Medieval Material Culture - Quality: Then vs Now

But they had bad stuff too. Hi guys, welcome back. I'm Ian LaSpina and today I want to make a point about quote-unquote lower quality items and how it's critically important that we differentiate what we mean by low quality in the present day reenactor market versus what we might call lesser quality or downscale historical objects. These two ideas might sound like they're the same thing on the surface or that I'm just playing a semantics game but if you're not careful about this it can quickly jump up and bite you in the butt while trying to develop a living history kit. Now as usual I fully appreciate that not everyone cares about trying to recreate the past with perfect historical accuracy. If authenticity is a concern and if you're playing the living history game that's kind of what you signed up for. This is particularly important but even the most rigorous living history enthusiasts make compromises and mistakes. It's not my aim to exclude people or shame people. You should be operating within the standards of the group you belong to or the events that you attend. But regardless of our goals it is important that we all strive to have the correct information as a common starting point so that when we inevitably do deviate from historical accuracy it comes not from a place of ignorance but rather as a carefully considered and informed decision to deviate in a way that makes sense for your goals. In an educational role starting with correct historical information as obvious ramifications we don't want to teach people things that aren't true. But even for people with a more passing interest or for those whose primary focus is on combat sports or even if you're a creative working in a fantasy setting having the correct information and a working knowledge of the real thing can only serve to better our overall understanding, improve our writing, make our artwork more believable, and even soup up your LARP kit if that's your thing. You really do have to know the rules not necessarily to break the rules but certainly to break the rules in a tasteful and believable way. So I'm going to talk about this under the assumption that our goal is to achieve a high level of historical fidelity but you can obviously scale this back as your needs and desires dictate. As we know the majority of medieval objects that survive to this day, the ones that you can go see in museums and read about in collection catalogs, are biased toward higher-end and more expensive artifacts. This is just a natural result of what people tend to preserve. The cheap stuff gets used until it's worn out, it gets recycled or repurposed if the materials are salvageable, and if not it simply gets discarded. But these more mundane objects made up the vast majority of what normal people actually used in their daily lives. Historical objects of lesser quality have an important place within reenactment and modern study. They give us a far more complete picture of the time period. Obviously not everyone in the past had access to custom tailored silk doublets and bespoke armors with decorative borders etched in the latest fashions. We just tend to know more about those things because that's what survives, that's what gets written about. But there were thriving second-hand markets for clothing and important centers for the production of lesser quality munitions grade armors that were literally turned out by the thousands. These are things that absolutely should be represented in good living history, so clearly we need to make sure we're reproducing this material culture as it was. But are cheap modern reenactment goods actually analogs for cheap historical objects? Unfortunately the answer is no more often than not, but the devil as always is in the details. I see this come up pretty frequently in some of the armor discussion groups. People will ask if one of those inexpensive mass-produced helmets you can buy on a bunch of the different resellers' websites are historical. Now some are certainly better than others, some are even usable with a little bit of work or as is. But unfortunately the most common answer is no, not really. The follow-up question or assertion that usually comes up next is, well medieval people had bad armor too, not everyone could afford custom pieces. And yes that's absolutely true, but what's critically important to understand is that the historical stuff is of lesser quality for entirely different reasons than why a lot of the modern reproductions are considered cheap, incorrect, or poorly built. There are a few different reasons why this might be the case. One of the biggest, especially in the armor world, is because a lot of the cheaper reproductions out there are not trying to replicate historically downscale armor. There are attempts at the high-end stuff that simply miss the mark. An affordable car like a Honda Civic is not a non-functional misshapen caricature of a high-end luxury sports car like a Ferrari, it's not trying to be something it isn't. Nor does it only come with three wheels or come without an engine, it's its own thing. The Civic and the Ferrari are both cars, yes, but they look, cost, and perform very differently. Cheap modern historical reproductions in this category are usually intending to be the Ferrari, but built in a way that the wheels are fall off as soon as you drive it off the lot. It ends up being neither the Ferrari or the Civic. A copy of the Kerberg 13 bassinet that won't fit anyone without serious modification or misses all of the critical shaping of the original, and invents completely new features or details that never even existed historically, or a 15th century gothic breastplate that's too flat to deflect blows or too tall to wear on any shape of human being, much less yours, because the person who made it doesn't understand how armor was intended to fit. These are not analogs for historical munitions-grade armors, they're not examples of something a levied infantryman down the social ladder might have had access to, or a piece a less wealthy esquire would have had to settle for, they're examples of improperly made modern armor. There's no way around that. Lesser quality objects of the past, like the more inexpensive utilitarian car of today, are their own thing. They are their own category of goods. They may not be super sexy with all the bells and whistles, the horsepower, and the refinement of the fancy stuff, hell, some of it can even be pretty ugly, but compared to the cheap modern pieces, the historical ones are ugly in different ways. They bear different errors and have different shapes, different corners were cut when that armorer in Nuremberg knew he had to push out 10 more sallets by the end of the week. They're ugly in all the right ways, and these objects deserve to be reproduced with the same care as their high-end counterparts. These are examples of lower-grade infantry breastplates from the armory in Kerberg, many of them now in Leeds. These are not high-end bespoke cuirasses worn by knightly cavalry, but they are still properly shaped breastplates that fit the body in the ways we expect. They have depth to them, they have compound curvature, they were made by competent armorsmiths who knew their craft. They're certainly not finely finished, they lack the expensive decoration of the finer pieces, they're not custom fit, but nor are they incompetently executed pieces of armor that don't fit anyone. They don't have the refined shape of a bespoke cuirass, the asymmetries are more visible, the curves are present but not as gracefully executed. I'm going to borrow a specific example from a lecture that Toby Capwell gave a number of years ago. There'll be a link in the description below to the full talk that I highly encourage people to check out after they're done here, but let's take a look at a series of sallets in the Wallace collection that he used to illustrate a progression of quality. This is A81 German from about 1490, and it's a fantastic example of the once commonplace but now incredibly rare surviving pieces of downscale historical armor. This piece belongs to a greater family of sallets collectively known as black sallets in reference to the relatively rough finish they were left with from the forge, and they commonly served as a piece of light cavalry armor. It basically came off the hammer just smoothish enough to be functional, but never met the grinding wheel or received a final polish. These last steps, the grinding and polish of an armor, were notoriously expensive and labor intensive and added significant cost to a finer helmet, and so it was a tremendous cost savings for a low quality piece like this to skip those steps. Some might say it's an ugly helmet compared to a more refined sallet, but it's ugly for the right reasons. It's ugly because a professional armorer was turning these out by the thousands and had to work quickly. He knew how to work it just enough to get a completely, albeit minimally, functional helmet without all the fuss of refinement. He didn't fret about the visor alignment being all out of whack because it worked enough. He didn't bother carefully hammering a roll around the edge of the helmet, and he left it plain because this was too time consuming for this grade of equipment. It's ugly for the right reasons, which to an armor geek makes it beautiful. The shape is essentially a nicer sallet in its earlier stages of being worked. You can imagine that as you start to form a good sallet out of a blank, you will pass through this very shape on your way to creating that higher end piece. This is A79, another German sallet from about 1480. We're still not quite to high end, but we can see how the shape and finish have been further refined. It has an edge roll around the hem, but it was done quickly. It's not even, but it's functional. The overall volume of the helmet has been worked down to be much more closely fit to the head, but it's still not quite there. Finally, we have A80, a very fine example of a German sallet from 1490. The roller on the front was a later modification to convert the helmet for use in But now you can see that striking, refined silhouette that we associate with a high-end sallet. The metal has been ground and polished smooth and bright. The armorer has had time to dial in the shape and achieve a nice close fit. The roll around the hem is straight and even, and incised accents have been added around the sights and crest. This is how quality varied in the context of historical armor. The first example is not an amateur attempt at the third. They differ in important ways and each suited its respective market. Another contributor to this split between modern and historical low quality is the simple fact that certain processes are just easier for us to do now, and so we take them for granted and they are being done on modern cheap goods when they would have been entirely inappropriate for historically cheap goods. A common example of this is achieving a smooth, uniform finish and a bright polish on a piece of using modern tools and machines. It's much faster and cheaper for us to do than it was 500 years ago. Historically, a final grind and polish, like we said before, was a very costly and labor-intensive process and so its very presence on armor would denote high quality and expense on its own. So if you're reproducing a cheap piece of equipment that was supposed to belong to a peasant levy and it's brightly polished, it doesn't make much sense in a historical context even though it's simple for a modern mass producer to accomplish. You also have to be careful not to go overboard. Sometimes we make the opposite assumption. It's easy to get carried away and end up trying to make something look so low quality that you end up with a piece, in the case of metalwork, that is so pitted, so rough, that you've swung right past the mark and ended up with something that even in a historical context would be considered of unacceptable quality. Is there a possibility that absolutely horrendous armor was being turned out by some shop and people had no other choice? Yes, it is, but without good evidence it would be difficult to replicate that with any level of fidelity and since that's our goal, it can be counterproductive to venture too far from what we can document. These concepts obviously also apply well outside of the realm of armor and extend to every facet of medieval material culture. Take clothing, for example. A gown of historically low quality or one that was acquired second hand in a historical context may not give you the custom tailored fit of a noble's bespoke garment, but it was still made like a historical gown using historical techniques and perhaps pieced together from offcuts to achieve a final shape and a color that was achievable in inexpensive dye stuffs or the result of being the final dip in the dye bath. A modern low quality shirt, on the other hand, may be low quality because it's constructed inexpensively in a way that has nothing to do with historical garment construction. Its pattern may be altered for expediency in a way that we just don't have evidence for or it's made from materials that alter the very function of the garment and in a color that was simply not available to a person of low station or perhaps not even achievable at all in the period. So it's not replicating the inexpensive clothing available to someone on the lower rungs of the medieval social ladder, it's entirely its own very modern thing. Now this doesn't mean that every good quality historical reproduction has to be outrageously expensive in modern money, but it does mean that we need to pay careful attention to reproduce the specific properties and characteristics that make it authentically downscale in the first place. We need to be very careful not to fall for assumptions that are not supported by evidence. When we start to say things like, well I'm sure they had x y or z or we rationalize things by saying well we don't know that they didn't do this, even though we have real good reason to think that they did other than our personal desires, we risk starting to get into the realm of trying to force the facts to fit those desires rather than basing our conclusions on the available evidence. If your goal is to build a good quality living history kit representing a common soldier, your time is much more constructively spent looking for fewer well-crafted reproductions of lower end or common objects that pay attention to those historical details than it is spending your hard-earned money collecting lots of cheaply made imitations of high-end objects. This can be and often is very intimidating for the newcomer. It's a lot to learn, a lot to take in, but patience is a virtue in this hobby and there are a lot of people willing to help. And a big part of it is enjoying the journey, learning new skills and continually improving. It's every bit as much about the process as it is about the final product, which as we all know is never final. This doesn't mean there's zero market for cheap modern reenactment goods or armor reproductions or that you're a bad person if you use them. You just need to go into it with the understanding of knowing what it is you're actually getting, what the limitations might be for your purposes, and why these things differ from even superficially equivalent low-cost items of the past. You only get into trouble when you try to rationalize that Depending on circumstances, these products can offer an entry point into the hobby, a way for people to get their feet wet and start attending events. But at the same time, it's important to weigh out the benefits of whether investing in something you know you'll have to replace is worth it for your specific needs. If you're joining a group, there may be more resources available to you in the form of loaner gear or other people who can help you necessary skills or even make things for you to help get you started. But that's not always realistic. Do what you need to do in order to enjoy your study of the middle ages, but always strive to stay intellectually honest and start with the right information. Anyway, something to think about. Guys, thank you as always for watching. Thank you especially to my generous patrons on Patreon. I hope you guys all enjoyed the video. All the social media stuff is available below. Like, subscribe, share, all that if you want. I look forward to seeing you in the next one. Until then, thanks for watching. Bye.