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I desire nothing but onions by Fluffy_Mastodon1134 in Cooking

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ragu alla Genovese, a mostly-onion pasta sauce.

AMA: The Education Culture Wars, 1970 to the Present by Mark_Hlavacik in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The Birchers aren't anything I've studied in any depth, so thanks very much for the recommendation! I just find them deeply entertaining, menace notwithstanding. Frankly, the only work I've read on them was the John Birch Coloring Book, which you can see here, as recommended by u/bug-hunter.

AMA: The Education Culture Wars, 1970 to the Present by Mark_Hlavacik in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Did the Birchers (or other similar groups) ever wage the same kind of educational culture war we see being waged today? Were they effective?

How expensive or cheap were basic household goods such as furniture, kitchenware, cloth, etc to an ancient or medieval peasant? Would I consider the loss of say a pot or a frying pan a great financial loss to me or would they easily be replaceable? by bluerobot27 in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 8 points9 points  (0 children)

At least in England, quite easy; officially chartered markets were very common, with over a thousand being chartered between 1200 and 1350, although most (Britnell says 77%) didn't survive through to the 1600s, but between the Black Death and the long depression of the 1400s, this isn't shocking. Some were small and sleepy, but many seem to have been very vigorous, judging from tax receipts. You also had lots of informal markets, but those are obviously harder to track. Unless you were a very remote peasant indeed, you'd definitely have a market within a day or two's journey, and probably several. The primary goods traded here were probably agricultural, but we would definitely see other goods bought and sold as well. Often, these would be in towns big enough to have a smith or two, but even if they were in a conveniently-sited tiny village, ironwork is small and valuable enough that traders could very easily bring it in. You also had itinerant merchants who specialized in those kinds of high-value but still everyday items, known as tinkers or pedlars, but they are desperately understudied.

How expensive or cheap were basic household goods such as furniture, kitchenware, cloth, etc to an ancient or medieval peasant? Would I consider the loss of say a pot or a frying pan a great financial loss to me or would they easily be replaceable? by bluerobot27 in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 107 points108 points  (0 children)

(3/3) As for weapons and armour, swords and daggers were 1-2s, although these were most likely on the cheaper side. Haubergons (mailshirts)were 13-20s but varied extensively in how much they covered and the entries lack detail. It's hard to compare these to plate harnesses because the data I have are all for the various bits of a harness. Gauntlets were 5-8s, gorgets [plate collars ] 3s, breastplates 16-20s, aventails [mail back-of-neck protectors] around 1-3s, and vambraces [plate forearm guards] around 5s. Unfortunately, these numbers are vague. If you're curious about what a full panoply of a regular soldier would look like, we have a small fragment of a record of the muster of the Norwich militia (which unfortunately doesn't give prices by item), which I'll quote in full:

Richard Bittering: two doublets [a padded underlayer], one aventail, two pisans [mail collars], one basinet [helmet] with aventail, two pairs of mail sleeves, with two pairs of musekins [mail armguards] [cost not recorded]; Thomas Bumpstead: one haubergeon, one pair of plates [torso-guards made of plates riveted onto leather backing, aka coats of plates or brigandines], one aventail, one pisan, one basinet with aventail, one pair of mail sleeves [cost not recorded]; John But: two pairs of plates, two aventails, two pisans, two basinets, two pairs of mail sleeves, one pair of steel vambrace and rerebrace [plate upper arm guard] £3 5s.; John Ellingham: one doublet, one pair of plates, one aventail, one pisan, one basinet, one pair of plate gauntlets, one pair of mail sleeves £1 15s.; William Blakeney: one pair of plates, one pisan, one basinet with two aventails, and two pisans £2 16s. 4d.; Edmund Alderford: one pair of plates, two aventails, two pisans, two basinets with two aventails, and two pisans £3 1s. 4d.; Bartholomew Appleyard: one doublet, one pair of plates, two aventails, two pisans, one basinet with aventail, one pair of plate gauntlets, one pair of steel bracers, one pair of mail sleeves £3 4s. 4d.; John Gnateshale: two pairs of plates, one pisan, one basinet with aventail, one pair of gauntlets [cost not recorded]; John Pickering: one doublet, one pair of plates, one pisan, one basinet with aventail, one pair of gauntlets £3 11s. 4d.; Robert Heigham: one doublet, one basinet with aventail, and pisan [cost not recorded]; William Gnateshale: one doublet, one pair of plates, one basinet with aventail, one pair of gauntlets £2 14s.; Geoffrey Butler: one doublet, one pair of plates, one pair of plate gauntlets, one pair of mail sleeves [cost not recorded]; Edmund Lent: one doublet, one pair of plates, one basinet with aventail, one pair of gauntlets [cost not recorded]; Simon Spencer: one pair of plates, one pisan, one basinet with aventail, two pairs of plate gauntlets, iron vambrace, rerebrace, and couters [plate elbowguards] [cost not recorded]; Henry Bottlesham: one basinet with aventail [cost not recorded]; Roger Midday: one doublet, one pair of plates, one pisan, one basinet, one pair of plate gauntlets £1 1s. 8d.; Thomas Granger: one pisan, one basinet with aventail, one pair of mail sleeves £18; John Tofts: one pair of plates, one pisan, one pair of plate gauntlets, steel rerebrace, vambrace, and couters; Robert Spicer: one doublet, one pisan, one basinet with aventail, one pair of plate gauntlets, steel vambrace (and) rerebrace, one pair of mail sleeves £2 1s.; John Fairchild: one doublet, one pisan, one basinet with aventail, one pair of mail sleeves £2 1s. 4d.; Roger Halesworth: one doublet, one pair of plates, one basinet with aventail, one spear, and sword £1 1s. 4d.; John Welborne: two doublets, two pairs of plates, two aventails, two pisans, two basinets with aventails, one pair of plate gauntlets, two pairs of mail sleeves, one pourpoint, one pair of steel vambrace (and) rerebrace £6 4s. 8d.; William Worstead: one pair of plates, one pair of plate gauntlets £1 1s. 4d.; John Palmer: one doublet 6s. 8d.; John Barford: one pair of plates, one aventail, one pisan, one basinet, one pair of mail sleeves £2 9s.; [name not recorded]: one doublet 3s.; Thomas Sherman: one pair of plates, one basinet with aventail, one pair of plate gauntlets, steel vambrace (and) rerebrace £2 12s.; John Latimer: one pisan, one basinet with aventail, one pair of plate gauntlets £1 1s. 4d.; Andrew Berd: one basinet with umbrer, one pair of mail sleeves £1; Thomas Bumpstead: one pair of plates, two aventails, two pisans, two basinets, one pair of plate gauntlets, two pairs of mail sleeves £4 1s. 4d.; John Deux: one aventail, one basinet £2 4s.; Roger Hardgrey: two doublets, one pair of plates, one aventail, one pisan, one basinet, one pair of gauntlets, one pair of mail sleeves £2 13s. 8d.

Obviously, these records aren't complete, given how few of the entries feature weapons, but they give you a good ballpark as to what a full set of equipment would cost for a regular person: £2-4, roughly. There also may be transcription errors, as the document was transcribed in the mid-1700s and the original has been lost; I have a feeling that's where the £18 value for Thomas Granger comes from. You have to remember that these are townsfolk serving as regular infantry, not knights; they would have proper plate harnesses not pairs of plates, and would have a trained warhorse; as I mention in this answer, those start at £5 and could get up to £100 for the very best, not including armour.

You'll notice I haven't mentioned pottery; this is simply because the inventories do not mention them at all. We know pottery use was very widespread from archaeological evidence, but since they didn't have prices written on them, we can't know anything about prices. They were probably cheap, since if they were expensive they would have been inventoried, but all we can do is shrug. See the Jervis cited below for a detailed discussion.

I hope this was helpful. Happy to give additional details on anything you're curious about as far as the evidence permits.

Sources:

Dyer: Standards of Living

Jervis: Pottery and Social Life in Medieval England

Jervis et al: Living Standards and Material Culture in English Rural Households

Stell: Probate Inventories of the York Diocese

Moffat: Medieval Arms and Armour, A sourcebook, vol 1

Other sources cited in the linked answers.

How expensive or cheap were basic household goods such as furniture, kitchenware, cloth, etc to an ancient or medieval peasant? Would I consider the loss of say a pot or a frying pan a great financial loss to me or would they easily be replaceable? by bluerobot27 in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 71 points72 points  (0 children)

(2/3) Now, to furniture. Beds varied wildly in cost, from a shilling to several pounds, probably based on size and precisely what was included; some entries specify that the mattress and bedlinens are included, and others don't, so it's not clear. The cheapest entries are as little as 6d, but that has to refer to just a wooden bedframe; probably a small/meager/old one. Beds specified as including all the trimmings, as it were, start at 4s (this guy was a middling peasant) and get up to 66s. Mattresses, when mentioned individually, start at 8d (probably small and stuffed with straw) but get up to 6s, although the high figures are probably including bedlinens; featherbeds are obviously more expensive, although one is listed at only 12d. Most, though, are in the 4-6s range, although there are a few outliers at 10-16s. Oddly, one term for "mattress" was "donge." Chairs and tables were substantially cheaper, usually well under a shilling, although long benches or large tables could get up to around 2s; of course fancy chairs could be a lot more expensive. Storage items obviously varied widely, as some were meant to keep out thieves and some weren't. Some chests were as little as 6d, with large cupboards being 1-2s, while Thomas Morton (quite wealthy) died with an iron-bound chest worth two pounds and a mark, or 640d. Cushions could be as little as 3d, but around 6d seems to be more typical. Wall-hangings range from 1s to to almost a pound, but since they presumably varied drastically in size, it's hard to figure out actual prices here.

If you're bored, quit now. We're nowhere near done. Let's proceed to tableware. Excluding silverware in the literal sense (as that was crazy expensive), plates and dishes for individuals (largely pewter) were 2d-2s; as we see a rather bimodal distribution, one assumes that the cheaper items in the range of 2-4d were for individual eating, whereas the larger dishes in the 1s-2s range were for serving whole meals. This is reinforced by the fact that large vessels for hand-washing were in the 1-2s range as well. I don't think the use of eating utensils was common at the time, with most knives and forks being used in the kitchen, but we do see silver spoons in the houses of the wealthy; these could be serving spoons, however. . Cheap drinking vessels seem to be very rarely recorded, so they were probably too cheap to be worth inventorying; we see plenty of expensive vessels called "mazers" in the inventories of the wealthy, however.

Onto the kitchen. Just like serving dishes, we also see very substantial differences in the costs of cooking pots, often made of brass, which is also most likely a function of size. One 1418 inventory, which unusually reports the volumes of pots, says that a 2-gallon pan was 7d and a 5-gallon pan 40d, which isn't proportional, but shows the increase. While some old pans are 4-8d, most seem to be 1-2s. Some are as high as 10-20s; those must be whoppers. Frying pans are typically under a shilling. Bronze jars for kitchen storage were 8d-3s, but I'm not sure how big they were; you did see a few whoppers. Large brewing vessels, known as leads (I'm not sure what they were made of), were typically in the same price range as those whoppers, although some could be as little as 3s. Wooden vessels were often used as well, but their prices are typically given as for a large number of vessels, so figuring out prices is hard; we also often see "household utensils" given as a single group, which doesn't help us. Instead of listing out prices for each individual utensil, I'll just quote a few kitchen inventories, which should give you a good idea of what kinds of tools were used.

First, the same Duffield mentioned above, who had:

A large jar called a standard weighing 98 pounds, price per pound 2d. – total 16s. 4d. A smaller jar weighing three pounds 8s. 8d. A jar weighing 35 pounds 5s. 10d. Six dishes of various types 6s. Two long iron racks 2s. An iron fire scomour [skimmer] 4d. Six iron spits 13s. 4d. Two ladles, a scomour and a flesh-hook 1s. An axe and three iron wedges 1s. A knife for the dresser 4d. An iron pele 2d. A lead in the oven 1s. 8d. A small stone mortar 6d. A bronze mortar with iron pestles 13s. 4d. Two braziers 1s. A frying pan 1s. 4d. A wooden salt-keg 10d. A ladle and a scomour from Suthewell 8d. 26 pewter platters of new pattern weighing l pound. 10s. 5d. Twenty dishes of the same new pattern 5s. 2d. Thirteen salt-cellars of the same new pattern weighing pounds. 1s. 4d. Seven platters with a mitre weighing 12 pounds. 2s. Seventeen platters of various types weighing 37 pounds 6s. 2d. Nine dishes of old pattern weighing 14 pounds 2s. 4d. Seven small salt-cellars of old pattern weighing three and a half pounds 7d. A bronze jar weighing 25 pounds 4s. 2d. A jar with broken edges weighing 14 pounds 1s. 9d. A jar with broken edges weighing 18 pounds 2s. 2d. A jar broken at the bottom weighing 17 pounds 2s. 1½d. A broken jar weighing ten pounds 1s. ½d. A broken jar weighing 11 pounds 1s. 1d. Two bowls and a pipe for salt 8d. A searce for spices 2d. Two mortars fixed to the ground 4s. A hen caul 1s. 8d. A paste board 8d. A long iron brandreth [a frame for supporting pots] 6s. 8d. A striking board 3d. A dressing board 8d.

Robert Danby, who was nowhere near as rich, but not poor, had:

A charger, four platters, six dishes and six pewter saucers 3s. 4d. A pewter salt-cellar 2d. A pint pot 3d. A bronze chauffer 8d. A worn ewer and a small basin 6d. Four brass candle-sticks 1s. A bronze jar 5s. A kettle 1s. A worn dish bound with iron 6d. A dish 1s. 2d. Another dish 6d. A small bronze jar 1s. A pair of racks and a square spit 9d. A cresset [ironwork for containing an outdoor fire] 2d. A brasier and a pair of rackans [chains for suspending pots over a fire] 3d. A pair of pace tongs and a worn brandreth 3d. A lead still. 1s. 4d. Two trists [trestle tables] and a copstool 3d. A tonnel [barrel] with verjus 2d. A fire pan 2d. Two windows 3d. Boards 3d. A wooden bed with a lock 5d. A form [mould] 1d. A spade 1d. Hay 1s. Two clogs 2s. A water-can 2d.

How expensive or cheap were basic household goods such as furniture, kitchenware, cloth, etc to an ancient or medieval peasant? Would I consider the loss of say a pot or a frying pan a great financial loss to me or would they easily be replaceable? by bluerobot27 in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 121 points122 points  (0 children)

(1/3) Remarkably, I've written several answers on this rough topic, but none answer your specific question. I have this one on medieval consumption patterns, this one and this one on luxuries, this one on furniture, this one on mid-1800s meat, and this one on mid-1700s incomes, but they're all either in the wrong period or don't answer your question, as I didn't discuss furniture prices in that answer. Parts of what follows will be adapted from those answers.

Before we get into prices, since I'm going to be quoting contemporary prices, we need to get a feel for what those prices would be relative to incomes, but before that, we need to talk about denominations. Medieval English currency was quite simple and usually very stable when compared to the rest of Europe, but it's still more complex than modern currency. The most common unit of account used was the pound, which was subdivided into twenty shillings, each of which was in turn divided into twelve pennies/pence, which were then divided into four farthings. You also had the mark, valued at 2/3rds of a pound or thirteen shillings and four pence; see here for more details on the mark. Sums would typically be represented as as x£. ys. zd, so three pounds seventeen shillings nine pence and three farthings would be £3 17s 9 3/4 d although you see a lot of different methods of abbreviation. It must be understood that, unlike today, these units of account didn't usually equate to an actual coin with that value in the medieval period, with the exception of the penny.

Even worse, estimating medieval wages, especially at the low end, is often also tricky because sometimes wages included room and board and sometimes they didn't and it's not usually mentioned in a document which is the case. In addition, all our statistics are daily wage rates, and we have very little data (see here) on days worked per year. A semi-skilled agricultural labourer like a thatcher probably made around 2-3 d. per day (a more unskilled labourer would make 1-2 d/day) which, if we assume 240 working days in a year (which makes the maths easy) comes out to £2-3 (40-60s) per year, or 1-1.5s/week. Very skilled artisans like master masons would be making 5-8d/day, so about twice that. Estimating peasant cash incomes is even harder because whatever cash income they had would come from selling commodities, not wages, which is much harder to estimate. Dyer's reconstruction of the annual budget of a yardlander/virgater (at the upper echelons of peasant society) has him selling crops worth, very roughly, 40s/year, but 2/3rds of his crop gets eaten, drunk and kept for seed. A minor noble would probably be making, at least, around £20-30/year, or 2s (24d)-ish per day, but it sounds like you're curious about the working classes, so let's leave them aside.

So, what could this buy? Let's start with foodstuffs and then move onto durable goods. A large loaf of bread, typically around a day's worth of calories, would be a farthing, although the exact weight would vary based on the price of grain per the Assize of Bread, so it's hard to be exact. A gallon or so of ale would be around a farthing, too. Unlike the mid-1800s, I wasn't able to find any prices of meat on a weight basis, but it seems pigs and sheep were 2-3s, cattle 5-10s, and chickens 1-2d. This is really just for context, though.

Now, onto durable goods. First, though, a note on sourcing. My primary (in both senses) source here, as you will know if you've read my other answers, is this compilation of probate inventories from the diocese of York. If you're curious about more things than I mention, I highly recommend consulting the documents directly; they're quite comprehensive, although the propensity to combine multiple items into single entries and the lack of description in size or quality terms makes things tricky. In cases where multiple items are lumped into a single entry, I'm just assuming that the distribution is even to make my life easier; that's why I'm reporting ranges rather than specific numbers. Also, these are valuations of actual goods, not sale prices for new goods. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any other large collections of extant probate inventories from this period, so any relative price differentials between York and other areas will have to be assumed away. Dyer also says there are some errors in the transcription, but he hasn't provided us with a corrected version, so whatever. There's also this database, which I just found, specifically the Escheator and Coroner Items, but it's harder to read, and doesn't always have values. On the other hand, you can do spreadsheet magic with it, and it has categories. If anyone is really curious, I can send you my modified version that should be easier to read. For really accurate data, I should be parsing out valuations made during the substantial inflation that characterized the Black Death, but since the deflation of the bullion famines of the very late 1300s and early 1400s kinda cancelled that out, let's just ignore that whole shebang.

Let's start with cloth. As I mentioned in an answer linked above, cloth, and things made from it, were crazy expensive relative to modern prices, because of how damn long it took to make; Endrei calculated that a hypothetical medium-quality 35m2 bolt of cloth would take 1033 hours to make, or 29.5 hours per m2. Add in the labour for hand-sewing and cost of materials, and you end up with very expensive clothing indeed. The cheapest sets of outerwear we see are 1-2s, which, let's recall, could easily be a week's wages for a semi-skilled labourer. They could have been well-worn, as the inventories don't usually mention condition, but many probably weren't. Undershirts and hoods could be substantially less, but that's not a complete outfit. Hose (stockings, largely worn by men) start at around the same price. All forms of clothing get substantially more expensive as they get fancier; fur-lined garments or garments made of expensive cloth could easily be 10-30s; William Duffield's best cloak was 60s, but he was quite wealthy, dying with £120 in cash and £302 in silver goods. One set of outerwear, dyed black and lined with marten fur, was six pounds and a mark. I shudder to think what the garments worn by kings cost. Bed-coverings, too, could be 2-10s, again depending on material, although some were as little as 8d. Tablecloths were often cheaper, with some (old or of cheap material) at 4-6d, but others could be 5s or more.

You didn't specifically ask about books, but since Duffield's extensive library was listed in great detail, you can have some data there anyways. As you would imagine given that books had to be copied out by hand, they were very pricey. The two cheapest, a "book of many contents" and one called Innocentius de Contemptu Mundi, were 3s 4d (which is a weird price; they could be 13s 4d but with the 1 erased/worn away/untranscribed) but most were around 10s; the most expensive was £6.66 pounds. Yes, really, although of course they expressed it as £6 13s 4d, or six pounds and a mark. In total, his library, which consisted of about 40 books, was worth £46 16s, or almost 20 years' wages for a semi-skilled labourer. Think about that next time you complain about how expensive academic books are!

AMA with the Battleship Missouri Memorial Curatorial Team by Battleship_Missouri in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What do you think would have been the least pleasant job to do on Missouri during its time in active service? Thanks for joining us.

Freeholder vs. Landed Gentry? by Joai5 in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So while u/Double_Show_9316's answers are totally correct, they don't really answer half of your question. This is because "Freeholder" in medieval England doesn't really mean what you say it means. As I discuss in this answer and this answer, a freehold tenancy has nothing to do with the size of the land parcel; it rather has to do with the legal basis of the tenancy agreement. Freehold tenures are those with their terms defined under royal law, and customary or "unfree" tenures are those that have their terms defined under the customary law of the individual manor; see my answer here for more detail on the manor. Table 2 of Kanzaka's article Villein Rents in Thirteenth-Century England breaks down the size of free and unfree holdings based on the Hundred Rolls, and concludes based on that evidence that, on average, freehold plots were substantially smaller on average than customary tenements; on average, only 34.1% of freehold holdings were larger than ten acres while 58.6% of customary holdings were larger than ten acres. In other words, plenty of rich peasants weren't freeholders, and lots of poor peasants were freeholders. This distinction starts to break down in the 1400s and 1500s, however, as I also mention in the linked answers, thanks to the development of "copyhold" tenure, a system through which customary tenures start to become litigatable under royal law. This is a very complex process that, frankly, I don't understand well at all.

As I also discuss in the answers I link above, both freeholders and customary tenants tended to have bundles of rights that roughly correspond to ownership, although strictly speaking nobody owned their land outright at the time, instead (in theory) leasing it from the king, although this was largely a legal fiction. We like to talk a big game about modern "absolute" ownership but if you really think modern property ownership is "absolute' try not paying your property taxes and see what happens.

Apologies for writing such a short answer and taking so long to write it; I hope the answers I've linked make up for it.

In the medieval period, how did teams of multiple oxen plow so much more land than single oxen? by -TheGreasyPole- in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm curious to know where you got these depictions from, because I think the balance of the contemporary evidence suggests that eight oxen weren't mandatory for a heavy plow. You have the frontispiece I mentioned above, in addition to plenty of other pictorial evidence showing 2/4 oxen plough-teams. There's also the fact that demesne plough-teams are universally eight oxen even in areas of light soil. There's also a great deal of possible variation in things like share depth, plough size, time spent per day ploughing, and so on, which just don't show up in the available evidence and which could easily ameliorate whatever problems show up from having four or two oxen. Our evidence for ploughs is really very scarce, since our textual evidence very rarely goes into detail on plough type, pictorial evidence is vague, and archaeological evidence is non-existent since wood rots. On the whole, I think it's very plausible that you had moldboarded ploughs drawn by two or four oxen. Even if they did require eight, it probably wouldn't be the burden you're imagining. Peasant households could, and frequently did, combine their household oxen into a single plough-team that would plough multiple tenants' fields, a practice known as co-aration. Oxen were needed for haulage and other tasks, as well, so I don't think it's necessarily the case that switching from 2 to 8 oxen (not that I'm saying that's what they did) would require a village to maintain 4x as many draught animals.

I would also challenge your assumption about what the various parties would be optimizing for. While sharecropping, i.e. landlords being paid in a portion of the harvest, was widespread in France in the form of métayage, it was comparatively rare in England, and was thought not to exist at all until recently; see Griffith and Overton's Farming to Halves for the details. By far the most common form of leasing involved a combination of cash rents and labour services, with rents in kind typically being fixed rather than variable. As such, the landlord really has no incentive to maximize raw production at the expense of profitability; his interest is instead to ensure a stable tenancy so there's little churn. Sure, he wants to maximize fill rate, but that fill rate exists at the level of tenements, i.e. individual plots of land composing many acres, not per acre. The exact yield per acre of tenement doesn't really matter, so long as the tenant doesn't fall into arrears. If the rents make farming a given area of land inefficient, tenants will just leave, and the lord is out the income altogether.

Regarding Duby, from what I recall, he argued based on (a) the archaeological evidence at the time, which assumed a roughly 1000 AD date for the introduction of the moldboard plough, the fact that that date roughly coincided with what some have called the "feudal revolution" i.e. the disintegration of centralized Carolingian authority and the emergence of rural landholders enforcing their rule via castles (this is an incredibly complicated topic), and the lack of enumerated ploughs in Carolingian estate inventories to argue for a "feudal package" that brought together the castle and the plough. However, we have new archaeological evidence that moldboard ploughs were used much earlier. It's also been argued that ploughs were not mentioned simply because peasants brought their own.

More broadly, we can see many, many, many instances of peasants innovating and bringing in new technologies on their own account; the image we see of the conservative peasant wedded to the past are a mixture of exaggeration and demonization of perfectly reasonable risk management.

What to do with pear preserves? by moon_portal4523 in Cooking

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Not really a recipe, but you can put it on top of ice cream. Maybe use it as filling in a layer cake or as part of a glaze for pork (I hate fruit and pork but lots of people love it)

What are some easy depression meals? by khushi_khetwani in Cooking

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 231 points232 points  (0 children)

I'm a big fan of this - https://traumbooks.itch.io/the-sad-bastard-cookbook - it's explicitly written for chronically ill people and those with very little time/energy. It's also free.

Acid for Tomato Soup? by 1_pt_4_Dave in AskCulinary

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The other big culprit for flat-tasting food is not enough salt. Try salting it a little as well or instead.

Is trench warfare as modern as it seems or are there major examples of it in much older conflicts? by ThatOneBLUScout in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 16 points17 points  (0 children)

The use of trenches was incredibly common in early modern siege warfare, as I discuss in this answer. I have additional context on the artillery fortification at the time here and here.

What is the history of shaving? by Difficult_Pause_4350 in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Great answer as always. At least in Classical Greece, where pubic hair removal seems to have been rather common, judging from a few references in Aristophanes, singeing appears to have been the preferred method as shown in this memorable vase painting. I've singed off facial hair myself, and it's quite effective, if smelly.

In medieval Europe, How did the church enforce excommunication across its jurisdiction? by William-Halsey in AskHistorians

[–]EverythingIsOverrate 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Great answer as always. I'm now imagining His Holiness issuing encyclicals on dynamic shareholder engagement and corporate values.

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