Gone Medieval - How Everyday People Built Medieval Japan

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

When it comes to Japan in the Middle Ages, we think mostly of stories of the Shogun, samurai and ninjas. But for a society dominated by the court and military elite, much was dependent on the labour of skilled people. In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Eleanor Janega talks to Dr. Paula Curtis, to find out more particularly about Japan’s metal casters who rose to technical and social preeminence, creating strategic ties and trade networks that would have an influence for centuries to come. This episode was edited by Ella Blaxill and produced by Rob Weinberg.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to God Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga and today's episode we'll be speaking with Dr. Paula Curtis, a historian of pre-modern Japan at UCLA. Today we'll be talking about artisans in late medieval Japan, how they form trade networks, what it meant to be an ordinary but skilled person in Japanese society, and why we in the global north often want to overlook. regular people to tell stories about samurai. Paula, thank you so much for being here. I'm absolutely delighted to chat Japan. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Let's just start off in the way that

I think we have to, because I think it's pretty fair to say that the average person in the global north, unfortunately, doesn't really have an opportunity to study Japanese history very often. And with that in mind, can you help us unpack the term late medieval Japan? Because it's pretty laden with meaning, right? It absolutely is. As many of your listeners may know, the quote-unquote medieval period for Japan scholars

stretches from roughly the 12th century to the end of the 16th century. And, you know, if you want to get really technical, some people say it is 1185 to about 1603 or 1615. And this is because the conventional periodization schema aligns with the rise and fall of political institutions and the concept of quote unquote medieval was borrowed liberally from Western European history around the 19th century when Japanese thinkers, scholars, and politicians were trying to find ways to draw parallels between Japan and Western powers

as it entered, you know, the period of quote unquote modernization. But in fact, you know, the Japanese translation for the term medieval first appears in works about European history in around the 1870s. And it didn't even get applied to Japanese history for another couple of decades. So if we were going to talk about medieval history or the medieval period as it happens over in Europe, what's going on in Japan before we hit late medieval or medieval? Because from what I understand, you know, as someone who's only ever done any work on early modern Japan, you know, I'm one of those, I'm the worst. So first you have the classical period and that goes right up to medieval, am I right?

And that's a classical period. We see a lot of sort of Chinese influence in Japan. Am I right about that? Yes and no. Perfect. All right. We're talking about the formation of, if we want to call it, state in, say, you know, ancient to classical Japan, the ditsidio system of government that is in place is highly influenced by Chinese models.

There are notable exceptions. There are certain government offices that the Yamato Imperial Chieftaincy that eventually becomes the imperial family puts in place but it's not a fully cynicized structure, I should say. And we do have this kind of oligarchic period in the length of classical Japan. And as we shift into what people call quote unquote medieval, this aligns with the establishment of a diarchy, right? When you have the medieval warrior government also being formed after a civil war, the Genpei War.

And at that point, although popular culture likes to call this the age of the warrior, we're actually talking about dual government structures, neither of which has full control over any particular population. So by and large, the imperial court is running things for courtiers, is setting up some of these broader laws that directly impact the people that it's dealing with in Kyoto, while the Kamakura government in the early medieval period is over to the northeast and creating laws and structures that largely impact warriors. So there is this kind of flexibility in place in that sometimes their areas of control overlap or their legal systems overlap and cause conflicts because who are we actually listening to for particular things and whose rules should take supremacy in certain conflicts. But that is a very complicated way of partitioning out different elements of society.

And the later that we get into the broader medieval period, You know, we have the overthrowing of the early medieval government and the establishment of a new one that migrates to Kyoto. And so then you have an imperial court and warrior government simultaneously ruling from the same city and in conflict sometimes and other times working together well. And gradually, both of those central institutions will weaken and will see the rise of regional warriors and regional overlords that are much more powerful. And so it's a very complicated shift, but there's never one real government to rule them all, I should say. And then there's the religious institutions as well, which have power in their own right. So there are lots of different ways of looking at this, but the idea that it is the age of the warrior, I got questions.

And, you know, the popular idea that warriors are controlling everything is really not that accurate. This is something that I want to dig into, right? because I think there's this real tendency for people to relate to whatever is happening in medieval Japan. The thing that I hear over and over again, especially from non-experts who probably don't actually know anything about Japanese history, so they'll say, oh, well, feudal Japan, right? That's something that they always like to bring up. And, you know, even when you're talking to a nerd like me who's like, oh, I don't really use the term feudalism. I don't think that it's useful.

There's no such thing as, you know, feudal European society. You will still see people say, oh, but Japan was futile. And there are these varying powerhouses and people who are controlling things. But do you want to unpack some cultural baggage around using the term feudal? I know you do. I know you do. Yeah, it's one of my favorite drunken party rants. So in terms of why we get the term feudal, I mean, it's tied into the importation of the idea of the medieval from the West. And if we're talking about this from the 19th century perspective, the idea of having a

middleing age, bookended by two historical eras in the sense that we use in European history, is not an indigenous concept to Japan. You know, it had to be created prior to the 19th century. There are many different and overlapping, even conflicting ways of telling time and thinking about transitions. But part of the benefit of thinking in these, what they would consider more global comparative terms at the time, is tied up in the project of nationalism and modernization, because if Japan had a medieval period, if it had a feudal system, and of course had gone through these Western stages of socio-political and economic development, then it too could be part of this global consortium of modern nation states. So this is where we see the genesis of this

as Japanese thinkers and historians are trying to consider what are the terms we're going to use to talk about our history when we present it to the rest of the world. And that's absolutely part of it. And this, of course, is a little bit more complicated as well by later historical shifts, namely post-war changes and post-war limitations, or I should say the pre-war limitations and wartime limitations on scholarship that happened. So, I mean, not to skip over decades of things that are happening in Japan, but when we do get to World War II and we get to this fairly complex historical moment, you have the rise of right-wing military government and this also influences scholarship because we have quite a deal of censorship, not only in

everyday publications, but historians were encouraged to produce pro-imperial works with nativist ideas and anything that was or hinted at leftist leanings was suppressed. And this is not to say that prior to this, we didn't have a lot of comparative work, work that we might consider as adhering to ideas of Marxist development, for example. There are quite prominent scholars like the historian Asa Kawakhanichi, who was actually good friends with Mark Block, who wrote extensively, wrote him letters. They were great pen pals. He wrote extensively about feudalism in Japan. He was actually the first native Japanese professor. He became a professor at Yale in 1910. So this is kind of a stage that is set. And then

on the Japan side, you know, during the war period, you're not allowed to focus on certain topics. And once the war ends, we have this hard reactionary left turn for medieval scholarship that's like, now we can talk about Marxism. Now we can talk about feudalism at length. And so there's this couple of decades that follow where we have institutional histories as the primary form of history that focus on warrior rule, on agriculturalists being oppressed. And so much of the scholarship is samurai on violence and peasants, as it were, to the large exclusion of people who were not elites or not farmers. And merchants and artisans were marginalized in medieval studies for quite some time and seen as more important in the early modern period, this kind of teleological reading

that we may be familiar with for the medieval early modern transition to commercialism. that is very much tied to Marxist ideologies in a kind of loose sense. So, you know, the stakes of medieval were tied up in nationalism and tied up in these kind of larger intellectual and political trends. And for that reason, we see both before and after the war, these deep-seeded frameworks of Marxist ideology and feudalism that greatly impact what kind of scholarship gets produced. and we don't actually see a shift in what gets produced and a more kind of turn towards social history

and alternative forms of source materials for historical study until, say, the 60s or the 70s in Japan. Wow, okay. Well, I mean, I suppose I say wow, but at the same time, I mean, this is kind of also what happens with the European desire to do the same thing. I mean, you absolutely see similar things. I mean, I would say specifically working with,

with the Czech historiography, as I do. Super similar, you know, when the Nazis take over Czechoslovakia, you're only allowed to say right-wing things. You're only allowed to talk about how Czechs are actually just kind of a type of German, or they just got in the way of Germans. And then after the war, you're only allowed to talk about how this is all a feudal society and blah, blah, blah, you know, and so there are all these specific things that are the accepted ways to talk about history.

And I guess it just goes to show how this idea, if feudalism, this real design, or to talk about a society where there's this impression from above. It's a super European idea, but that doesn't mean that other people can't take it and run with it if it means they want to get into the global conversation, I suppose. Yeah. And what's really fascinating is we often say in the field that English language scholarship, the Anglophone world tends to be a half or a whole decade behind what's going on in the Japan side of things. And when you see area studies and Japanese studies really start flourishing in, say, the 60s and 70s, some of these foundational scholars, John Whitney Hall, Jeffrey Mass, they are focusing almost exclusively on

institutional histories, on big warrior guy history. And this is inherited from this post-war scholarship, but at the same time, they're not about to lean into the Marxism side of it because of all of the politics outside of Japan. But they do take this feudal framework and this idea of warriors, peasants, and oppression and focus almost exclusively on that for, you know, a couple of decades at least. Yeah. Okay. So this is it. All of history is just like some big guys punching each other. And that's history, baby. And then like you can critique that. But it's an interesting one, right? Because I like the critique. You know, you and I are quite similar in terms of our research interests in that we're interested in looking at normal people. But there is this other way of doing

history where it's like, oh, well, I'm still looking at the big powerful guy, but I'm going to call him a jerk. And it's like, all right, well, you're still just looking at him. Come on. I want to be fair. There are some like big sexy stories in Japanese history and in this era that come out that make it tempting telly stars, like the Mongol invasions that happen or in like, come on, interfamily rivalries. You know, it's all very Romeo and Juliet. It's sexy. It's fun. I mean, there are other ways of doing those histories that are absolutely fascinating. I had people above me in my PhD program. Kevin Gouge was focusing on this institutional legacy of Jeff Mass and thinking about how these different warrior families are developing, what inheritance

looks like. And he was doing it from an environmental perspective in thinking about what is the difference between someone who's, you know, living up on a mountainside and a much more isolated and difficult terrain versus someone out on the planes and how are they situated and what does that mean for the types of alliances they make? Or if you're talking about the work of Hitomi Tonamura, you're talking about, well, when we say samurai, why aren't we talking about women, right? And not women warriors, but the fact that if we're thinking of samurai as a social group, women are included in that. And what are they doing in supporting, you know, family structure and education and negotiations of social and political nature.

And so getting beyond the big man with the big personality who's so attractive in popular culture and really fleshing out what it means to understand the broader patterns of society. Okay, all right. So this is perfect. Speaking of understanding the broader patterns of society, like the things that people tend to talk about is you hear about Shoguns or you hear about the Daimyo, you hear about samurai. So we're not going to do that, all right? We're just going to introduce them and be like, no, no one gets to hear about that.

They exist. They exist. That's kind of the backdrop. You have these powerful families. You have these powerful governments, sometimes more than one at a time. But you and I are lovers of ordinary people, regular people. And you also, more specifically than me, know a lot about artisans. So today, I want to talk about this because I think it's ridiculously cool.

And I guess so I've got to start you off with a kind of. of broad question that could take us forever, which is when you say that you work on late medieval artisans, what do you mean? Because an artisan in Europe, that would just be weird in Japan, but then you do see overlap. So there are all kinds of commerce happening that we wouldn't necessarily expect to see in the global north. I mean, I would say yes, they are ridiculously cool. My work focuses on metal casting, artisan organizations, but what counts as an artisan is absolutely part the first chapter of the book I'm working on, because it is so complicated. And in modern Japanese, when we use the term chokunin for artisan, it evokes what I think it also does in English as well,

which is the idea of like a crafts person. Not to debate artist versus artisan here, but this is a kind of maker. You know, you envision a carpenter or a lacquerer or a potter. And this image has a history that also goes back to the early modern period, which for your listener, in Japan, roughly the 17th to 19th century. And it's during this period when we get the idea of the four occupations, which is an idea inherited from China. And in the early modern period, it's a legal classification that divided society into these four classes,

warriors, farmers, artisans, and merchants, with merchants on the bottom because they, you know, don't do anything or produce anything useful, according to society. But there's also discriminated categories. which are people who are kind of outcasts that fall outside those four categories. But again, this is an early modern concept and a formalized legal designation. So if we look at what's going on in the classical and medieval periods, it's much more fluid. And there's no formal or even

unified linguistic designations that are telling us who is or isn't an artisan. It's not even until the 14th century that we have some of the earliest known uses of the term Shokunin, although we don't even know if that's how it was pronounced at that time. This is the first time we get an explicit description of a group of people who might be considered by this modern definition, artisans. But, you know, one of the most widely recognized sources of information on medieval artisans, if we want to call them that, is a series of illuminated poetry competition scrolls that were produced between the 13th and 16th centuries.

And they're known today by the title Shokunin Utawase, so artisan or various occupation poetry competition. It's a clunky thing to translate, but these are basically hand scrolls that provide a visual accompaniment to a literary composition, so text and image, and it's a sort of riff on the conventional, poetic, practice of utta-a-wasse or poetry competition, which is a very courtly pastime for aristocrats since like the 8th century. And what these scrolls are doing is there a production of a kind of

faux-imagined poetry competition between artisans. So it's courtiers writing in the voices of artisans pretending to be courtiers. I love this. If that makes sense. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're talking about two teams of, in a traditional Utawase, aristocrats, but in this case, supposedly artisans, competing with each other as team left and team right to compose on a predetermined poetic theme. And then there's a judge who writes the merits and demerits. But basically, we are having doctors, diviners, carpenters, ritual dancers. In some of the later versions, we have sex workers. We have bean vendors. And so these are imagined voices of a really diverse group of people.

And when you actually dig into them, you find out that the titles that were given to this as Shokunin Uttalase, artisan poetry competitions, that's only applied in the early modern period. So there are terms that appear within these scrolls that suggest some kind of grouping that you get. one of the terms is Michi Michi no Mono, people of the road or the people of the path. Michi is this character that can be abstract or be concrete. Sometimes it means like a literal road you're walking on and sometimes it means like a path of pursuit. So the suggestion is that all of these people grouped together are people of a certain pursuit. And perhaps that's the closest thing that we have to calling them artisans, that they're these peoples of skills.

And that's why we have a doctor as well as a gambler. You know, so there's quite a lot of diversity in there. And these scrolls, sometimes they are taken at face value as historical materials, but they're also literary and they're also artistic and they're playing with courtly conventions and they were likely composed by an aristocrat. So they give us all of these different layers to think about in considering what kernel of truth about artisan identity, is it that created these? Is it these courtiers interacted with artisans? You know, because there's lots of wordplay in these poems that are skirting the conventions of

what's okay and traditional poetry. You would never write a poem as an aristocrat about chisels, right? Or hammering metal in the night. And yet we have this sometimes satirical, sometimes very beautiful riff that lets them play with language and play. with identity, and it gives us a little bit of insight into just how complex the idea of artisanal practice really was at this time. In a European context, we talk about artisans. We're actually really talking about guilds a lot of the time over here, and we're like, oh, here's this group of people who function as kind of a union, kind of a mafia.

Who knows? But what we're seeing over here is at least people at court kind of know enough about these groups of workers to say, well, at least this. could be an interesting thing to play with. At least this is a cool way to talk about what is poetic and what is a worthy subject. And so it shows at least some interest or respect on the part, I think, of rich people, right? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, they're going to have different levels of interaction with different statuses of artisan, because it's not a uniform status in the slightest. You're going to have, for example, carpenters who appear in many

a macumono scrolls, these hand scrolls, well, oftentimes the head carpenter will be dressed in white courtier's clothes and wear a courtier's cap and have a short sword, which tells us that this carpenter probably has some kind of court rank, either actual or honorary, whereas there's also the, you know, laborers who are dressed in very casual commoner clothing and maybe they're half undressed because they're working with fire. And so you have a very wide range of, you know, of status difference. And this is also connected to how artisans function as organizations, which I wouldn't use the term guild, but that's my picky thoughts about how we think about different linguistic connections and definitions across different medieval societies.

I often use the word association. Okay, well, tell me more about these associations. What are we looking at here then? So I hesitate to use the word guild in part because if we're talking about guilds in medieval Europe, there is a very characteristic element which involves, for example, the freedom of the city or the idea of citizenship. And paying into this guild, oftentimes, as I'm sure you and all of your listeners know, there are these also spiritual connections that are very explicit and very distinct in some of these groups. But if we're talking about Japan, we don't really have that sort of cohesion. And partly because we are talking about extremely pluralistic overlordship.

You have these different associations that form, and they're often called different things, and they are often affiliated with different, not always central institutions, but these, as I said, overlords is a word that I like to use. So, for example, in the case of metalcasters, they often use the term kugonin, which means imperial purveyor. And they are given this label because they are affiliated with the Chamberlain's office, which is this office within the imperial court. But that does not mean that they are tied to a city. It does not mean that they have an exclusive affiliation with the imperial court because the group that is the Kugonin, the imperial purveyor of the Chamberlain's office,

could also be Jinin or Yori Udo, these other clientele labels. And in having those, they might be affiliated with a totally different group. So they might be affiliated with a particular temple, or my metalcasters are affiliated with Hiei Shrine at some point. So you find that they have these different overlords with whom they affiliate, and these affiliations give them prerogatives that supported their livelihoods. They could get, for example, tax exemptions, free travel without being taxed at certain checkpoints, monopolies on certain markets or trade routes, and in exchange, they give these patrons

regular tribute, which could be cash or goods and kind. And so there's this give and take, but it's not exclusive. You could be a purveyor for different groups, basically. And that's actually plays to their benefit. Because if one person's trying to tax you, you know, this temple wants a particular fee, you can say, oh, no, no, no, no, I'm actually a imperial purveyor for the Chamberlain's office. And they say, I don't have to pay that. So you can end up playing your overlords against one another in really clever ways. Okay, so we've got all these overlords.

And, you know, as you say, something that's totally different from the European guild system. You know, here it's like, well, you're a part of the London. guild, but that might not mean anything up in York, baby, right? So it sounds like these guys, are they a bit more itinerate? Are they still linked to cities at all? Or are they moving about? Because if you've got all of these varying overlords that you might be serving, does that mean that you move with them? Or do they just kind of like know where to find you? That is a great question. And the answer is either or, maybe both. So for example, if the Imperial Court is your patron. Most courtiers of high rank anyway, who you want for a patron,

are not really leaving the capital. You're not having people going on vacation out into the provinces. It's kind of like, why would I want to go out there? Everything is happening in the capital. My job is here. My people, my cultural center is here. But if you're a group of casters, you probably want to go out where the business is. And there were some casters who weren't itinerant and some who were. And this is actually tied to a lot of debates about this term, Michi. Is this about people of the road or is it about people of pursuit or is it both? And so some organizations we know are very mobile.

I have groups of casters who identify as suchi emoji, which is like casters of the earth or casters of the land. And I also have Kaizen emoji, casters of the boat, who we think traveled around by boat in certain areas and basically went where the work or where the resources were. And so the question then goes, how does everybody know that you are a purveyor? And this is actually the other leg of my research, which is about documentary culture, because many of these overlords would provide evidence to these artisanal groups that said, I recognize that you are a kugonin.

I recognize that you are a Yori Udo and connected to this organization. Basically, these documents would be carried around with casters as this mobile archive. In some cases, lots of forgeries as well, which is part of the focus of my work on the 16th century in particular because metalcasters have a very expansive network of forge documents that develop in the 16th century. And so, yes, I do love this for them. It's spearheaded by a low-ranking courtier in the Chamberlain's office, so they kind of had an inside guy. who instigated it. And it's just a wonderful story. And I have a whole article about it in the Journal Monumented Neponica, if anyone is interested. The point being is that these overlords are not

necessarily functioning in any kind of way that would allow for control or this sort of conventional feudalistic oppression as we think of it. Right. They're giving you a document and you're roaming free and essentially enforcing the center's social and political capital by asserting your identity as their purveyor. And so part of the work that I do is thinking about how these commoner organizations are actually upholding a sense of authority for these central institutions in a way that they wouldn't otherwise be able to assert. You know, who cares about the imperial court during the 16th century when you have all these regional daimyo and overlords who are asserting power in distant lands? But there is a social and historical legacy that has cultural capital. And in part, it's upheld, these sort of fictions of power are upheld by these artisanal

organizations going out into the provinces, carrying these imperial documents and saying, no, no, look at this. I have status. I have imperial connections and that means something. And people in the provinces could choose to recognize that or not, but more often than not they did. So that's really interesting to me because it's free propaganda for the imperial court, right? It's stuff for everybody there. So it's a way of saying, oh yeah, hey, hey, you like that? Back in Kyoto, they think that my metal work is really good. So it does something for you, but it definitely does something for the court. So even if you're carrying around forgeries or whatever, I mean, provided that the work is good enough, I suppose, then it's still doing something.

I can't imagine they're really all that worried about cracking down on whether or not people have these forgeries, because at least if you're the one who's out on the West Coast or something being like, oh yeah, they love me back in Kyoto. Mm-hmm. Woo! You know, that's at least doing something for the court. Yeah. And I mean, part of the reason why the court does not sink into obsolescent, with the rise of warrior society is that this idea of the legacy of the court, of the cultural and historical and religious and social importance of the court, matters to what is essentially a bunch of upstarts who took physical power, right? Because the court doesn't have a standing army. The court does not have martial power. And so there's this kind of delicate balance in that

warriors, in many cases in the medieval period, are craving these connections to the imperial court, two more legitimate sources of power. So when my intrepid entrepreneurial guy in the lower courtier heads out into the provinces and says, hey, we would like to revitalize these relationships of metalcasters as imperial purveyors, what do you think? Many of these warriors thought like, great, we can be these middlemen. We can let them access the metalcasters in our territories who are far outside. the imperial capital, and we get this connection to the court. And that's wonderful for us. And maybe we'll get a cut when they send their tribute to the court. And so it creates all of these social and political networks more in depth than they might have been at the time. And so like an everybody wins situation.

But there were definitely points where this imperial representative or this court representative, lowly though he is, reaches out to the metalcasters and says, hey, do you want to be imperial purveyors? And some of them are like, no, we're good. We have our low. We have our low. local warrior patrons, and we're fine. And there's no coercive power in the way that we might think of, hey, the imperial court reached out to these casters and wanted to connect to them. They must be able to do that because they're the court. And that's not really how it functions at all. Right. So we have this thing. Here's an alert for a weird British story time. So we have this thing here where varying products or stores and things like that will have this little seal on them,

say that they are purveyors to, well, his majesty now. So, for example, Worcestersauce. Here will have a little seal on it and they'll be like, oh, purveyors to his majesty the king or it was her majesty of the queen. So it'll have a little seal that says that they have Worcester sauce at court. Or same thing with Tabasco sauce, I'm very serious. Varing bookshops will be like, this is a connection that we have. And you can't say that the palace has a coercive power over trade here.

But it might be nice for them. But people also might like want to pick that up or put it down for political reasons as well. You know, it's sort of like receiving an OBE or some people are like, no, thanks. I don't want that. So I think that it's actually quite interesting because there's this, again, quite European desire to say, oh, well, you know, it must all be coercive. It has to be some strong guys pushing everybody around. And I'm like, we have this right now.

This is like a recognizable thing. You should. There is nothing new in history. Yeah. And absolutely, there are some cases where a merchant. organization, for example, had these documents, in fact, extremely fake. And the local warrior overlords were like, sure, we're going to recognize your rights to this trade route for moving things along this road. And then, you know, a couple decades later, they were like,

things have changed. We're going to not recognize that anymore. And they pick and choose when it's convenient for them to accept this actual paper or this agreed upon counterfeit. Hmm. There's a concept that we often have within medieval Europeans, will all the time use the term customary. If something isn't written down, they'll say, oh, well, this is customary. So this is the way that things have been. And it's sort of like, well, yeah, it might have been based on a horrory, but we're doing it for a while. But then if you have a nuanced relationship with paperwork, if you have a situation where papers come up a lot, then I suppose you can decide to pick that up and put it down. Is it useful to me right now to allow you to have that idea? Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, documentary evidence in Japan, it's the idea of precedent. Is there a precedent? Sometimes people will cite precedent from one place and not the other. A lot of legal systems, they were local. Then you have the larger, I guess if you go back to the Gose by Shikimoku and say the 13th century, the warrior government legal documents, it's only 41 articles and everything else is a Suikoho and addendum document. And so it's kind of ad hoc where they're like, oh, we don't.

really have a rule for this, but maybe we should make this one now based on this ruling. And so it's really complicated. And a lot of times just having this document is something that, you know, they were like, well, you have something. And so we'll work with something. And the documents themselves make reference to other documents. But having this physical, material representation was actually quite important. And a lot of people like to say, oh, well, you know, late medieval, it's the lawless time. It's like, well, people were kind of just doing their best. And they were actually quite invested in some cases in upholding those customary practices and thinking about having material representations of rights and prerogatives.

That said, not everybody had that. You know, not every artisan organization was mobile. Not every artisan organization was connected to these great big overlords. But there certainly were some that were and that had significant status and privileges, even if they did what people might consider somewhat lowly work. It's quite interesting this idea of, oh, well, it's lawless if you have these guys walking around and changing situations and here they are with their fake papers. And I'm sort of like, well, if you got fake papers, it's not really lawless, though, is it? You're saying that you know there's a structure and you want to fit into it, but you don't have access to fitting into it. So you're just using the wiggle room you've got. It's almost an admission that

there are laws, I would argue. There's a structure at the very least. Yeah. It's a structure. It's It's part of this chicken and egg argument, right? If you have laws that are being issued about one particular thing over and over again, it's clearly because people are violating it. So does that mean anything? And yet, it's still there. And so it's a part of our historical interpretation to think about how do we understand this evidence. And, you know, if something is a forgery and people know, does it matter? And there were laws against forgery on the books, so to say, in some places, both in larger court legal systems, in the warrior documents, in, you know, local warrior family house codes sometimes had things about forgery in them. There's even an addendum in some of the Tzuika hole that basically says, scratching off one character on a document, because this is paper, you would just scratch away the surface, much like with your manuscripts in Europe, that also counts as forgery.

And it's just like a one-line law that says, scratching up a document. is also considered forgery because people are scratching things away and replacing those other stuff. See, that shows, I would argue, a really deep understanding of legal things where you could be like, not a forgery. It's got the seal. So I didn't forge it. That's a complex argument to attempt to make. And, you know, if it requires a legal ruling and something written about it, then that's an argument to be made that perhaps there was an interpretation that I could have in that way. Yeah, absolutely. And there's lots of documents that we might not necessarily consider official, like what is official in this case,

especially in the 16th century, there are documents that are not issued by some kind of overlord infrastructure. I don't know, you know, sometimes it's an organization, sometimes it's an office, sometimes it's a temple. But there are these documents we call today Yuishogaki that are closer to legendary origin tales than anything else. I love that. These are also produced and used.

in legal cases. So in the case of metalcasters, I actually reasonably well know or believe, based on my research, that this low-ranking courtier helped to produce the Ui Shilgaki that's being used by metalcasters because it very obviously points to intertextual connections to court documents from his office. But it's also a fantastical tale of an emperor in the 12th century or so, falling ill from being attacked by an evil wind, and nothing can save him, no prayers and no candles, they all get blown out. And then they call on a group of metal casters to cast iron lanterns, and these can't be blown out by the evil wind.

And so he recovers, and therefore they get all of these rights, and they become these imperial purveyors, yada, yada, yada. And it goes on. So this, too, is being treated as a legal document, essentially for centuries that follow. I love this because this is like the mythical origins that European ruling families make up for themselves. Oh, yeah, and we are descended from, you know, Romulus and Remus,

and that's why we get to be the king. But doing that for metalcasters, that's fantastic. I mean, quite literally, it's fantastic. Yeah, and I mean, one of the fascinating things, and I honestly can't remember if my manuscript draft uses this as its opener or not anymore, But there are steel companies today that have information about these origins on their website, right? And they try to connect themselves to this supposed legacy of these casters from this particular area who get mentioned in this tale. And so there is kind of a cognizance of it among even metal workers today.

I absolutely love to see a medieval tradition thriving. I want to see that myth repeated on every website of every metal. or forever. Thank you. Brilliant. Beautiful. No notes. Like, let's keep it up. Keep that moving forward. That's what I say. We can only hope. Paul, I could talk to you about this all day long. Surprisingly interesting paperwork. But I think we're going to have to leave it there. So thank you so much, Paula, for coming along. And thank you to all of you out there in podcast land for listening. This has been Gone Medieval from History Hit. And if you've liked what you've heard, don't forget to rate, review, follow the podcast, tell your friends about it. And also

so how metalcasters are cool. Absolutely. If you fancy suggesting an episode, you can drop us an email at Gone Medieval at HistoryHit.com. Otherwise, I'll be back again next Tuesday for another episode, and my co-host, Matt Lewis,

will be back on Friday. Until next time.