Medieval Basket Weaving

The coolest class you’ll probably never take

A few years ago, a very senior manager at my then university liked to refer in meetings to ‘Medieval Basket Weaving’ as a hypothetical example of a completely pointless course. ‘Medieval Basket Weaving’ featured regularly as shorthand for the kind of nonsense we should all be getting rid of to make sure that our departments ran efficiently (read: cheaply) and made our students into useful people.

Needless to say, I disagreed. I’ve never actually come across a course on medieval basket weaving, at least not accredited at university level, but I find the whole notion of things that are pointless to learn or teach a bit strange, and besides, baskets are cool! I did frequently find those meetings a bit pointless, though, and when that happened, I started wondering, what would a course on medieval basket weaving actually look like?

Maybe I would not have designed this course, even in my head, without this picture and the utterly inspiring analysis of it by my brilliant friend and erstwhile colleague Lesley McFadyen. It is an eel trap found during the excavations of the southern English site of Must Farm. Lesley explained how the direction of the trap revealed what season in which it was laid down, how it had been made and repaired…

For simplicity’s sake, I went with a ten-week course. I decided it would be for advanced undergraduates or MA students, as that provides the most flexibility about how to use classroom time, and it would have two hours of contact time per week, which is pretty standard in the UK. I didn’t bore me and I won’t bore you with how many credits it would carry or how many words the assignment should be…

Week 1

‘What’s in a basket?’

It may seem obvious, but what actually is a basket? How do we define one? When are baskets first described and what sorts of words are used for them? If we read about a container in a medieval source, can we be sure it is a basket and are the words used in one place related to the words used in another?

Week 2

Raw materials

What are baskets made from and how did people in the Middle Ages get it? Whole areas of woodland across Europe today were made the way they are by medieval coppicing designed to produce the materials for basket making and wicker work. Plant species could be moved and transplanted for the same reason, which we know from genetic testing, analysis of archaeological pollen samples, medieval descriptions of farms and gardens.

Week 3

Archaeological contexts

We know that people in the Middle Ages used baskets for all sorts of things but we rarely find baskets from medieval sites. When we do, it is usually because the site is either very dry or very wet, as this preserves organic materials. How have archaeological discoveries in recent years changed what we know about medieval baskets? What is still a mystery?

Week 4

Experimental archaeology

From television to Youtube channels galore, doing things the way we know or think we know people did them in the past is big business and can be extremely entertaining. It’s also a branch of archaeology with its own theories and ideas about how to do it right and what the problems are. This session asks, how much can we learn from making baskets the medieval way?

Week 5

Baskets of time

Imagine a basket as a window into time: time spent finding the materials and making the basket; designs and fashions changing over time; times of the year when the right plants are growing, when there is free time from farming or when extra baskets are needed for crops or to catch animals. We are used to saying that people in the past lived seasonally, but what did that really mean for how they used their own time, thought about the passing of time or responded to the timing of plants, animals and the planets?

Week 6

Teaching and learning

We know that people must have learned to make baskets in the Middle Ages but we don’t actually know much about how. Using evidence for other skills we can see that medieval people distinguished between practiced skills and memorised knowledge. They sometimes restricted who was allowed to know what but also wanted systems to guarantee that people knew the things they said they did. What was valuable knowledge, a dangerous skill or an everyday habit?

Week 7

Buying and selling

In medieval England, one monastery made good money weaving baskets. It seems to have been what a lot of monks spent their time doing. We know because selling the baskets made it worthwhile for the monastery to keep a record. We can guess that lots of other baskets were made for people to use within their own home and family. How does who bought and sold baskets affect what we know and why?

Week 8

Paupers’ graves and ladies’ leisure

Being buried in a basket these days in the UK is very fashionable, and quite expensive. A hundred years ago, being taken to the graveyard in a basket, which was reused for the next pauper, was a mark of extreme poverty. In the Middle Ages, baskets could be signs of status too. Who used baskets and who used boxes? Were there better baskets and commoner baskets? And how could poverty be a status symbol?

Week 9

Women’s work?

Do we think that women made baskets in the Middle Ages because we have evidence that they did? Or do we think they did because it was ‘household’ work and we think that meant women’s work? Or do we think they did because it seems a bit like knitting or weaving cloth and we know, or think, that women did most of that? Basket weaving is often associated with women in books, films and illustrations of the Middle Ages, but do we know it was? What about basket weaving by children, the elderly or disabled people? Can we find people in the things they made?

Week 10

Reduce, reuse, recycle

Looking at medieval choices can help us ask new questions about sustainability and waste. Baskets were everywhere in the medieval world, but are often invisible in written sources and archaeology precisely because they were perishable. They could also be highly valued, repaired and cared for. How do factors like the time we spend making something, the availability of the resources for making it and the emotions we invest in its use shape how we understand the idea of ‘disposability’, and was this different in the Middle Ages?

Assessment:

(Here I’ve assumed some of the freedom that institutions like to tell us we have. Realistically, I don’t think anywhere I’ve ever worked would let me actually assess students this way but I could probably strip this down to something plausibly legible and formulaic without too much trouble.)

Each student will make a basket, accompanied by a report describing the choices they made about what to use, when to do the basketry work, what they planned to use the basket for and how this affected its design, how they learned to make the basket and how this relates to what we know (and don’t know) about medieval practice.

So, there you go: the coolest course I will probably never run!

I probably won’t run it partly because I’m not actually that interested in baskets. I’d much rather run a course on coins. I also expect that a proposed course on medieval basket weaving would run into some of the same disdain which gave birth to my back-of-the-envelope idea in the first place. And that is a shame, because it misses the most important thing about learning, or at least about learning history, which is that it really doesn’t matter what you learn about.

The past isn’t some kind of ready reckoner or spot-the-difference game book. Something isn’t more useful to study because it looks like what is going on now, even if that might make students more likely to take a class because it seems ‘relevant’. History does not repeat.

The point of studying the past (I think, and I think about it a lot) is to learn a way of thinking. Let’s look back over the history of medieval basket weaving in ten unmissable weeks. Making a basket for the assessment might provide some good dinner-table conversation later in life (‘They actually made us make a basket!’). One student in a thousand might take up basket weaving for their mental health or even start a sustainable packaging business. (I’m making this course up, so shouldn’t I imagine thousands of made-up students taking it?)

Every student taking that course (I’m also imagining them all showing up and doing all the work) would come away from it having done some serious thinking about:

• How we define things and why it matters: does the word I’m using mean the same when you use it and how do we agree?

• How we know things, including from what other people say, what is left of what they do and changes left behind that nobody ever consciously intended to cause.

• How we get around not knowing things by analogy, comparison, common sense or logic and the problems each one can cause.

• How apparently small things people do (making baskets) can shape the physical world in pretty massive ways (such as changing the biodiversity of woodlands and wetlands across Europe).

• Whose stories are told (usually able-bodied men, making money) and whose stories are overlooked (like women, children, the elderly and disabled and people making life go in the everyday rather than turning a profit).

• How we learn and how we value knowledge.

There are other reasons to study history but whenever I’m asked these days why anybody should bother, I usually find myself giving some version of the programme catalogue outline for ‘Medieval Basket Weaving’: the point isn’t what we know, it’s how to know.