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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Walking Tour of York Fourth Stop, The Shambles As explained here, as part of my teaching this year, I gave my students a walking tour of York. This is the fourth stop on the tour. Caveat Lector - I do not vouch for the complete accuracy of all of these bits and bobs. Do not quote me. Some of this is myth and legend. First, I'm simply going to give you a link to a Shambles site, since I couldn't get a decent picture that wasn't swarming with people - here. The name is thought to derive from scamol which is an Anglo-Saxon word for bench or stool, and this somehow related to the fact that it was the butchers' street. You can see that the buildings tend to overhang the street, and it is probable that they used to do so even more, but that they were pulled back at some point to reduce fire risk. It's a great old medieval street, and one of my students mentioned that (at least in the films) Diagon Alley from the Harry Potter books was inspired by the York Shambles. The picture I've given you is of the building that now contains the Little Shambles Tearoom, No.1 Little Shambles. It is an extremely rare surviving example of a three story, single chambered medieval house. That is to say, it has three floors, each of which consisted of a single room. Originally there would have been no chimney, and no plumbing or electricity. I think it's fabulous. I like to come and look at it to remind myself of the physicality of some of the issues I'm researching. The size brings everything into scale, for one thing. For another, it brings questions of heating and cooking into stark relief. The upper stories may well have been let to day labourers or other relatively poor individuals, as a sort of a medieval studio apartment. There was no hearth on those floors, which makes heating the room in winter and cooking at any time extremely problematical. These are things which, as the saying goes, are relevant to my interests. Luddite'sLog, 5 January 2015 © 2014 Jeff Berry

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