The Stability of Craftsmen

When my neighbour brought his horse to the farrier – horseshoe-fitter, pronounced like “carrier” – I tagged along to watch and learn, and the farrier seemed happy to answer my many questions. He looked like a teenager, with a face you’d expect to see in a drive-through window, but he wrestled the stallion’s legs and shaped the hot iron like a man who knew his business.

His van folded out like a tackle box, with rows of hanging tools and a miniature forge like a barbecue, and when the shoe was ready he kept the stallion calm even when the hot iron caught its fetlock on fire. He told me he apprenticed for four years to learn his trade, and when I asked how quickly someone could learn the basics, he said, “Four years.” No shortcuts.

My elderly neighbours can remember when young men like him were normal. A century ago in my native USA, and only a few decades ago here in Ireland, villages depended on a network of crafts and craftsmen – smiths, wrights, thatchers, tanners, millers and coopers -- whose callings survive only in surnames. Each town had its own set of craftsmen, known to everyone and identifiable at a distance by their clothing.  

Nor would the farrier’s age seem unusual decades ago; children apprenticed from an early age, learned a skill for several years, and entered the world as craftsmen at an age when teens today are looking sullen in a corner of a mall. Only today do we assume that everyone must spend their prime years bored, warehoused and indebted.

Of course, most people did not attain such rank, but most people of any rank had a palette of survival skills unknown to almost any modern person.  Farmers with little money or formal education would have known how to deliver a calf, weave a basket, butcher a pig, keep bees, shear sheep, turn autumn fruit into wine or spirits, make hay and silage, forage for wild plants, dig the peat bog for winter fuel and coppice trees on a timetable that stretched across the generations. You can see such casual knowledge on display in, for example, cookbooks from a century ago, which began recipes with instructions to “pluck, draw and wash” birds before cooking, or to first “prepare the sheep’s head in the usual way,” assuming this was something any idiot could do.

A world of craftsmen creates an economy alien to modern Westerners; instead of cheap belongings meant to be thrown away quickly, goods had to be made durable, to be fixed, recast, re-forged or re-sewn over and over. The mountains of trash that rise outside our cities did not exist then, nor did the Texas-sized garbage patch in the Pacific, for few goods were thrown away.

Such an economy had few corporations or anonymous transactions. Writers from a century or two ago described recognizing particular barrels, nails or saddles as we would recognize someone’s handwriting, and the craftsman’s reputation hung on the quality of their work. When everyone knew where products came from and could identify the makers of the superior and inferior work, they could reward the hardest-working and most skilled craftsmen with their business – what used to be called capitalism, before the word came to mean something else.

Today, of course, we drive long distances to buy underwear and smart phones made to last a matter of months and be thrown away. We never meet the Third-World workers – possibly slaves -- who make such products, nor the crew that shipped them across a planet, nor the truckers who delivered them to a store larger than a cathedral. Few craftsmen remain in this world, and those that remain are often elderly hobbyists. Our modern system won’t last forever, though, and we know a world of craftsmen can be sustainable for centuries -- because it was.

I asked what work there was for a farrier these days, and the young man said he had more work than he could handle. Few college-educated people in Ireland or the USA can say that these days, as AI programmes are rapidly replacing the marketing managers and web designers. But we will always have horses, he pointed out, and they will always need shoes.

 

 

Twisting wood into a house

These days, you spend your life paying off a house, and even building a shed or animal shelter can be expensive, as timber, brick or any other modern building material requires a heavy investment of money, time and skilled labour. For thousands of years, though, people used a simpler technique that used nothing but natural, local materials.

“Wattle and daub,” as it’s called, takes its name from its two components; a “wattle” was a wicker fence or wall made of a pliable wood like willow or hazel, woven around upright posts like a horizontal basket. Farmers sometimes surrounded their fields with wattle fences, which could be made in modular, lightweight pieces a metre or two high and a metre or two across – hurdles -- and then uprooted, carried to a new location, and stamped into the ground where needed.

The farmer usually created a wattle by putting the upright posts (sometimes called zales or sails on these islands) into a wooden frame (sometimes called a gallows) to hold them in place. Then withies – slim cuttings of willow or hazel – were wound back and forth around the uprights. At the end of the hurdle the withy would be twisted for greater flexibility, wound around the last zale, and woven back in the other direction. Usually a gap would be left in the middle of the hurdle, called a twilly hole, which allowed a shepherd or farmer to carry a few hurdles as a time on his back.

According to author Una McGovern, hurdle fences were vital to medieval agriculture; by keeping sheep confined without the need for permanent infrastructure, they allowed tenant farmers to graze sheep on a patch of land, letting them manure the fields one by one and deposit the fertilisers necessary for cereal crops.

The same technique could form the walls of a building, once a log or timber frame was built and the wattle filled in with a “daub” plaster for insulation and privacy. The daub often contained clay, human or animal hair and cow dung, and hardened around the wattle like concrete around rebar. The technique proved popular throughout the ancient world, among Sumerians, Chinese and Mayans alike. If kept dry the walls would last for centuries, and even now restoring or demolishing old buildings in Europe sometimes reveals wattle inside the walls.

Not all ancient builders loved it; the Roman architect Vetruvius, in the first century BC, moaned about its hazards in his Ten Books on Architecture:

“As for ‘wattle and daub’ I could wish that it had never been invented,” Vetruvius wrote testily. “…But since some are obliged to use it either to save time or money, or for partitions on an unsupported span, the proper method of construction is as follows. Give it a high foundation so that it may nowhere come in contact with the broken stone-work composing the floor; for if it is sunk in this, it rots in course of time, then settles and sags forward, and so breaks through the surface of the stucco covering.”

Vetruvius’ disdain notwithstanding, however, clearly many of his contemporaries loved it, and it’s easy to see why; it allowed people to build a structure cheaply and easily. The main disadvantage, as the Roman mentioned, is that it cannot get damp; like cob, straw bales or other natural building methods, it works best when you build the foundation and walls of rock for the first metre or so.

The technique is similar to building in cob, that mixture of sand, straw and clay, mixed with water and squeezed together – usually by humans walking on it.  Handfuls of the mixture – the word “cob” comes from an Old English word for “lump” – are stacked them on top of each other in a row, stomped solid by people’s feet, and then another layer of cob added, until people have a wall.

The straw binds the clay and sand together; instead of a wall’s mass hanging on a few large structures like girders or beams, it hangs on the many tiny structures of the straw. Once the cob dries it can be almost as durable as stone. Daub needs to be thinner than cob, like stucco or plaster – to be spread across the wattle rather than creating a self-supporting wall – but is can be made from quite similar materials. 

Of course, wattle and daub is probably not suitable for modern homeowners unaccustomed to mud walls. That doesn’t mean, however, that it has no relevance to today’s homesteader; animals don’t tend to mind such all-natural surroundings, as long as the interior remains warm and dry, and neither do garden tools.

Building techniques like cob or wattle-and-daub fell out of favour in the modern era because they are more labour-intensive than our modern building techniques that rely on fossil fuels. We should not let such skills disappear entirely, however, for these methods still have advantages. They are completely ecological, requiring no machines, and generating no pollution. They can last for centuries, as evidenced by homes built this way in Europe – and might still stand when our reinforced concrete has collapsed to ruin. And when a wattle-and-daub home is finally torn down, it merely adds fertiliser to the soil, rather than toxic waste – and another one can be built, literally dirt cheap.

 

References:

Una McGovern, Lost Crafts, published by Chambers, 2009. 

Vetruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, Chapter 8, Section 20. 

Top Photo: Cottage in Heimbach, Germany. 

Bottom photo: Listed building in the UK with original wattle showing. 

Both photos courtesy of Wikicommons. 

 

What Once Held Communities Together

I wrote a few weeks back about how much of our community life has disintegrated over the years; elderly Irish tell me that people used to go to each other’s houses on winter nights and tell stories, used to bring musical instruments that they knew how to play, and used to sing old songs together, since everyone knew those songs and everyone could sing well and without embarrassment.

I mentioned that this was true in my native USA as well, as seen in the “funny pages” or cartoons of American newspapers, which have changed little over the years and thus provide a window into the America that was. You can see the same rich communities in old black-and-white movies like It’s a Wonderful Life, and if you are tempted to think that those were mere fictional conceits, like the way people burst into song in old musicals.

Yet in his excellent book Bowling Alone, sociologist Robert Putnam used dozens of polls, surveys, diaries and other statistics to back up their depiction of what American life used to be, a culture rich with neighbourhood gatherings, card games, fraternal lodges, dinner parties, bowling leagues, PTA meetings, political caucuses, town bands, Boy Scouts and many other groups.

In Ireland over the last few centuries, neighbours used to assemble “mutual-improvement societies,” training their members not only to read at a time when where was little public education, but to understand and debate scientific and political issues of the day. They organised adult schools, subscription libraries, reading circles, dramatic societies, and musical groups. Other volunteer associations organised to pay each other’s medical bills, unemployment benefits, and burials, to offer savings banks and job referral services – and by 1880 as much as 80 percent of all male workers belonged to such groups. It was only through their loyal support and intense political organisation, for example, that someone like Ramsey MacDonald, illegitimate son of a farmhand, could rise to become Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Similarly, movies and television have given us hundreds of portrayals of American life through the decades, but rarely has any media showed the fraternal lodges that were part of so many Americans’ lives. Most people have heard of the Freemasons as the inexplicable target of conspiracy theorists, or parodied as the Stonecutters on The Simpsons, but there were literally thousands of similar organisations, with chapters in almost every town and neighbourhood.

They included the Elk, the Odd Fellows, the Knights of Pythias, the Knights of Columbus, and such sadly extinct and magnificent-sounding organisations like the Prudent Patricians of Pompeii, the Modern Aztecs, and the League of Friendship of the Supreme Mechanical Order of the Sun. They took many forms -- quasi-religious orders, paramilitary groups, social clubs, health funds, college funds, unions, co-operatives, and grass-roots political organisations, many of these at the same time.

Each lodge member contributed a small amount of money each week to a fund, and when any member took sick, the lodge typically gave them sick pay to cover the loss of employment. Lodges often hired a doctor or nurse to check up on all its members; called “lodge trade,” it offered work for thousands of medical professionals, and unlike our modern medical system, it was affordable and gave patients a say in their own care. When a member died, the organisation often paid for the funeral and perhaps a pension for the widow(er) and children. Many did more than that. A lodge called the Knights of Labour evolved into the first labour union, and every union created since has followed its template.

As recently as the mid-20^th-century a majority of Americans were members of these organisations – again, of both genders and all races. Of the 3,500 fraternal organisations that existed at the beginning of the 1900s, about 1,500 were African-American. And while they are called “fraternal,” many existed solely for women and were run by women, some independent of any men’s organisation.

This doesn’t even include the PTA, Lyceums, Chataquas, Temperence Societies, Agricultural Societies, Philosophical societies, educational institutes, book circles and church clubs. These organisations were deeply woven into community life for centuries, and their sudden and astonishing decline after the 1960s has been rarely commented on or even noticed.

These kinds of close communities lasted longer here than in the USA, but are fading here now as well --- but this trend is not inevitable. These organisations did not appear in the landscape, after all – they were organised, and could be again. 

 

Photo: Knights of Columbus gathering. Public domain. 

 

The Neverending Forest

A prehistoric squirrel, it is said, could have scampered from Norway to Singapore without touching the ground, so dense was the carpet of trees that stretched across the world. Similar forests stretched across North America and many other parts of the world – all of them providing a home to thousands of living things, all of them vacuuming the carbon dioxide from the air and keeping the climate stable.

Most of that landscape was felled for timber and paper long ago, the land given over to crops and suburbia – or to wasteland. Of course, humans need food and houses, but we also need timber and wildlife, and our ancestors would have been wiser to preserve some of those forests for future generations. And sometimes, they did – for at least six thousand years, some humans have used an old technique to continually harvest timber from a forest while keeping it alive indefinitely.

When the evergreen trees around here are cut at the base, their roots die. But many broad-leaved, deciduous trees continue to soak up water and nutrients through their roots. The roots put their energy into creating shoots, which grow into new saplings – and soon you will have several smaller trees where you had one before. In a matter of years or decades – how long depends on the type of tree – you can harvest those smaller trees, called “underwood,” and the process begins again. You can keep doing this as long as the original base continues to live, which can be more than a hundred years.

Commonly coppiced species included ash, chestnut, oak, hazel, sycamore and alder, and most of these created shoots from the cut stump, called a stool. The new trunks usually curved outward from the original stool, and so their naturally bowed wood was often prized for ship-building. Other species, like cherry, would send suckers upward from the roots surrounding the stump. Either way, the new shoots grow quickly, fed by a root system made to support an entire tree.

Willow stands in a class by itself in coppicing, as it does not need to mature before being cut, nor does it require a decade or two of waiting. Its flexible shoots – withies – are perfect for weaving into shapes, which provided early humans with homes, boats, chariots, armour, fences, barns, sheds, coops, weirs, animal traps, and baskets.

Woodsmen coppiced areas where they could keep out cattle and horses, as animals might eat the shoots. In places where animals might roam the woodland they would pollard – or cut branches higher up on the tree out of their reach. Waterford farmer and self-sufficiency expert John Seymour called coppicing and pollarding “the most fundamental of woodland crafts.”  

In medieval Europe vast stretches of woodland were coppiced or pollarded regularly for charcoal, firewood, timber and other uses. Here in Ireland, willows – sometimes called sallies or silver-sticks – were pollarded each winter from century-old trunks that had never been mature trees, often looking like fields of spiky sea urchins. Weavers here were said to harvest the willow on St. Bridget’s Day – Feb. 1 – and with large machete-like tools called bill-hooks, collected ten tonnes to the acre.

In a copse – a forest of regularly coppiced trees – each tree is marked with the year it was last felled, and only a fraction of them are felled again each year. Coppiced trees – harvested every several years or so – are interspersed with trees allowed to grow to maturity and felled for large pieces of timber. The latter group – called “standards” – are harvested at a rotation time of about 10 times the coppice; for a coppice cut once a decade, for example, the standards will be cut once a century.

If more forward-looking souls were to turn their fields into copses, they could have a regular harvest of wood for many generations to come. Enough copses around the world could supply the world with paper and timber, warmth and wildlife without the need to ever fell another forest.