On thoughts about medieval camp beds

A medieval bunny-pelt cushion needs a good medieval bed to go with. Now I have been thinking about this a lot recently, because I intend to create a mid-Medieval German-Slavic camping equipment that would also be suitable for Viking camps. In addition, I don't want it to be too heavy-weight, but at the same time can't reckon on setting up a bracken bed on every camp-site. To my knowledge, two extremes are fairly well documented or reckoned on:

1. Beds made of solid wooden boards. These can mostly be (dis-)assembled in few minutes (the two of us took 5-10 minutes for the last bed I set up) but involve a lot of heavy and long wood. The finds and depictions I associate with these beds also usually involve quite well-to-be people, so I don't know how representative these are for normal travelling people
2. It is much more likely that normal travelling people took their pelts and blankets and built a bed from bracken and undergrowth, covered it with pelts, stretched their tentplane above that and slept just between those. Now as mentioned I don't think I can source this everywhere.

Basically this thought prompted me to look at finds and more modern versions and collect thoughts on these.

Restrictions:

• lightweight and compactable, but self-contained
• contains no metal
• can be styled for 12th century German/slavic and 10th century viking
• function over style

As mentioned above, the heavy version of a travel-bed is all-wood. Finds of this type of bed are e.g. the Oseberg Bed (and there are Variants of the Oseberg Bed in modern reconstruction) and the Gokstad bed, as reviewed in this good overview of sources on Oseberg and Gokstad beds. These beds have in common that the sleeper is held aloft through wooden slats that presumably a straw-filled mattress or other bedding lay on. This also seems to be the fashion for contemporary bedroom-beds in Germany (and also later depictions), so travelling with this is basically equivalent to taking your modern bedroom-bed with you - you wouldn't really do this unless you were royalty. Sidenote: Kings in the later Middle Ages and even later often took their entire bedroom with them because they would travel throughout their realm to maintain their power.

Image of the Oseberg Bed

The next type of bed that I looked at are rope-beds. I am not aware of any rope-bed finds for the groups and periods mentioned, but it seems not unreasonable as rope-beds have been used in all sorts of regions and periods of the world, from the mentions in the Odysse (which mentions a rope-woven bed - link) through high medieval/Renaissance Europe (British rope bed from the 16th Century to modern-day South-Asia (called Charpai). So why not?

A friend of mine built a rope bed and realized that the wood that you brace your rope against needs to be quite solid for the bed to not gently sag with time. Admittedly, he did build an extra-wide full-length bed, which is definitely not optimal in the distribution of the pressure. However a rope-bed definitely seems to need at least two very stable full-length poles or boards as the sides. Ideally I want to get around using full-length sides but make them collapsible. So I would need to spread out tension as evenly as possible and maybe be able to support the joins additionally.

Based on this thought I found a third area of bed constructions that I do not know any finds from 1000 years ago for: beds based on stretched canvas. Maybe cotton canvas is best suited for this type of bed, though I would expect linen to work reasonably well. Wool would be a nightmare, if not selected, spun and woven exactly for this intent I would expect wool to be far too elastic.

Canvas beds suitable for camping especially arise in the context of military campaigns. The most interesting concepts I came across are the following three:

WW2 army field cots, found here.

Marcy field cot, found here.

Safari daybed image, cropped, from this source.

1. Second world war field cots are a cool start, they consist mainly of wood and canvas and you can clearly see the principle of using stretched canvas as the lying surface. However the hinges and corners are metal and I cannot see an easy way to substitute them.
   
   
   
   
   
2.  The Marcy field cot is described in a quite interesting book called "The Pairie Traveller". Though modern replicas often use metal hinge and this depiction has the canvas nailed down, these details are easy to substitute through wood pegs for the hinges and sewing a loop instead of nailing down the canvas.
   
   
3. Finally, we have the Safari daybed. This is a modern Scandinavian design that uses the ancient tensioning mechanism of a medieval bow saw. While I love the mechanism in it's elegance I think industrially cut wood helps, as I expect the fit needs to be just right for the legs not to tip.

There are various other forms of canvas field beds that I did not mention, I only listed the ones I find most interesting. Of these, I find the Marcy field cot and the Safari daybed most intriguing, so I sketched out component 'lists' for these.

Honourable mentions: it is definitely worth mentioning this awesome slatted bed-in-a-box concept, though I avoid it because of the metal.

On ikea-hacking a workstation

Yes, I have decided that's a verb.

Fascinatingly, both German and French Wikipedia actually have articles on IKEA-hacks, while the English ones do not. French Wikipedia even explicitely states that it's a neologism.

Ikea hacks involve creating new items out of Ikea furniture. I do not fully condone buying vast amounts of Ikea's furniture - here's quite a comprehensive analysis of Ikea's sustainability - however I do fully condone reusing and passing on furniture as far as somehow possible. And then, if the furniture starts falling apart, reusing the remaining material.

So as we recently moved and no longer needed our overhead storage units from the old kitchen, I decided to create the furniture we did need - a work station with storage capacities - from these old cupboards. This does not follow any instructions, only trying out and screwing together.

Sadly I don't have any pictures of the cupboars in their original position... but I will try to link all individual components as closely as I can find them. I used:

• two 60x80cm hanging cupboards, like these
• one 40x80cm hanging cupboard, like this
• one beech-board measuring 40x120cm, like this
• eight 10cm high furniture feet, like this
• two large and one small brass handle which I have had for 9 years and bought from a store that was shutting down... I really don`t know where to find these, however hardware stores should have similar things
• about 8 self-cutting wood screws

Basically the steps are

1. assemble cupboards
2. attach feet to the bottoms of the two 60x80 cupboards
3. screw these to each other with two screws
4. attach 40x80 cupboard to the top with two screws
5. screw on beech board (screwing up from within the cupboard, to avoid the screw showing on the top) using 4 screws
6. attach handles
7. you're done

We set it up to use it for printer, scanner and shredder, to be able to place a laptop on the surface and access the devices immediately. The top cupboard contains stationary, printer paper, etc, while the lower cupboards serve as archive. I am quite happy with the final result and once we grow tired of it we can simply take it apart again. The holes are small enough to close up with wood-filler, the feet are set such that we can use the bottom cupboards as individual cupboards... I think there's so much more potential in these items that I intend to give them a long and fulfilling life as part of our furniture.

On a bunny pelt cushion

In Ribe I was tempted by rabbit pelts and after a friend spent a night sleeping on hers I decided I needed a pelt cushion. Not exaggerating, I did not want the entire cover to be pelt, but only the patch my head actually lies on. So my train trip back was spent sewing a linen cushion and attaching the pelt.

My initial instinct was to make a neck-roll, as that seemed a good shape and size to wrap the rabbit around. It took me until I finished it to realize that I sleep on my belly and hate high cushions. A neck roll was the maximally most inconvenient shape for me. So I took it apart again and made a little rectangular cushion with small filling instead.

So here goes my rabbit cushion, waiting for a medieval bed!

On painting a viking church

Ribe was a viking market place and trade town before it became the idyllic Danish coastal tourist town that it is now. It also is one of several possible sites where Ansgar built the first Christian church in Viking Scandinavia. Hence Ribe Vikingecenter, a wonderful reproduction museum of Viking age Ribe, built a replica.

Two years ago I first went on re-enactor camp in the market place of Ribe Vikingecenter. At this point in time the museum was constructing the church and we helped on the construction site - I will try to write a post about that at some point. Anyhow, it was finished end of 2017 and consecrated in spring 2018. So when we returned in summer 2018 the church was fully functional, however all the wonderful wooden carvings on the carrying pillars and framing the roof were still natural, only the edging of the A-shaped frames were coloured.

Ansgar's church just before it's consecration. This image is taken from the Ribe local newspaper "Ryk ind Ribe".

However Trine had started painting the pillars, so we joined in an helped there. 
A short note on Trine: she is one of the people who form the heart and soul of Ribe Vikingecenter and she is an artist. Among other things she designed the carvings themselves and she is now doing the vast majority of the painting and deciding on all the colours and mixing all the paints.

The colours are all earth-based pigments, except for black which is charcoal. They are made into tempera paints, however I will let Trine explain for herself in this video (she speaks Danish, but the English subtitles of the video are very good).
The pigments used on the outside of the church are:

• Yellow: Ochre
• Red:  Red Ochre (does not have it's own Wikipedia article)
• Green: Green Earth (substitute for the poisonous Verdigris)
• White: Titanium white (substitute for the poisonous Lead White)
• Black: Charcoal

The resulting paint is viscous but pleasant to paint and I was surprised how pigmented it was and how well it covered the wood underneath. The texture reminded me of acrylic paints.

Adapted from
Ribe Vikingecenter's official facebook page
(Adaptation: cover faces)

In 2018 I actually didn't actively paint, I took over making glass beads from Trine so she could paint, but this year I got to paint a little. However 2018 was exciting, because the Danish queen was due to visit two weeks after our stay ended and Trine wanted as much of the church painted as possible. Especially one member of our camp spent several days carefully framing the column elements in black - he even made it into the Vikingecenter's official picture series.

Now at this time Trine was urgently trying to make progress because in two weeks the queen of denmark was going to visit and she wanted to have all columns in standing height painted - at least as far as possible. So she was especially greatful for help and they actually made considerable progress. At least on one side most columns were painted with at least two or three columns for the visit of the queen.

This image from the Esbjerg newspaper is proof that the Danish queen really did come to visit.

Also from
Ribe Vikingecenter's official facebook page

This year, some of the painting was done on scaffolding, some of it on ladders, however there was still plenty of painting to be done - and as another camp member was able to take over making the glass beads for both Trine and I we could both paint - I got to do some painting too! I ended up painting green and black on three seperate columns, though admittedly I did not cover large survaces. As I only was able to paint for one day the progress I could realistically make was limited. and I don't have any images of me painting or the status afterwards... However the last image shows as close to the current status as I could find online. Do you see the column in the middle that has the red and yellow knots on black pattern, but the black stops halfway up the column? I filled in some of the black that is missing in this image. That's as close as this post will get to describing what exactly I did. But who cares (except for me, I will visit next year and in my thoughts point and think 'I did that bit!').

On sheathing my tools

For quite a while I have been accumulating sharp tools - various gauges, axes, knives, scissors, etc. Recently, while looking after children who were crafting, I realized that handing a child a very sharp carving axe without blade cover is probably not wise. So when suitable scraps of high-quality vegetable-tanned leather appeared and I was able to borrow leather-working tools from a friend, I went on a sheathing-frenzy and got all tools that I carry around on a regular basis sheathed.

As you can see, I also made a tool-rollup for my smaller knives an gauges.

To make the sheaths last, I used following basic principle: never rest a blade on a seam. All blades must rest on leather. My leather was quite thin and flexible for sheath-leather, so I chose to bend the leather around the blade. For thicker leather I would have added a third layer of leather in the blade-seam, so the blade rests on the side of this third (middle) layer.

For straight blades, bending the leather around the blade is easy (see e.g. third item from the left in the tool-roll, a knife with the straight blade lying to the left). For curved blades such as the axe I had one layer of leather on each side of the blade and then folded a narrow strip lengthwise along the blade and sewed to each side-piece, following the curve. The scissor-sheath is just one piece wrapped around with edges sewn together.

Formalities:

• Tools sheaths: hole-punching awl, leather sewing needles, fire lighter (to melt ends of synthetic leather thread)
• Tools tool-roll: normal sewing needle, leather strip cutter (for strip around tool roll)
• Materials sheaths: scrap leather, leather sewing thread
• Materials tool-roll: linen fabric, scrap leather, linen yarn
• Time: each sheath 15-45 mins (carving knife vs. axe), tool roll maybe 1.5 hrs

On making a wooden bowl

Woodworking is not traditionally my area of expertise. I know some properties of different types of wood and have done a little work with wood, but I have done very few large projects, especially not from the raw tree. So it's about time I dipped my toes in.

"My" museum village is directly next to a wood-disposal area, where material of publicly cut trees is stored to then be shredded and sold on as biogas-material, mulch or compostable material. If trees are cut down - especially after a heavy wind - then this disposal unit also has the tree trunks. However they are not keen on trunks, as they need to get heavy machinery in to process the large diameters. We, on the other hand, are interested in large diameter wood that is not yet broken down, as it allows us to process it to our needs - which are not standard.

At recommendation of people who know their way around wood we picked up a freshly cut birch trunk with 30cm diameter and just about 2m length three weeks ago. It probably had only been cut about 2 days prior. I was told that this was suitable wood for bowls. So I split it, using wedges (sorry, no images), then we sawed out pices of suitable length. At the advice of people who know wood, I split off another 2cm from the middle, to get the heart wood out (apparently birch is very prone to cracking when drying if the heart-wood is left in). I also chopped off the bark using an axe, just to avoid having to carry too much wood around.



Once at home, I hollowed out the middle, initially using a gauge inteded for spoons (i.e. small diameter curvature) and later using a larger gauge. This process took two evenings and was made much easier through the fact that the wood was still fresh. I did initially leave the wood in water when I was not working on it, but then it started to develop dark marks on the cut sides, which I interpreted as the beginning of mould so I stopped soaking.

Once the bowl was hollowed out I used a small carving-axe to give the outside it's rough shape. This worked astonishingly well and I am really quite happy with my progress using an axe - especially this axe, which is my carving axe "Wölfchen" (little wolf - hence the handle carving) and my favourite.

Once rough-carved I smoothed it out using a knife. The shape is loosely based on other wooden bowls I've seen but not directly on a specific finding. Basically it's a round bowl with a little handle on each side. The rough-carved form of the handle - as you can see in the image - has a continuous slope from the rounding of the bowl to the furthest out part of the handle. Handling the bowl, I found this shape to be inconvenient as it did not give me a secure hold when holding only one handle. So I ended up adding a groove on the bottom of each handle for the last two joints of my index finger to rest in and on the top of the handle I added a divet for my thumb. This shape gives me perfect leverage to hold a full bowl with one hand holding one handle.

The carvings on the top of the handles are loosely based on carvings on the handle of a slavic wooden spoon found in Groß Raden.

In general I am really happy with the bowl, however I did learn one major lesson for next time: When splitting the trunk it did not split perfectly and so there was a crack in a part of the trunk. The chunk I used was off the end of the trunk and sadly the crack ended up in my bowl (on the edge of the left handle in the image). While drying, this crack has widened and currently my bowl is not waterproof. I will wait until my bowl has fully dried an then I will see if I can seal it with birch tar and/or wax. However in future I would pay more attention to the wood that I am using and possibly discard it earlier.

Formalities:

• Tools: Metal wedges and heavy hammer to split, saw to cut into segments, axe, two round gauges with different diameters, normal carving knife
• Materials: birch tree trunk, olive oil (final oiling)
• Time: approximately 20hrs

On Neolithic beer (and Japanese TV)

... I should be more specific, the title should probably be "on drinking Neolithic beer", but then the Japanese TV doesn't get mentioned. And I think it is worth mentioning.

I wanted to adapt the title because I wasn't actually involved in making the beer - however I did get to sample it!

Göbekli Tepe is a site in current Turkey that contains a Neolithic ritual site. Not only was it a meeting point in the 10th to 8th millenium BCE, it also was a meeting point before humans made ceramics or became sedentry. In other words it's a really really really old meeting point. In this site, excavations and re-examinations of old findings have been taking place for the last twenty years and I think it must be in the context of these more recent findings that this experiment took place.

Now as I wasn't too closely involved in the making please don't place too much weight in my understanding of the findings or the process of beer making - if you really have detailed questions research yourself or I can try to forward more academic requests to the academics involved. The results have not yet been published, I expect them to be published early next year in our annual journal.

Disclaimer in place, here is how I understand that the findings and their interpretation were. Large stone vessels were found and for some reason the archeologists seem to say that wild barley had been in these vessels (I guess they found traces). The two likely interpretations are that the vessels were used to bake bread or to brew beer. As wild barley really was an effort to collect for non-sedentry humans, the beer-interpretation is seen as more likely. The picture drawn is that people got together to celebrate rituals and for this occasion would make beer and drink it together. This also would have the advantage of making otherwise undrinkable water drinkable - I can only imagine that this would be an advantage in a large get-together.

In Düppel a reproduction of this beer was made. I don't know too many details. The steps I know of are: barley and water were mixed to form a mash which was fermented (presumably using wild yeast from the barley, so without explicitely adding yeast... but I don't know this). The mash was heated by dropping hot stones from the fire into the stone vessel. At some later point the mash was strained through cloth into a wooden vessel.

I got to drink some of the resulting beer and I know that it was stored in a glass vessel for that purpose, however I guess in Neolithic times it didn't get to sit round too much? I really don't know.

But I know what it tastes like! It was a bit sour, like a weak vinegar, and tasted of barley. Though it smelled yeasty, like young wine, it didn't actually taste very yeasty at all. It tasted quite refreshing and really suited the hot summer day we drank it on. Slightly diluted I would actually drink this more frequently. I don't like the bitterness of normal beer, but as this beer did not contain any hops or other bitter elements it wasn't bitter at all. More like an unsweetened fermented barley lemonade... without the fizz. That description doesn't sound appetizing, but even volunteers who were very skeptical tried it and afterwards declared it wasn't that bad.

So... what about Japanese TV then? Well, we rarely have TV crews in and if they do come then they usually want to film a horror film or something. For some reason my museum village does not really attract many documentary TV crews. So I was really baffled when a Japanese TV crew showed up to film the Neolithic beer brewing for a Japanese documentary.

I think that's really cool!