How Did Medieval PEASANTS LIGHT their HOMES?

work didn't stop when the light failed in medieval times you would go indoors and make stuff how did you create light i've got some tools let me show you [Music] if you were poor in medieval times you still had need of a kind of light for evening work especially in the winter the evenings actually were quite long the work day probably finished with the sun going down what did you actually do to light the inside of your house candles were very expensive they were made of beeswax they burnt with a bright light but they were really reserved for the clergy and the nobility if you couldn't afford beeswax candles well there was another form of artificial lighting available to the medieval person and it was something you could make yourself really quite cheaply it was the rush light and we're surrounded by the raw materials needed to make that light form these are medieval rushes these are the core ingredients the reason people used this kind of plant was that it has a spongy center and that spongy center is one of the key components to make a rush light these are traditionally harvested in the late summer or early autumn i think that's because they're probably the chunkiest of their growth phase and they do the job better it also might be because it's convenient time to actually harvest them between other jobs that's often the case in medieval times you had a spare week so let's go and make some rush lights ready for the rest of the winter it's a different kind of species than ordinary grass this is just ordinary grass this rush grows in fairly boggy moist conditions it's not particularly wet here but the ground does remain damp for most of the year and it does flood a little bit in the winter so i presume that this particular type of species likes being here so we will cut some of these with this tool and take them back and do the next stage i'm going to harvest some rushes now but i need two bundles because there's a bit of an experiment to do there are two different sets of instructions in the medieval period and as always if you're harvesting something only take what you need i'm not going to take too much from any one plant so that it has chance to grow back next season i try to make sure that i do as little damage as possible to the environment that i'm living in [Music] it's taken me a few minutes really just to get a modest bundle of rushes the leaves are interesting the leaves of the rush plant are actually quite sort of sandpapery they've got quite a grip to them almost feel like you could get paper cuts from them but the stems themselves they're quite variable there's lots of different thicknesses to them so that's going to be interesting and apparently rush lights are very variable they're very cheap but they're very variable so we will do some experiments and see but meanwhile i'm going to go back to base start the next phase [Music] [Music] [Music] here are half of the rushes i've gathered there are two sets of instructions that i'm aware of about making rush lights one of them says put your rashes in water and then dry them the other one says nothing about that at all it doesn't tell you how long for it doesn't tell you anything about the type of water running water or stagnant water like this i'm going to just use this and i'm going to do it for about a week i have no idea whether that's far too long not long enough but i think because they were cheap to make chances are it was fairly quick so let's tie these up good bit of baler twine here but i'm not going to tie them very tightly because i don't want to crush them i just need to be able to pull them out of the of the water and keep them together so that they don't get completely separated in the water [Music] that's not too much right i'll just chuck them in the water see what [Music] happens like that it's floating but uh we'll see what happens after a week it might sink here we are a couple of weeks later and these are the rushes that were soaked in water for a week and they've been dried subsequently and this is the pile that has just been dried i have to say i can't see much difference between the two at the moment i have no idea whether there'll be a difference later on but so far it doesn't look like it makes any difference whatsoever what i've got to do now is i've got to peel some of the outer away from this uh to reveal the inner pith and what i've noticed immediately is that quite a few of these thinner rushes perhaps younger or maybe a different species actually don't have any of the pith inside them at all which is a bit disappointing they're they're literally hollow so they're not going to be any use for the rush lights so obviously when you pick the rushes you have to be aware of that and i wasn't really aware of it but i now know the difference between the rushes with pith inside them and the rushes without so you can see the inner layer the foamy core of the rush this one's actually come apart quite nicely so this is the piece that will form the uh the rush light so i'm going to do a few of these and then i'm going to soak them in tallow or in my case cooking fat that's come from some meat i had left over i've rendered the fat have rendered the fat i've just put it in boiling water to try and get much of the meaty stuff out of it and this is just animal fat i'm going to melt it and soak the rushes in that and see what it does my guess is the cheapest way of doing this is not to prepare it for too long because if you prepare it for too long you've used up lots of fuel so i would imagine that you get the smell of whatever it is you've been cooking so what i'm going to do now is take a nice pyrex dish it's not very medieval but it's all i had you actually do find there are some special dishes that were constructed maybe a piece of wood with a hollow carved in it but i haven't actually got that yet and i'm just going to use this nice pyrex of an oven dish and the fat and i'm just going to put a bit of this on here so what i'm going to do is they take the fat and i'm going to use a heat gun to melt it i find this a little safer than using an open flame or doing it in the kitchen and obviously you have to be very very careful this stuff is quite flammable you need to keep a careful eye on it so be very very careful with what you're doing so just use the heat gun to melt it to create a fluid fat which i'm then going to soak the rushes in so you just uh soak your rush light core into the molten fat whatever it is tallow beef dripping in this case is lamb and it's uh it smells quite pleasant actually it's from my dinner yesterday and saved a little bit of the fat and i'm making rush lights out of it once it's soaked like this you put it on one side and let it harden let it cool down and harden if you want to speed it up you can of course put them in the fridge medieval people didn't have fridges so they would have just let it harden over time and we'll come back in a few hours and have a go at lighting it well i've had a few false starts it's taken a while it's a bit more complex than i thought it was going to be you've got to find the right rushes you've got to prepare them properly and you've got to have the sort of the right mixture but i think i've got one here working so i'll use this beeswax candle and light it there you go it's not too bad it's actually slightly bigger than a beeswax candle it burns quite quickly i'm quite surprised but uh yeah it's been a bit of an adventure making this and [Music] yeah not too bad so in summary rush lights are much harder to make than you think but they were ubiquitous in the medieval period and they were very cheap but i actually think there's quite a lot of skill in being able to make them and i don't think i've mastered it yet [Music]

Channel: Modern History TV

Views: 4,193,606

Keywords: history documentary, jason kingsley, medieval, middle ages, knight, rushlight, rush light, candle, peasant, houshold, cottage, medieval people, medieval lives, forgotten technique, ancient wisdom, Medieval, fantasy, dnd, dungeons and dragons, history, historical, hema, historical european martial arts, mount and blade, video, game, roleplaying, role playing, rpg, lord of the rings, adventure, adventurer

Id: IxBsbzUKnAs

Length: 11min 42sec (702 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 15 2019