Heat (17 page)

I stare for some time, hovering inches above her glass case, examining her dry skin. I search for tattoos, a common feature in bog people, but I find none. More importantly I search for a connection to the early Iron Age, to a time that laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution, a time when people were learning the basic secrets of manufacturing. With her mummified body in front of me, I try to imagine her in life. I try to understand how Yde may have lived and thought. I want to reach through the glass, to feel her preserved skin. I want to smell her long dead hair.

My son has but one word for my behavior toward Yde. “Creepy,” he says, and he backs away.

By bicycle, I ride to an Iron Age village close to the peat mines described by Kortooms. Two thousand years ago this was the site of an actual village, but today it is a living-history museum organized by a group of teachers, a reenactment of life in the time of Yde Girl, the time when people in this region were learning how to smelt iron from iron ore and to beat the hot metal into axes, knives, and jewelry.

The museum is surrounded by a wooden palisade. Inside sits a taste of Yde Girl’s life—impressive huts made from wood and mud with thick roofs of thatch, a pigsty, dugout canoes, chickens and ducks and a goose, piles of firewood in ten-inch lengths. Dirt carpets the floor. There are baskets of acorns and hard white cabbages in the shadows. Along the walls are bunks with loose hay instead of mattresses and a few pieces of dirty sheepskin for blankets. The bunks surround a fire circle in the middle of the floor, an open hearth of built-up earth and small stones.

Chimneys would not come to this part of the world for at least a thousand years. The Iron Age hearth sent its smoke upward, rising to find its way outside through vents just beneath the peak of the roof. Firedogs—props of stone or clay—kept burning wood off the ground, allowing air to pass through from beneath, to feed the flames from below, and the people knew the value of dry wood. They knew that dry wood burned clean, with little smoke, and gave more heat than green wood. Soot does not stain the beams or the thatch at the top of the hut.

I try to think of Yde Girl here, probably blue eyed, her auburn hair filthy, possibly matted. She would have smelled of livestock and humanity and smoke. She may have tended sheep and goats and perhaps a cow or two. There were dogs underfoot. And small children—birth control was nonexistent, and infant mortality was high, necessitating high replacement rates. Would she have suffered from fleas? She would have worked in fields of wheat and barley and oats and various vegetables. She would have been sent into the nearby forests and meadows to find berries and edible leaves and tubers and mushrooms. She was likely tasked, on a regular basis, with grinding grain, pounding it with a heavy mortar and pestle of wood or maybe stone, or turning a grinding wheel, the beginnings of mechanization. Her hands were calloused.

The fire in the middle of her floor burned most of the time. Someone—perhaps everyone, perhaps Yde Girl—spent untold hours gathering, cutting, and splitting wood and maybe digging peat. Fuel may have been a limiting factor for the village. Too many houses, too many fires, and the nearby wood supply grew lean. As the village expanded, its inhabitants traveled farther and farther for fuel. At the end of the day, Yde Girl sat somewhere in the hut, mesmerized by the flames, feeling the warmth, watching a thin stream of smoke meander toward the openings in the roof.

Then something went wrong. She was strangled. Her body was dumped in the bog.

Outside, scattered around the village, I find more open hearths but also a clay oven, shaped like an igloo, two feet tall and three feet around. Someone like Yde Girl would have loaded the oven with wood and tended the fire while the clay walls warmed, the Iron Age equivalent of preheating. When the fire burned out, someone pushed rough dough inside and shoved a wooden door into place. The bread baked.

Nearby, a fish smoker stands, square sided with a door for fuel and wooden slats for a roof. Hanging from a stake in front of the oven: a fish, petrified by smoke, gray and dried, its eyes gone, mouth gaping, a piscine version of Yde Girl.

Near the smoker, I find a charcoal kiln. The kiln is little more than a dirt mound, eighteen inches tall and covered by grass. Fuel was stacked in a hole in the ground, sticks leaning against sticks to form a teepee, and lit. The teepee was covered with turf, the supply of oxygen choked. The wood smoldered beneath, sending out white smoke at first, then gray smoke, and finally black smoke. In a process still used today, water vapor baked out of the wood, followed by the volatiles—anything that turns to gas at temperatures close to seven hundred degrees—leaving behind blackened friable chunks of charcoal, almost 100 percent carbon, a necessary ingredient for the smelting of iron ore, or the kind of ore known as bog iron.

In wet ground near the village, a trickling spring of groundwater brought dissolved iron to the surface, where it found oxygen. The iron combined with oxygen to become a reddish stone, an iron oxyhydroxide, a chunk of goethite. It became bog iron. It became the raw material that went into a primitive smelter.

A few steps from the kiln stands an Iron Age smelter, a cylinder of clay, its three-inch-thick walls reinforced with sticks. Bog iron and charcoal could be dumped in through an opening at the top of the kiln.

I talk to a docent in a coarse dress, a dedicated reenactor, her hair tangled and one cheek smudged with soot and her fingernails rough. She makes me think of Yde Girl. Her English falters, one word at a time, each requiring conscious effort, but it outweighs my Dutch. She describes herself as “an experiment archaeologue.” She is a teacher but works here now, in part because of her love of fire, her fascination with fire. “It is what you can see in the fire,” she says, “and about what you can know.”

She tells me about smelting. She saw it done once. Fellow reenactors converged here from several countries, people with an interest in, and a knowledge of, primitive smelting. The little smelter’s fire burned for three days and three nights. Into the smelter, the reenactors dumped bog iron. Repeatedly they dumped in charcoal. Repeatedly they added wood. Temperatures would have pushed two thousand degrees.

The charcoal produced carbon monoxide. The carbon monoxide, heated, stripped the oxygen from the bog iron to become carbon dioxide, leaving behind increasingly pure iron. The iron—droplets of liquid metal—fell to the bottom of the smelter and floated in a pool of liquefied silica sand, liquid slag, fayalite. The droplets of metal joined together. The slag, as it accumulated, was drained from a small opening in the bottom of the smelter.

After three days, the iron makers let the fire die. They broke through the side of the smelter. Inside, they found metal stuck to the clay walls. They scraped it off and took the iron to a smithing hut just behind the smelter.

The docent leads me into the smithing hut. A pair of twenty-inch-long bellows, their bags made of coarse, yellowing leather, sits on a table. In front of the bellows, a clay clamp stands ready to hold heated metal. Here the reenactors heated and pounded their iron into a useful tool. That tool—the result of three days of work, of well over a ton of carbon emissions, of the skills of a team of reenactors escaping from their twenty-first-century lives to test themselves, to apply their collective wisdom in the re-creation of Iron Age technologies—is a single spear tip, a few inches long.

Two thousand years ago, Yde Girl may have watched someone beat iron into useful shapes, sending up sparks and flashes and emitting bangs and hisses as he dropped hot iron into water, its heat suddenly quenched. Technology like this must have appeared magical to Yde Girl. The smith was almost certainly a man. As a specialist, a man who worked metal, he likely wandered from village to village, among the first of the tradesmen, likely a storyteller, by virtue of the demanding nature of his job and the anonymity of a wandering life something of a glutton compared to the men of the village.

The docent leaves, moving back to an open fire where she cooks dough balls for other visitors. When she is gone, I return to the smelter. I poke around in the ashes, hoping to find a missed bit of iron. I find a rusty nail, its presence there inexplicable, but no raw metal, nothing left over from the Iron Age, and I move on.

In 1744, Benjamin Franklin worried about fuel shortages. “Wood,” he wrote, “our common Fewel, which within these 100 Years might be had at every Man’s Door, must now be fetch’d near 100 Miles to some Towns, and makes a very considerable Article in the Expence of Families.”

Still worried four decades later, he wrote, “We must have a chimney in every room.” He worried that every servant would soon want a fire. Visiting Europe, he worried that the demand for fire had consumed all the firewood in England and would “soon render fuel extremely scarce and dear in France, if the use of coals be not introduced in the latter kingdom as it has been in the former.”

In the former kingdom, in England, coal had been in use for some time. To people accustomed to burning peat, the burning of soft coal would have been no more than a small step, part of a natural progression. From soft coal to hard coal would have been an even smaller step. As early as 1228, a London street was called Sacoles Lane, or Sea Coals Lane. In the early days, before mining, coal was found at the surface where veins were exposed along bluffs on the seashore and along riverbanks. It may have been called sea coal to distinguish it from charcoal, which at times was also called coal, or it may have been called sea coal because it was transported by ship to London.

But by the 1500s there were more people, all hungry for coal and the things that its heat could make. Kilns built for iron smelting deforested Kent, Surrey, and Sussex.

By necessity coal found its way from smelting furnaces to domestic use. The transition from wood to coal required chimneys. The smoke from dry wood was manageable—some even considered it aromatic. Low-grade coal, on the other hand, produced an acrid smoke that no one would consider aromatic. It was a smell that no one could love. The era of the open hearth, the era of a fire on the floor sending smoke through an opening in the eaves, died.

Within a lifetime, coal became known to common people. From a man named Harrison, writing in 1577, lamenting the loss of the open hearth: “Now we have many chimnyes, and yet our tenderlings complaine of rewmes, catarres, and poses; then had we none but rere doses, and our heads did never ake. For as the smoke in those days was supposed to be a sufficient hardening for the timber of the house, so it was reputed a far better medicine to keep the good man and his family from the quacks and the pose.”

In 1661, John Evelyn wrote his pamphlet
Fumifugium, or The inconveniencie of the aer and smoak of London dissipated together with some remedies humbly proposed by J.E. esq. to His Sacred Majestie, and to the Parliament now assembled
. In it, he compared London to Mount Aetna, the Court of Vulcan, Stromboli, and the Suburbs of Hell. Soot coated the city. It found its way inside, Evelyn wrote, “insinuating itself into our very secret Cabinets, and most precious Repositories.” Raindrops fell thick and black, picking up soot and coal dust from the London air as they fell. Coal-thickened air destroyed gardens. It soiled clothes. It led to the tradition of black umbrellas.

But the Crown profited from coal. King Charles I, before the civil wars, held a monopoly on coal. The Crown taxed chimneys. If you owned a chimney—and that was the only way to burn coal—you paid.

From Lord Macaulay, writing in the 1800s, a century after the chimney tax was repealed: “The tax on chimneys was, even among direct imposts, peculiarly odious.” The tax collector—the chimneyman—could barge into a home and search each room for chimneys, demanding payment of taxes on the spot. “The poorer householders,” Macaulay wrote, “were frequently unable to pay their hearthmoney to the day. When this happened their furniture was distrained without mercy.”

Old women cursed the chimneyman. In exchange the chimneyman hauled away whatever he could carry. “The single bed of a poor family,” Macaulay wrote, “had sometimes been carried away and sold.”