The Little Things
Medieval Russia -- Articles
"The Little Things"
Excerpted from Cariadoc's article of the same name at Cariadoc's Miscellany. The Miscellany is Copyright (c) by David Friedman and Elizabeth Cook, 1988, 1990, 1992. Staying in persona does not mean saying you are a different person. It means being a different person. One of the hardest, and most interesting, parts is getting the little things right. Before you worry about inventing ancestors for seven generations and an elaborate personal history-things which few people tell strangers in any case-it is worth first learning as much as possible about the little things that anyone from your time and land would have known. The more such details you integrate into your medieval self, the better you can convince others (and yourself) that you are your persona. One way of doing this would be as a group project, involving two successive gatherings a few weeks apart, both held out of persona. In the first, each person tries to stump the others with questions their personae could have answered without thinking-the sort of questions that you could answer without thinking if they were asked of your twentieth century persona. The questions must be ones for which the answer can be learned; invented answers are not allowed. I suspect that most of us, myself included, would find that we did not know the answers to a majority of the questions. Those who were sufficiently interested could then go home, or to the library, and try to find the answers to as many as possible. In the second gathering, we would come back together to report to each other the answers we had succeeded in finding. I have not actually participated in such gatherings, but I have spent some time thinking up questions-to some of which, for my own persona, I do not know the answers. Here they are. All are intended to apply to your persona prior to your arrival in the Current Middle Ages.
- What kinds of money do you use? What are the relative values of the different kinds? How much does dinner at the inn cost? How much does a horse cost? How much does a skilled worker make per month?
- What system do you use to describe what time it is? When does one day end and another begin? How do you tell time (sundial? clock?)?
- What system do you use for describing dates? What is your calendar like?
- Can you read? If so, what have you read? What poems, tales, etc. have you heard told?
- What do you know about history? Have you heard of Alexander the Great? Julius Caesar? Charlemagne? Vergil? Saladin? What do you "know" about each?
- What do you know about geography? What is the most distant country you have heard of? The most distant country you have met someone from?
- Who is your immediate overlord (title and/or name)? Who is your ultimate overlord?
- What is your religion? What duties (prayers, fasts, dietary restrictions, etc.) does it impose? What do you (your persona) know about its doctrines and history?
- What do you eat for breakfast? Lunch? Dinner? What do you drink? Where do your food and drink come from? How is the food cooked (style of cooking, tools, how does the oven work, etc.)?
- What sorts of wild animals live in your area? Which are dangerous? Which are good to eat? How are the latter hunted?
- What clothes do you wear? What are they made of? Where do they come from?
- What crops are grown in your part of the world? What goods, if any, are exported, and how are they transported? What goods are imported?
- What language(s) do you speak? What language(s) do other people in your town (city, barony...) speak?
- If you or one of your friends wrote a poem, what form would you use? What about a song?
- What "mythological" beasts do you know about? Which ones do you believe in? What do you believe about them?
Most of these questions are specific to your persona and so may seem to violate the requirement that the answers be researched instead of made up. But in most cases, although research may not tell you for certain what would be true of your persona, it will limit you to a few alternatives. A twentieth century American might plausibly have any of a number of different things for breakfast, but there are far more things that he would not have. One final remark. Some of you, after reading the list (and perhaps making some additions of your own) will conclude that only a professional scholar can stay in persona. There are few things that must be done perfectly in order to be worth doing, and staying in persona is not one of them. The more such questions you can answer the better a job you can do. Finding the answers-recreational scholarship-is one of the things the Society is about. And fun.
