Alex Langland's Cræft: An Inquiry into the origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts (2017) is fun to read and filled with many illuminating asides about numerous everyday matters in pre-modern life. For those of us interested in early medieval Europe, it's a treasure trove of suggestions for understanding the ways things were done or might have been done. I very much appreciate that this trained medievalist has chosen to write for a wider audience. He has solid hands-on knowledge of an astonishing array of subjects, sometimes gained during his work with BBC on programs regarding historical farming at various periods.
While he devotes attention and care to the traditional ways of tanning hides and producing varying qualities of leather, he does not explore the making of parchment or vellum for manuscripts, nor the manner of production of inks, writing instruments, or crafting environments. I felt this lack, because the production of manuscripts is an example of the intricate inter-dependencies of medieval cræft and orders of knowledge, trade, and wide cultural resonances. On the other hand, Langlands is a trained archaeologist, so texts are often for him a secondary concern.
I was left a little uneasy with the wording "true meaning," perhaps a subtitle inserted on an editor's insistence insofar as to those outside of the study of early medieval vernacular languages, cræft won't mean much. There were and are many meanings of this crafts and modes of production. Who is to say which of them is "true?" Langlands is at his best when he pursues the entanglements of environment, local customs, skills, and needs to show how almost all everyday customs and objects for ordinary people were sourced locally in reasonably sustainable practices. The truths he points to are practical insight gained at the intersection of skill, material, location, and tradition, a deeper sense of cræft as a form of life.
Langland's concern for the destructiveness of modern and post-modern industrial practices (especially plastics) is well-warranted. He failed to note, however, the medieval and early modern agricultural practices which degraded some lands and environments. Granted that far smaller populations generated less negative environmental impact, it is still worth noting the inefficiencies and frictions of medieval and early modern societies that motivated some populations to move out to new horizons, and perhaps come into lasting conflicts with previous residents. Why did, for example, so many Norse leave Scandinavia? Could patterns of over-populations and customs of ever-smaller land holdings for agriculture have played a role? Was there sustained environmental damage done in some relatively fragile nordic locations, such that agricultural, hunting, and fishing yields diminished to the point that people emigrated?
I do enormously appreciate Langland's insistence that many traditional practices and cræfts embodied knowledge and a real wisdom concerning available materials, and that medieval people were far more clever and aware of their surroundings and impacts than modern scholars are often likely to credit. They were hardly stupid; for the same reasons, many sought to leave subsistence or exchange agriculture because of precarity, rising social expectations, and increasing awareness of the outside world and its possibilities. It wasn't an easy life.
One notes that Langlands does not discuss traditional cræft of medicine, healing, pain management, dentistry, or the challenges of plague and pestilence. Since the 18th century it's hard to argue that standards of living have not risen for a very great portion of the world's populations, and even deeply impoverished populations have more access to more resources than they might have had in centuries past. It's also impossible to avoid the realization that the modern and post-modern methods of meeting human needs are not sustainable. In a coming era of population stability or decline, returning to many traditional manners of living and working may help to alleviate some of the worst impacts of global warming (if anything can do that at all). No one will want to go backwards to traditional medicine, however, no matter how attractive natural remedies are. Selective pre-modern modes of life and production might well be introduced to leaven and reduce the impact of modern or post-modern modes.
What I learn again from Langlands is humility: the ancients and pre-moderns knew far more and far better than often is understood or realized by those outside rather narrow scholarly circles. To re-learn and re-member sustainable agriculture and societies that are environmentally low-impact will require unlearning a lot of facile and pseudo-knowledge and attitudes commonplace in complacent post-modernity. Langland's book is an engaging, readable, and positive wake-up call, even as global catastrophe seems unavoidable.