I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world.	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he's experimenting with federated platforms . He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance, and can found on the PlusPora diaspora pod. He hates cell-phones.

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Standing on History The last month or two have been full of high winds, rain, flooding and historic tidal surges. For the last week or so, the local weatherman has shown pictures of the River Ouse in York, which appears to be running very high. So yesterday I walked the few hundred yards down to the River Foss, to see if it was running high. It was not. The tributaries of the Ouse to the west drain much of the dales and moors, it seems, whereas the Foss has a more north-south course. As I stood there, wellies in the mud, looking out across the fields to the west, I was suddenly struck by the thought that, almost a thousand years ago, a man named Saxfrith (or Sasforð) might well have stood in the same spot looking out at a rather sizeable estate of five carucates that he, along with a man called Thorkil (or Turchil), managed for the Archbishop of York. Mentally, I tried to erase the railway bridge, and visualize the land as it might have been in the 11th century. The manor would be behind me, north of the church. This side of the river was a bit more low lying than the other, meadow rather than field, perhaps. Saxfrith, a deacon of the church, might be looking at the sky and wondering about the weather. In the not-too distant future, it would be time to start the plowing. Years of history were, quite literally, beneath my feet. I stood and thought, "How did I get here?" I'm living in a thousand year old village in Yorkshire, studying medieval cooks and cookery in a great medieval city five miles down the road. Twenty years ago, I was about to move to New York to do theatre and work for NASA. And for the twenty years before that I was growing up in Colorado. What was it that set my feet on the road that brought me here? Was it in the late '70s when we discovered Dungeons and Dragons? More specifically, was it after we'd been playing for a while, and I began to find that I had questions that D&D didn't answer well. How much would it cost your adventurer to buy a house and what would it look like? What if he wanted to hire farmers to feed his household - how much land would he need to feed the party of five or six PCs? How many peasants would it take to work that land? Those questions, and others like them, began to fill my odd moments in adventure design. The adventure is going to be in a village. How big is it? Who lives there? What do they do? In many ways, the mundane little questions like that became just as important to me as the larger adventure. Could a village that size support two inns? Three? It's isolated, there are few travelers, so who frequents the inns? Without quite realizing it, I was becoming an amateur social historian. I accumulated notes and designed rules modifications to make the economic and social structures work. Figured out things like how to make skills affect crop yield. A game called Pendragon had rules for estate management, and I was ecstatic. Years later, in a game of Ars Magica, the players wanted to establish a village outside their 'covenant.' I ended up writing a little script in perl to generate population change and handle immigration of craftsmen to the burgeoning village. I got involved in medieval reenactment, and found that medieval cookery fascinated me. One thing led to another and I completed an MA, with a thesis that asked questions much like those I had asked nearly thirty years earlier - who wrote these books? Why? Who read them? I don't know the answers to those questions, not to my satisfaction. So here I am, at the University of York, learning about cooks. Asking questions about how they worked and lived: What were they cooking? How were they cooking it? And, coming full circle to ask, what did their houses look like? And, looking out across the Foss, where would I plant the grain? Luddite'sLog, 9 January 2014 © 2014 Jeff Berry

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