I am very happy to announce that A Circle of Dead Girls, Will Rees number 8, will be released March 3, 2020.
The Circus has come to town. Rees arrives for the performance but the sight of his old nemesis, Magistrate Hanson, sends him home again. On his way, he meets a party of Shaker Brothers searching for a young girl. Her body is found in a nearby field.
Who killed Leah? The circus trick rider? The strong man? One of the Shaker Brothers? Maybe even the Magistrate.
Much research was and is required for the Will Rees mysteries. After all, they dressed differently, ate differently and mostly lived different. Most people then lived on farms. And, of course, there were no telephones, landlines or otherwise, no computers, no cars – the list goes on and on.
But as I research Bronze Age Crete for my next series, I realize how many things there are. Money, for example. Every Western country as well as China, India and more had money. Well, there was some money in the Bronze Age. In what is now Iraq and Iran, shekels were used. They were tied to a certain amount of barley. Consistent weights for gold and silver were beginning to be set up. But can I casually say my characters in Minoan Crete went to the market with their money and purchased something? No. Something must have been used; after all, Crete was the center of trade. Did they use a barter system or a combination of both? Obviously, more research is required.
I talked about needles in my last post. Well, let’s move on to scissors. Rees uses scissors and we would recognize them. Scissors were invented during the Bronze Age but they were not the scissors we know. More like two blades attached with a copper band.
And the people of Rees’s time period ate similarly to us. More meat heavy and certain vegetables were newish such as potatoes and tomatoes but we would recognize most of their food. The Minoans ate differently. Sure, they ate lamb, seafood and goat, lentils and other pulses, grains such as barley and wheat. But did they consume dairy products? Had they learned to make cheese? So far, although there are competing theories, no one seems to know.
And did they eat beef? The bull was sacred to them. The Classical Greeks sacrificed Cattle by burning the hides and bones so the aroma would go up to the Gods. Did the Minoans sacrifice their Bulls and do the same? Or did they treat their cattle as they still do in India today: cattle are sacred and not eaten?
But they did consume beer, wine and a fermented honey similar to mead.
With Thanksgiving coming up, my thoughts turn naturally to food.
One of the first things that strikes a modern person when one researches food from this era is how meat heavy it is. The American plate for the last fifty or so years has been meat, a vegetable and a starch like potato or rice.
Johnny cakes or cornbread would have more likely been the starch on the table. And while vegetables from the garden would be available in the summer and early fall, people would have been limited to good keepers like cabbage apples, and carrots after that.
Refrigeration was primitive. Root cellars, holes dug into the ground and cool, were further cooled with ice covered in sawdust for insulation.
But meat, both from domesticated animals and whatever a hunter could bag, was available all year. (Assuming enough wealth to own animals or the skill to hunt successfully.)
Here is a list of some of the animals eaten:
The regular domesticated: beef, pork, mutton, lamb and chicken.
Fish: salmon, shad, Hannah Hill (sea bass), oysters, lobster, cod, haddock, perch, eels
Wild: ducks, geese, partridge, deer, snipes, pigeon, hares and rabbits, turtles and of course turkey.
Recipes included many herbs.
No wonder people longed for greens in the spring.
Well, we have had a wide-ranging journey through the domestication of horses and the invention of wagons and buggies.
This is one of the things I find so incredible: horses (as well as donkeys, asses and other equines) were not only the main form of transportation for almost 9000 years, they were, except for shanks mare – i.e. walking –the only form. By the time of Will Rees in the late eighteenth century, wagons and buggies were polished and elegant inventions.
Okay, I can just hear someone saying ‘But what about shocks?’ Right, they didn’t have shocks. But the front wheels were slightly smaller than the rear and they were cupped to make for smooth turning. The axle, as mentioned before, is equipped with other pieces to make the operation both smooth and efficient.
And horses have been domesticated for literally millennia.
What does this mean? Well, as with dogs and the other livestock, (cattle, pigs, sheep) they are used to human companionship. Training a horse is a lot easier (I would say it requires) human contact from a very early age. Horses not only have to accept human companionship but also direction. They have to be trained to a bit and reins. If intended for a saddle horse, the animal has to accept a saddle and the weight of a rider as something normal. Horses destined to pull vehicles have to learn, besides the feel of the bit and reins, to accept the weight and the clatter of something following (Remember, horses are prey so they instinctually run).
In Rees’s time, most of the horses were trained as working horses, pulling wagons and buggies. Saddle horses were expensive and, as had been the case for several centuries, were pretty much owned and used only by the wealthy. A horse trained to pull a wagon could not serve also as a saddle horse unless it had been trained as one also. Horses were divided into the aristocrats and the cobs. The working and middle classes ( and I think of Rees as middle class since he owns property and has a craft) did not have the wherewithal to own saddle horses. They needed workers that pulled vehicles.
Of course things are different now.
For a time horses continued to be used simultaneously with the car. But gradually the engine took over. Although the Amish continue to use horses as they have been for thousands of years, for most of us, the horse has become a luxury animal. And it happened in less than one hundred years.
But not completely. One of my readers referred me to an organization that strives to keep the skills of using horses and oxen alive. Since the use of these animals are more sustainable in Africa than tractors, farmers there are assisted in their use. Thanks Kim for that information! I love it.
Livestock, i.e. cattle, sheep, pigs and horses, have almost as long a history with people as dogs. Sheep, for example, were domesticated between 8000 and 7500 BCE for their meat. They were covered with hair called kemp; their wool was a layer close to the skin and made up of short fibers. How did we get the spinnable long fibers sheep have now? Mutation? Or did the people then do a little selective breeding? We don’t know.
So, on the steppes, horses were –somewhat – domesticated pre-5000 BCE.
Horses originally roamed not only the Eurasian steppes but also the North American plains. Fossils of early and not so early horses have been found here in the USA. But the North American horses disappeared, no one is quite sure why. Climate change has been suggested as one possibility. But I digress.
Like sheep and cattle, horses were first used as a source of meat. Not as draft animals. And then, with the human ability to see other advantageous qualities, someone started riding. Although I can’t know for sure, I am pretty positive the first mount would be a mare. Stallions are fierce and aggressive. But gelded males and mares are more manageable, especially if they have had regular contact with people from birth. And horses, at approximately 800 pounds, are large enough to carry a rider or pull a vehicle.
A man on foot can control 200 sheep; on horseback 500. Leather and rope bits and cheek pieces begin showing up in grave goods. Horses begin taking on value and are only eaten at feasts (where the chief is showing off.}
I will add that of course, given our human propensity for war, the horse became part of the effort. Not just as a mount for a horseman but also as a team pulling war chariots. Now chariots speak to a ruling class with the necessary time and resources for the purchase of a chariot and the team of horses as well as the training necessary to use them effectively in battle. I’ve seen a few graphics of an Egyptian pharaoh driving such a vehicle with the reins looped around his hips. Since chariots were used only for war, they had their moment in history. But they didn’t come down through the millennia the way wagons did.
Think about this fact for a moment: humans have used horses and wagons for millennia. Yet, in the space of 100 years, less, actually, the use of horses had ended.
Most of us no longer have a connection to these beautiful animals or the really elegant inventions that shaped the wagons and buggies that were used for most of human civilization. True, the advances made for the creation of the humble axle did set up the use of axles in cars. How many of us think about this tool which was really the product of many years of trial and error investigation?
First came the wheel?
Not exactly. Remnants of sledges using rollers, not wheels, have been discovered n eastern Europe. There is a lot of discussion about the dating of these rollers and some estimates put it back to about 4000 B. C. (To my amazement, when I began researching wagons and horses, I discovered that Eastern Europe and the steppes were actually the home of many inventions that today we take entirely for granted. Axle is actually an evolved word (aks) from some Proto Indo-European tongue that spawned of the languages from Greek to German, Iranian to Celtic that we are familiar with today. Honey bees. Pigs. Sheep who were domesticated first for meat – they were short fibers so the wool was unspinnable. No one is sure whether it was a mutation or human intervention that created sheep with the wool we use today. )
But I digress.
Sledges had to be pulled by teams of oxen and were very heavy. Also, and this is where the axle comes in, they didn’t move smoothly. Drag is very important in the movement of objects since it pulls back. Think of trying to move something through heavy mud. Later wheeled wagons and of course our current cars don’t have drag – not from the wheels nor to this degree – because the wheels and axle and all the other pieces are constructed in such a way that the vehicle moves as though it is much lighter, without the clutch of another force holding it back. From mud to a smooth asphalt road, for example.
Are we to wheels yet?