[Artemisia] A New Discussion - SCA Skills in a Modern Plague

[Aletheia Isidora]

Hi, all,
A very interesting discussion & now I'm putting in my 2 cents.

1. The 4 thieves vinegar mentioned in one message is one of the earliest 
examples of an urban legend: it comes from all over & it's not true. 
It's been attributed to plague epidemics all over Europe, including the 
one after the Great Fire of London.

2. Something to keep in mind - unless we ALL die in the plague (in which 
case this whole discussion is irrelevant), those who survive will not 
have lost their personal knowledge - most folks (& especially SCA folks) 
know basic personal hygiene & public health stuff - kill the rats, the 
rats' fleas die before they infect you, etc. It's also still written 
down on paper, not just online. So civilization can be rebuilt.

3. Paper - the internet will go away. Not to mention cell phones. So 
libraries personal & public will be very important, for information to 
keep you alive. Books mentioned so far are good (I have Back to Basics & 
9 of the Foxfires). Some other useful tomes: 5 Acres & 
Independence/Kains (1935 but with lots of diagrams on wells & drains); 
Henley's Formulas for Home & Workshop (1907); Practical Blacksmithing; 
the Sunset Garden Book for this part of the country, any edition; 
Rodale's Encyclopedia of Herbs & the Healing Herbs book, which have 
modern research on what herbs can actually do; any of the 
mountain/prairie/desert survival guides; The Way things Work (Macaulay)& 
the 4-volume How Things Work - lots of others. Edible Native Plants of 
Montana, for example. Yes, sometimes they are not terribly helpful 
without actual experience, but having instructions at least gives you a 
starting point.

4. Speaking of paper - how many of us can make it? I have books on that, 
too (one of my quirks - I have a library intended for using to rebuild 
civilization, including technology. Lots of gaps, but still a good basic 
set). NOTHING can be thrown away - old rags will turn into paper, most 
food scraps into pig food or compost, bits of board into tree nails/wood 
pegs, bits of metal back to the forge for re-smelting, etc etc. Nails 
are a lot easier to make than screws, or nuts & bolts - think about it. 
There are books somewhere describing Thomas Jefferson's plantation at 
Monticello & how he tried to be completely self-sufficient there, 
including making nails (he failed, by the way) & how he did it.

5. Sourdough makes perfectly good bread & can be kept at room 
temperature as long as you feed the yeast. You can also make any other 
kind of leavened cakes/rolls/whatnot, with the right ingredients. I have 
an active start - some of you may have eaten the rolls at Daman & 
Veronique's coronation; the ones I made were all sourdough, including 
the barley bread, oat bread, and saffron bread. Barley & oats all grow 
well in Montana, by the way. The name for sourdough before the Klondike 
gold rush was "leavening"...use a chunk for your loaf of bread, keep 
part for the next loaf.

6. Herbs that repel bugs (at least to some extent) and grow in Montana 
in my garden: tarragon, southernwood, wormwood (all artemisias, by the 
way), rue, cooking sage, hyssop, lavender. Flowers that kill bugs: 
pyrethrum daisies! Cooking herbs I grow: sage, winter savory, oregano, 
mint, chervil, coriander/cilantro, parsley, dill, thyme, garlic, 
chamomile. Healing herbs likewise: yarrow,hyssop, rue, mint, sage, 
feverfew, garlic - most of the cooking herbs can double for healing 
depending on what the problem is. Feverfew is a pain & fever reducer; 
yarrow alias woundwort is good for cuts & bruises, etc. Wild or big sage 
that the kingdom is named after (artemisia tridentata)can also be a 
healing herb. If civilization collapses, it's likely that no one will be 
interested in enforcing laws against growing actual pain relievers like 
poppies.

7. Cider and beer were safer to drink in period than water because 
making either one requires that you BOIL the water that is a primary 
ingredient; "small beer" was very, very weak - less than the old 
3.2/love in a canoe weak, which is why even children could & did drink 
it without turning into lushes before puberty. Medieval folk did not 
know it was the boiled water that made it safe; we do. Yes, boiled water 
tastes flat; better flat water than cholera, or typhus. I know the 
kingdom has brewers, but we all know how to boil water!

8. Other problems to consider: trace elements like iodine - who has 
lists of high-iodine foods? You'll notice they are mostly seafood, but 
Idaho has a secret lifesaver: potatoes are high iodine. Cow's milk & 
navy beans are also relatively high, so after the iodized salt runs out, 
keep growing beans in your garden (good idea anyway - high protein, 
nitrogen-fixing, high fiber, relatively easy to grow, dry well & keep a 
long time. Grow peas too).

9. Metal sources: Idaho, Montana & Utah have been mining centers for 
over a century for a reason. Not only is there gold in them thar hills, 
there's copper, manganese, lead, zinc - lots of basic building blocks. I 
know the location of a mullen board for hand-grinding ore in small 
quantities (yes, I've done it, yes, it's heavy-duty work). It would 
require not just people who understand mining, but guards to keep them 
safe while working, and some way of smelting without killing the folks 
doing the work (ask Anaconda MT residents about that). It would require 
the efforts of a community, in other words.

10. There's a lot of coal around here too, relatively speaking. Some 
seams are so close to the surface you can see them, and dig it out by 
hand. Not enough for commercial purposes, but certainly sufficient to 
keep a house or two warm for the winter. Even if it is low grade lignite 
not anthracite.

11. Home canning - what lid alternatives were used before Ball/Kerr jar 
lids? I have my great-great-great grandmother's recipe for mincemeat; I 
know they kept it all winter, but I don't know what kind of lid they 
used. Maybe I'll stock up on lids...

12. Water - boil it. Don't worry about all over baths; a basin of warm 
water, soap, & a washcloth can keep you perfectly clean from a hygienic 
standpoint, as long as you do it often enough. Remember all the streams 
of the west are giardia-infested these days, so no water is safe to 
drink direct from the ground, even wells unless they are aquifer-based, 
not just river-bed water table. It's possible the big gravity-feed 
irrigation systems would survive a collapse - most city folk don't know 
they even exist, let alone how to destroy one. Just need somebody to 
open the head-gates & sluice-gates & away you go. Farmers would (I hope) 
have more sense than to go breaking the ditches.

13. Laundry - did anyone watch the "Victorian house" miniseries? Laundry 
in the old days was no fun; also a communal activity for either the 
whole household or the whole village. In paleolithic times, when I was 
young & lived at the ranger station, all the ladies on the station would 
go to the wash house together to do laundry, because there wasn't 
sufficient electricity to run individual washing machines & dryers (the 
station generator had limited wattage, and the official business was 
higher-priority). The wash house had a big paddle washing machine, and 
an electric wringer & a hand-cranked wringer, and clothesline strung 
inside for rainy days. Otherwise, we took the wet clothes home to hang 
them outside. Us kids got to help, sort of, depending on age. Getting 
body parts caught in the wringer was not fun. That old saw about someone 
having been through the wringer has actual meaning for us old fossil types!

Okay, I've said way more than I started out to now, have fun working 
your way through, or not.<grin>

Aletheia Isidora of Philae aka Tarimaat