Does anyone know of any good non-fiction dealing with wilderness survival in a pre-modern setting? There's plenty of survival guides, but most of them assume that purifying tablets, canned goods and nylon stockings are a thing, so they're not so useful for my purposes. I'd mostly be dealing with your standard cookie cutter fantasy setting, lots of forests and mud villages on dirt roads and whatnot. Books, guides, blogs websites, TV series, any will do, as long as it's accurate and fact-checked. Thanks!
Can't recommend any books, but... Purifying tablets...how long has mankind known that boiling your drinking water is better for your health than not? It obviously doesn't pre-date the discovery of fire, so VERY early man made do with drinking what he could; obviously with a butt-load (pun intended) of intestinal problems, but he survived. Move that forward to feudal times and you've got the availability of fire, and dudes who are practised in making it by rubbing a couple of boy scouts together. Food? You no longer HAVE to hunt it yourself, most of the population grew it - literally - meat was a luxury for most of the people for most of the year. Poaching, especially the king's deer, would probably have been punishable by death, although you could probably get away with something small enough (and that includes squirrels, rats and hedgehogs, as well as birds) to catch, cook and eat before the king's men turned up - so especially likely in the wilderness. Weapons? Most feudal societies had "gun control"... a samurai could kill a peasant who was carrying a sword...so most peasants had simple weapons; quarter-staff, bow (think European longbow, rather than the more powerful but more complex laminated recurve). Dunno how widespread a knife would be...probably fairly widespread, else how could you whittle your bow? ETA: There would also be agricultural implements; scythes, sickles. Dwellings? Only the rich would have stone-built. In the countryside you're talking about "cabin made of earth and wood". Log cabins are fairly basic technology, although they do require quite a bit of labour to fell enough trees and assemble them. Single-storey houses made of turves stacked on one another are less labour-hungry...one man, given enough time, can stack enough turves to assemble a simple structure...downside is that they're not so weather-resistant - as in, the rain will wash them away over time - less time than a log cabin, anyway! But don't forget wattle-and-daub - simple panel woven from thin laths of wood, daubed with mud and dried in the sun. Travel? You mention dirt roads, but there are prehistoric tracks in the UK made of timber...not as good as Roman roads, but a damned sight better than wallowing through the mud! Again, in the UK, Alfred the Great created a network of roads between cities to enable his armies to march quickly to counter Danish raids...same logic as the German autobahns between the wars, and the avenues of trees shading French roads to ease the sunstroke on Napoleon's men. But most people would live and die in sight of their parish church. Religion? If you're going fantasy, you'll need to make up your own. Any primitive society will have a religion; something to explain the inexplicable, and something to appeal to when your crops are failing. ETA: If you're talking about a relatively stable scenario, you're talking about a strong central authority. No "king" means nobody to whom the lawless are answerable, so that would be survival of the fittest, red in tooth and claw. Lawlessness was always more rife in places where the king's writ did not run, e.g. the Border Reivers in the wild country between England and Scotland.
