When I shared yesterday’s post about making the pin bone with the Elizabethan Costuming Bees over on Facebook, EC Bee Kat Ferneley posted some wonderful pinners bones from her personal collection. These are “mudlark” finds, which means they were discovered by someone wandering the tide flats of the Thames.

She was kind enough to put them into a public album for sharing and you can find them on the Renaissance Artisan Facebook page. (While you’re there, do join up, won’t you?)

Two Things I Learned Right Away

1. Square: I was amazed to note that these wonderful extant bones are cut all cattywompus, off the grain, off-square, and just generally without much care for how flat/square they end up.
2. Tool marks: The cuts have obvious tool marks from their manufacture. Obvious scratches from the saw teeth that cut them probably came from a butcher’s saw (or so I opine), and finer scratches that quite obviously came from files rather than stones. I will test these conclusions as best I can to match the real tool marks against those I create, but I’m fairly confident in my current opinions.

More later, of course.

– Scott

Today’s cover image comes to us from Dr. Le Gear’s stock book: comprising a description of the general care, feeding and watering, stabling and breeding, and all the diseases and their treatment, of stock in Texas and the South, published 1897 (Public Domain) from the Library of Congress, via Wikimedia.