[Sca-cooks] Charcoal

[Stefan li Rous]

Alban said:
> >Um, do you have any documentation for this assertion? Because there's
> >nothing in any of the mentions I've seen about charcoal burning to
> >indicate that scrap wood was used.
>
> No documentation at all; but what else would you do with large scraps?
> Either burn them directly, or if they're big enough they'd be used for
> charcoal?

I had assumed you were talking about modern production of charcoal,
Alban when you said this, such as the turning of packing crates into
charcoal which someone else mentioned.

In period, there simply would not have been enough wood scraps to
produce the amount of charcoal needed. They were clearing large
swaths of forest to make the charcoal to feed the smelters.

I guess they might have gathered some scraps and made charcoal of
them, but remember most wood projects that would produce scraps
were small job situations. It wasn't like the industrial age where
you had centralized factories that would produce great piles of
scrap in one area. Period transport was primative. It was costly
to haul things any distance by land. Often the transport costs
could exceed the value of the item itself. Why go to the expense
of gathering scraps and transporting them to an area where you
would have enough of the them to be worth turning into charcoal
when you've got vast untouched, and frankly feared, tracts of
forest. Forests were generally not something to be treasured and saved
to the medieval man.

--
THLord  Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
Mark S. Harris             Austin, Texas         stefan at texas.net
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****