

It wasn't 500 years ago, but homesteaders similarly had to make from scratch most of what they wore, and used, and ate. I've been reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder books with my daughter, and Wilder goes into quite a bit of detail about all the very many things her family had to be able to do themselves, using only raw materials.

In general, everyone in the family is absolutely always working, and they all have a wealth of craft knowledge which had been passed down through the family. Extended families and neighbors work together when many hands are needed. They're kid's books, but really interesting nonetheless.

http://www.reddit.com/r/askhistorians is a highly moderated (i.e.: nothing like most of Reddit) subreddit that has a lot of historians happy to answer random questions about anything that happened more than 20 years ago.

I can't find it at the moment, but there was someone who as a research project handmade a linen shirt with medieval techniques, accounted for the hours of time taken, and multiplied by the modern minimum wage, to get a figure of about $3000.

especially if they were, say, 8 years old

From your family?

The extended family was far more an economic unit of organisation than it is in the modern west. It would be understood that your family should feed and clothe you somehow, with whatever assets they had, and in return you laboured in the family trade; generally outdoors / heavy manual for men, indoors / light manual for women. Clothing repair (darning) would be an important part of that.

Textile production would be specialised/industrialised even in the 1200s: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=42274 . That implies a normal commercial flow with working credit of some sort, based around bills of exchange. Note that it was even internationalised at this date, trading from England to Holland and Italy.

Have a look at e.g. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=z-uYTzxRUUcC&printsec=fro...

This page discusses some of those aspects of Viking clothing:

http://www.hurstwic.com/history/articles/daily_living/text/c...

Wow, this is amazing, thanks for sharing. I read the whole thing, lots of really interesting insights. I particularly liked the end bit:

Clothing was a sign of hospitality. Any family which could afford spare clothing would certainly keep warm, dry clothing on hand for travelers. In the wet, cold Northern climates, few things would be more welcome to an arriving traveler than a set of dry clothing.

If you were 8 and needed a shirt you got it from someone who outgrew it. People shared items quite a bit.

The poorer you were the worse your clothing, i.e. handed down more times. If nothing else you could piece together rags.

Yeah, this still is really interesting, who gives the kid their shirt? I guess their immediate family, but then again, how long can a shirt last? Now that person needs a new shirt. Piecing together rags makes sense, still, you need to have a collection of rags and some way to stitch pieces together, all of these are resources that seem like they readily available, but that's because I don't know what was readily available :)

Kids don't stay the same size for long, and clothing, shoes, and so on can be mended. You also had a larger pool of local resources to draw on than just the immediate family. (Nothing was thrown away until it couldn't be used for anything else.) The concept of hand-me-downs (and darned socks, for that matter) was ordinary when I was a young child, and while I may not be young by many people's standards, I don't quite go back to the late medieval. Depending on the article of clothing, going through three or four kids would be pretty normal. (Knee patches were pretty common on "play clothes", and there was a difference between your school clothes and your play clothes. If dungarees were involved, you actually wanted to be the second or third in line so you could bend your knees without much effort.) By the time I was entering my teens, those habits were pretty much restricted to infant clothing.

Probably with a loom something like this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oewvqPF9JU

There are still villages in remote areas, e.g. Himalayas, where weather and location mean you have to pretty self-sufficient. As others have said, if you have sheep or goats you have the natural resources, add some women (not trying to be sexist, this is just based on observation) to do the weaving, and bam, outfit.

I find codezero's lack of historical perspective rather uninformed and somewhat naïve.

"how can you afford..." People at the time didn't always have the money (or trade goods) and some lived in squalor (not all food/shelter/clothing needs met).

"hand made items like clothing..." Everything was handmade, so it was the norm. A shirt would be essentially worth the food required during the time it took you or the village weaver/tailor to make it. Fine clothes, such as those worn by nobles were notoriously expensive, often with a person's wardrobe being worth half of their entire estate (including land and buildings).

"which requires precious natural resources..." Many resources were more bountiful at the time, with more open areas and less population. Commons and wilderness closer by gave resources for the time to gather them.

"and time to create..." People had more time, without modern leisure pursuits. When you eat the subsistence level, you spend whatever time it takes to meet your needs (food, shelter, fuel, clothing).

But all these details were dependent on the time and place you're interested in. Feudal Europe had peasants living in squalor while the nobles controlled the land/resources and got rich off peasant labor. In places like the Pacific Northwest of North America, the salmon run was so abundant and nutritious that food was not lacking and I imagine people had time to hunt for furs and sew them into clothing before winter, as well as develop other arts and crafts.

> I find codezero's lack of historical perspective rather uninformed and somewhat naïve.

When someone admits that they don't understand something, it's generally considered gauche to insult them for it.

But how else are we to feel superior to others?

Fair enough, I was thinking I was being a bit harsh. And I applaud someone who wants to delve in to a realistic analysis of history. Yet...

I just couldn't help notice a disconnect. It would be like me asking on HN why, if tech salaries in SF are so high, why aren't all tech workers living like millionaires in the city. Anyone who's been to SF knows the situation, and anyone on HN must've heard about it. And I am writing about the tech industry on the Internet, so I could quickly google the topic and read some interesting analysis.

But I suppose it's taken me years of curiosity driven reading, and also some detachment and travel to other cultures to start to form a picture of how people may have lived. So I apologize for being rude.

I remain fascinated by the idea that humans have been "modern" (with the same and complete facilities for learning, reasoning, and complexity) for 10,000 years, perhaps even 50,000. They may not have had metal, they may not have had writing, but they had societies and intellectual lives just as complex as ours. They were not sitting around a campfire grunting, they were laughing, worshipping, making art, scheming, fighting, romancing, and surviving in many ways just like we do. I always think that a clan leader from the Stone Age would totally understand office politics.

I'd love more perspective. If you have any good sources that I can read on the subject, let me know. Like I said above and in other comments, I'm most interested in the entire system that revolved around something as simple as getting a shirt, or garment, from raw materials of the garment to the materials of the tools used to weave the raw materials, to the tools needed to build the tools used to weave the... etc... it's really interesting and obviously since I didn't live back then and don't have access to any personal accounts of medieval peasants, I'm intensely curious about any information you have!

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