Some Latin Measures

This is more for me than for any other reason but as long as I’m making a crib sheet, I might as well post it in case it is useful for someone else. I will add to this as needed.

Hectare -- a modern measure of area, equal to 2.471 acres or 107,639 sq. ft.

Roman Modius -- a measure of volume, often used to measure grain. I will use 8.73 liters as the size of this unit. It is interesting to note that it is often translated as “about two gallons”.

• The Roman Modius is equal to 8.736 liters according to http://www.livius.org/w/weights/weights2.html
• It is given as 8.75 liters in Agricultural Implements and Farm Equipment in the Roman World, by K. D. White
• It is given as 8.732 liters in The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World, edited by John Peter Oleson
• According to Pliny’s Natural History (18.66), 1 modius of wheat weighs between 20-21.75 librae (Roman Pounds) or 6.55-7.12 kg).

Carolingian Modius -- According to Verhulst and Grierson-Blackburn, it is suspected that in 793-4, Charlemagne increased the size of the official modius by 50%. This would make the new modius equal to about 13.1 liters.

Bonarius (aka Buonarius, pl. b(u)onarii) -- a measure of area used in the Carolingian Empire, given as 1.38 hectares (or 3.41 acres) in The Carolingian Economy (Cambridge Medieval Textbooks)
, by Adriaan Verhulst. “The normal occupancy of a mansus is one tenant [family] and it’s legal size is 16 bonarii.” p. 45. 16 bonarii is 54.56 acres.

Iornales (aka Iurnales) -- this word appears not to be a unit of measurement, but rather a vague word meaning “plowlands”.

And Another

I got my other shipment of books from Kalamazoo today, this time from The University of Chicago Press. I got The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England, but I probably won’t get a chance to read that one for a while, and it’s not quite appropriate for this blog.

The other one though, is quite pertinent to what goes on here: Around the Roman Table: Food and Feasting in Ancient Rome. It contains over 150 recipes reconstructed for the modern cook.

With a quick glance I’m both very impressed and disappointed. The recipes appear to very weak. They do not give good quantities and measurements (though they are better than the original latin), nor do they give good substitutions for hard-to-find ingredients, like garum. On the up-side, there is a lot of good additional information and detail both on the recipe, the ingredient and its relation to Roman culture.

There was one recipe that stood out and grabbed me and I may try it out over the weekend. Called Libum it is a flat bread simply made by combining white flour with ricotta cheese, then baking the cheese dough. It sounds simple and it sounds good. I’ll post how it turns out.

Two 15th Century Cookery Books

While I was at K’zoo I ordered three books and the first one arrived today -- Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books. It is the re-print of a copyright-free text available online here.

I guess I didn’t pay too close attention at the con, because it was quite a surprise that it is in Middle English. That’s not a major problem to translate, but I was taken a bit aback. It makes me happy that I found this website a few weeks ago:

• A Concise Dictionary of Middle English -- I like this one because you can just peruse through the words without having to search.
  
• Another excellent resource is the Middle English Dictionary

If I get really into this, I could see myself translating and adding modern measurements to many of these . . .

Planting Wheat - 7 weeks in

After my last post I was really going to try to post every weekday. As you can tell, that hasn’t happened. I’ve got four separate entries half-written and I just need to find time to finish them.

I spent another hour plus weeding yesterday and the field looks good.



The big surprise is my pot of winter wheat:



I don’t know if you can see it in this pic, but most of the tall stalks have ears of seeds. Yes they do! I have grown grain!



In this close-up you can see the sheaf and and the spiky awns coming off of each grain. They are still quite green and the other stalks don’t have nearly as many rows of grain as this one, but I am very pleased.

Yeah, wheat!

Carolingian Economics

[And he manages to get the post in on Monday with 18 minutes to spare. Phew!]

Charlemagne ruled over the Kingdom of the Franks from 768 to 814 AD. He was crowned Emperor of the Romans on Christmas Day in the year 800. His reign saw a number of reforms and steps toward civilization. He standardized coinage, standardized writing scripts, and encouraged his underlings to be organized and efficient.

Part of this latter effort led to the creation of polyptychs (or polyptyques), theoretically standardized books of accountings and inventories of the royal and ecclesiastical estates of the Empire. While they aren’t standardized or organized by modern standards, they do list things like: how much land they control, how many people work that land, what sort of obligations to they own to the estate, are they free or slaves (or in-between), what is grown on those lands, etc. They bear some similarity to the Domesday Book of 250 years later.

The University of Leicester has a wonderful website that details ten of these documents, both in the original medieval Latin and translated into English. A truly stunning resource that likes of which one does not expect to find for free on the internet.

One of my purchases at Kalamazoo, The Carolingian Economy by Adriaan Verhulst, has led me through them quite nicely, reading every nuance to get as much information as possible out of their sparse words. Reading them myself I’m left wanting more. In places they are so precise, listing tenants off by name, for example, or counting off exactly how many animals people own. Yet at the same time they are so vague, using words like “plowlands” instead of acres or similar unit of actual measurement.

They do often say something like “enough land to sow 20 modii of grain”, which could be used to get some raw numbers. I think in the future, I’ll play with some of these and see what I can come up with.