From the Frontlines: Boar's Hunt

Saturday was Boar's Hunt. While SCA autocrats have a less than stellar reputation for publishing event information prior to the event, this year's hit a new low. The major attractions (the midieval village and the tavern night) got little or no publicity, and the schedule wasn't put up until the morning of the event, by which time most people were already on site or had decided not to go!

Neither the rapier marshal nor the rapier champion were contacted to set up rapier.

Still, the weather was nice, the village was interesting, the tavern was fun, and the three rapier fighters that showed up and geared up (myself included) had a good time.

Mostly, however, I'm going to talk about making money.

One of the demos at the village was Master Raymond of the Moneyer's Guild. A quick demo became an extended demo as I asked more questions and asked to try my hand at more and more steps, and finally he let me do about a third of the work (by my estimate) of making a little over 100 pewter coins (above) each about the size of a dime, from scratch. He'd already melted the pewter, formed it into sheets, and made the dies, but I helped roll it down, cut out all the blanks, and struck or helped strike (we did two-person striking for most of them) all the coins. In the process I learned a great deal about how period coins were made (not just the methed we used, either), and thus why they look the way they do. Being generous, he awarded me the coins I'd struck. Being dutiful to my sworn fuedal lords, I paid a small tax to the Baron and Baroness. :-)

The most common period coining techniques involved a LOT of handwork, and the process of striking in particular is prone to human error. This is why a lot of period coins have their images off-center, and aren't perfectly round. This is not, as I've often thought, due to their being old and worn or damaged. Many of the coins I struck (especially early on) were only partially struck or had their images off center, just like the coins you'll see in museums. I even produced a double-strike or two. Without perfectly round coins with defined edges the temptation to shave coins for extra money becomes very high, which is why payments were often made by weight (and you don't want to know what they did to people caught shaving).

It was a great deal of fun, and I look forward to doing more moneying in the future past. :-)