Black berries

Different kinds of stains are used by modern bone carvers to highlight the relief or decorations of their carvings or to tint the item so as to ''age'' it. The most common recipes for such stains consist of one of these unsophisticated materiae - tea, coffee, soy sauce, tumeric, potassium permanganate...

But now, as we approach the end of the last month of the autumn - the season of fruits and berries- it is time to prepare ourselves better for the next autumn by poking our nose in ''the scriptures'' to see what hints to authentic medieval stains we might encounter there. To make our wagon in the winter and our sleigh in summer, as saying goes.

First of all we have to say that even without any appearances in texts or other sources of history, an endless variety of brews made from common natural materials would be more appropriate for the use in making of replicas of medieval objects than above stated ''devilish'' liquids. So there is wide open field for experiments before us.

And now to our berries! It is common buckthorn ( Rhamnus cathartica ). You will encounter the necessary hints  if you search for this amazing an unparalleled work entitled Archeologie en geschiedenis van een middeleeuwse woonwijk onder de Hopmarkt te Aalst  (red. Koen De Groote & Jan Moens, issued in 2018) and open it on page 391. Yes, it could be meant for woodwork, but as it has been used in crossbowmaker's workshop, bone and antler was never far from these berries there (look at this lovely specimen for example).

During the last leg of this autumn we indeed managed to get our hands on a small quantity of common buckthorn berries and the preliminary results of experiments with those are forthcoming. But we also got some other wild fruits that seems to be similarly promising - the berries of black elderberry ( Sambucus nigra ). These we even took decent photos of (as one below).