Tours and Dubious Facts

not just in Wales but in England too, spices 400 years ago certainly had three purposes - taste, preservation and masking of odours. Not a made up story

It is most certainly a made up story. Right, Europe's scramble in the age of exploration and colonization to get a cut of India is all about cutting out the middleman for those very expensive spices just to hide rotten meat. Right because their is no ability to store and preserve. One key feature of the use of spices in the 17th century boiled down to a conspicuous display of wealth.

It depends on the type of tour, the more academic ones tend to stick to facts and information, the ones that entertain, well, tend to be filled with entertainment, if enough people say it, then it must be true. To a degree you have to try to figure out what type of tour you are taking.

The only time I get a bit miffed on a tour is if the guide gets off telling dubious stories, and fails to relate many facts or actual history, or gets way off the rails and goes on a personal rant (Like the walking tour I took of New Orleans cemeteries, all the guide talked about was the politics around hurricane Katrina recovery)

I agree with Nigel, the use of spices in that way definitely happened.

Also you can choose any of a wide range of numbers you want for the deaths in the Irish Civil War. Firstly no-one counted at the time, and secondly there is much piecing together of facts and data now, a century on. It feels like revisionist history.

Some sources give a starkly higher figure than the guide. If the author of that piece had been leading the tour and told me 1450 deaths I would have openly questioned him. Equally the guide IMO should have qualified his figure with the word "estimated".

Do you mean just the Civil War, or the events of the linked War of Independence and the Civil War? One source I am seeing cites 806 deaths in County Cork alone between the two conflicts. The number of UK troops said to be lost looks very low to me. The figures are heavily masked because even the CWGC counts the troops killed in the War of Independence among WW1 losses. Just from my own very, very detailed research into WW1 in Cumbria where I have tried to split out Ireland from foreign losses (as well as attempting to sub divide Palestine and other 'side conflicts' including Colonial India) I am deeply sceptical of the cited figures in the research I can see. That is before we consider the fact that the IWM has a definition of the Irish conflicts as throughout the time of British Colonial rule- 1801 to 1923. 'The Troubles' are detailed separately.

The free tours are definitely doing this. Especially those run by folks who don’t have to be licensed. I see and hear many in my own city, spouting facts as to titillate or frighten people.

It’s not my money but if I’m on a tour I will sometimes ask about something I know is wrong.

in Colonial times nails were so expensive that they would burn down the houses to recover their nails. Pure bunk.

You might be interested to read a Virginia law in the 1640s that forbade the burning of buildings for the nails ...
Read Act VII here https://books.google.com/books?id=ykIVAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA291&dq=%22to%20burne%20any%20necessary%20houseing%20%20that%20are%20scituated%20therevpon%22

Yes, 1644-45 General Assembly's Act VII. It was a law about the abandonment of property. The issue in the colony mid-century was the general poor construction of houses, the shortage of housing for new arrivals into the colony and an effort to solve that problem making it illegal to burn structures when abandoning property and paying in nails for structures in nails -- the little tiny grain of truth within the myth was colonial authorities paying off in nails. This was also a period where house construction evolved in the colony from a low nail consumption to high volume of nail consumption construction with wattle and daub infill going over to clapboard cladded houses. Also burnt houses are not going to render very many useable nails many twisted and mangled. Those nails used in the construction of doors and shutters also were clinched over.

As far as an actual price a historian at UC Davis settled on 4d for the price of a pound of nails in the first half of the 17th century. The principle cost being the material over that of labor.

It is worth considering the poor laws, poor relief and the ability to put children of poor families into workshops... like naileries. Then jump to the future and Adam Smith's comparison of blacksmiths and nailers.
Book 1 Chapter 1 of The Wealth of Nations --
"A common smith, who, though accustomed to handle the hammer, has never been used to make nails, if upon some particular occasion he is obliged to attempt it, will scarce, I am assured, be able to make above two or three hundred nails in a day, and those too very bad ones. A smith who has been accustomed to make nails, but whose sole or principal business has not been that of a nailer, can seldom with his utmost diligence make more than eight hundred or a thousand nails in a day. I have seen several boys under twenty years of age who had never exercised any other trade but that of making nails, and who, when they exerted themselves, could make, each of them, upwards of two thousand three hundred nails in a day. The making of a nail, however, is by no means one of the simplest operations. The same person blows the bellows, stirs or mends the fire as there is occasion, heats the iron, and forges every part of the nail: In forging the head too he is obliged to change his tools."

King James liked a steak so much that he knighted it "Sir Loin".

What is wrong with a guide occasionally adding a bad pun in his spiel to elicit a groan.

I went on the "free" tour in Frankfurt once, with my son. It was the most cringy way to spend 2 hours. Every single fact that the guide told the group was incorrect. All of it. Of course no one on the tour cared cause they don't know anything about the city anyway, but it was awful. All of it was easy stuff to learn too, like when events happened or when were churches, etc. built.
You do not need a license in Germany to be a tour guide. Anyone can set up shop.

OP, I enjoyed your historical account regarding nails. This is facts? Because on the face of it it seems far-fetched mathmatically that a blacksmith could make that many nails in a day. 800 nails in a 10 hour day without any breaks at all is less than a nail a minute. This is on the low end and nowhere near > 2000 nails a day.
Really possible? Or is tour guide fact checking fraught with error posssibilies also? How much did Adam Smith really know about nail making or is he embellishing his writings with dubious facts?

treemoss2
I do tend to accept Adam Smith's account. I absolutely belive that boys as nailers were probably hitting upwards of 2300 nails in a day. But I tend to think that a blacksmith getting to 800 nails in a day may be tipping into being fantastical. I think Adam Smith's does as well. Look at what he said, "A smith who has been accustomed to make nails, but whose sole or principal business has not been that of a nailer, can seldom with his utmost diligence make more than eight hundred or a thousand nails in a day." Seldom and utmost diligence are key there. There isn’t a lot of primary source material available, nail making was mundane work of unskilled laborers. The difference between blacksmiths and nailers will be the nature of the work. Naileries and nailers were product specific and they're optimized just for nail production. Blacksmiths were material specific, they worked iron and the work they did would be random.

We can look to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, where he established a nailery in the 1790. In its nearly 30 year operation it was worked by up to 14 enslaved boys aged 10 years to 16 years. In 1795 the shop was putting out 8,000-10,000 nails daily. In 1810 the shop produced 6 tons of nails.

Making nails, my best time is 13 seconds, but I usually make a nail in 20-30 seconds. But I'm slow, I'm a smith not a nailer, I'm adapting blacksmithing tools to nail making, and I work in a museum and talk too much. For me a day of just nail making will be about 100.

My one caution is not to apply our modern concept of a work day to historical workdays.

What is wrong with a guide occasionally adding a bad pun in his spiel to elicit a groan.

Sam, not a thing at all! I love humor. I have chickens, work metal, make fire with flint and steel, and this past spring and summer I got a lot of milage out of Minecraft & Minecraft the movie jokes. BUT in the example I gave above, mine wasn't a history tour and the way it was told I think the guide really believed it to be true.

VAP, your last post nailed it.

"the way it was told I think the guide really believed it to be true" - The guide is misguided, I'm afraid, as the "Sir Loin" pun predates King James by quite a few years. A guide in Caerleon told our group that it was first used at the Round Table in 528 AD by Sir Madoc Laughalot, who was making fun of King Arthur's weakness for a good steak. Our guide seemed honest enough to me.

Several years ago when I was on a tour of Cleveland harbor on the GoodTime II and we were sailing past Huntington Bank Field home of the Cleveland Browns, our guide noted that Moses Cleveland who is reputedly the founder of Cleveland foolishly donated the The Ark of the Covenant to the Pittsburgh Steelers who then buried the Ark in the end zone of Heinz field and this is why the Cleveland Browns never won the Super Bowl. We are cursed.

Some say this is a dubious fact but I'd beg to differ. What else could explain our inability to win the Super Bowl? Based on this is seems quite possible to me that nails in Colonial Williamsburg could be quite pricey.

Happy travels.

I believe the correct story is this. One day King James said to Sir Loin, "I am hungry, bring me some meat, with no spices and isn't rotten." Sir Loin grab a slice of beef, stab it with a stake and cooked it over a flame where the blacksmith was making nails. Took it to King James where King James proclaimed this was a good piece of meat. "I'll shall call it a Sirloin cooked on a stake", he proclaimed. Later, King James said to another bring me one of those Sirloin Meat Stakes, but over time it just became Sirloin Steak.

Now there is a second part of the story about a potato that fell into the blacksmith's fire and became baked and was smeared with butter, sour milk and salt and pepper spices to hide the burned taste. But, I'm not sure that one is true. LOL

Do you think the Earl of Sandwich and Sir Loin ever get together for a meal?

Great one Jo , thus is really a fun topic I am really enjoying.

How do you suss out when you are being fed a line of BS?

I look to see if I find it on Facebook or Twitter. If I do, it's BS.

The Earl of Sandwich and Sir Loin probably have a Ham Sandwich [translation- Ham and Sandwich are two places in Kent close to each other, there is a famous road sign which reads Ham 1/2 mile, Sandwich 3 miles]

Like the Met Police horse in sunglasses that I had to Google for the other day, I had to look for the Ham Sandwich sign. Here it is.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ham_Sandwich_road_sign,_Kent.jpg

I understand that ketchup was created to add to meat that was on the edge of spoiling, when refrigeration was not easy due to electric refrigerators. I saw this on history channel, "The History of Food."

Threadware’s steerage off the rails has no peer and followups are surreal. Thanks, all for the most excellent laughs. I’m just glad I wasn’t in mid sip or something, I would have made a mess for sure.