FW: [Sca-cooks] Paper twists of spice
Carole Smith
renaissancespirit2 at yahoo.com
Tue May 3 10:56:42 PDT 2005
Following another part of the original thought. When I was a child visiting family in England, I went grocery shopping with one of my aunts. She went to the butcher, the green grocer, etc. No merchant bagged her purchases. My aunt would bring baskets from home to put her purchases in to transport them back to the house. Those were sturdy baskets, made of willow. I wish I had one or two of them now.
Cordelia Toser
ysabeau <ysabeau at mail.ev1.net> wrote:
I don't think it was a matter of saving up all year. In an
agriculture economy, they would get the majority of their pay at
certain points in the year...when the crop was harvested, the
animals butchered and sold, etc. These are seasonal activities so
payment is seasonal. When they harvest a crop, they would get paid
and buy supplies to get through the season until the next harvest.
I'm sure there was a lot of bartering going on as well - my piglet
for a bag of flour and a dozen eggs a week for six weeks. I don't
think it was that there weren't towns and cities, I just think
that transportation was an issue (the time to get to and from town
took away from time to work the fields) and they didn't have
stores for many of the daily necessities. They would be sold at
weekly or monthly markets and you could only buy what was in
season. When the wheat crops came in, you would stock up on flour
because as the seasons turn the backstock of flour would dwindle
and the prices would go up. Items that couldn't be grown or raised
locally (like spices) would probably have been purchased from
traveling vendors who would follow a circuit. They would go
through the big cities and ports to stock up then hit the circuit.
I don't have any hard research on this, it is just anecdotal from
what I saw in the small towns of Europe and how my uncle lives
even now. He is a farmer and he only gets paid when the crops come
in...that's when they "go to town" and buy school clothes and
stuff. My aunt is a teacher and provides the steady income but if
she didn't work, they would only have two or three pay days a
year.
Ysabeau
---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: Linda Peterson
Reply-To: mirhaxa at morktorn.com, Cooks within the SCA cooks at ansteorra.org>
Date: Tue, 3 May 2005 10:26:02 -0600 (MDT)
>Does this paragraph bother anyone else? There were no towns
before the
>16th century? Poor folk saved up all year in order to purchase in
bulk?
>That first sentence especially just seems odd to me.
>
>Mirhaxa
> mirhaxa at morktorn.com
>
>> "Until the sixteenth century, buying and trading were done
mainly in
>> bulk. There was little need for wrapping or packaging.
Customers
>> provided their own containers, such as baskets, jugs, or
bowls. But as
>> towns and cities grew, goods could be purchased in smaller
quantities
>> as they were needed, and it was convenient to do shopping more
>> frequently. Therefore, items such as grain, beans, buttons,
and
>> needles required some kind of wrapping or packaging to
contain these
>> smaller quantities.
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