fire

Indeed the hand saw is frequently used in our medieval village. But we use the axe even more: for construction wood, fire wood, you name it. The saw dust and small pieces of wood which remain are not thrown away...

Two methods were used to make fire. One was by striking a special piece of iron (strike-a-light) on a piece of flint. The other method is by friction of wood on wood. The strike-a-light was most common. Sometimes people used the back of a knife to strike sparks. Friction of wood on wood (“the old-fashioned way”) was used at religious occasions...

Medieval people were used to the smoke, like the modern city people the exhaust smoke of cars. Furthermore we should suppose, in the Middle Ages people could make a fire with much less smoke then...

The stake did not serve as place to burn witches, but the people at the end of the Bronze Age were generally cremated, ashes were collected in an urn.

Roughly seen, there are two methods of fire making. The oldest way is the fire drilling: one mounts a wooden peg on a board of wood and rotates this peg quite fast. This way, the temperature rises where the peg touches the board...

We cannot say for sure. We presume cooking from the Neolithic on when they started to use ceramic vessels – they prepared various gruels or soups, but it was possible...

They did not have chimneys in our sense of the word, but from at least the Bronze Age we presume that makeshift chimneys, for example made from wicker and daubed with clay would take smoke from hearths through ceilings...

It is a protection for the roof, to keep sparks from getting up in to it. Right now we have a piece of wool cloth, in our last house we had animal skin. As soon as we can we are building a frame of willow which we are going to coat with clay.

Well, from what we’ve seen we don’t need any more openings for the smoke to get out. The ones in each end creates a draft which makes the smoke rise up to the ceiling and escape easily without allowing any to be disturbing.

With wood and turf. A hearth can be found in virtually all excavated houses. Often this is a round spot with a lot of charcoal and orange burned clay. The hearths sometimes were constructed on small platforms...