I’ve mentioned before that until you have industrialization or some equivalent that makes the manufacture of things easier, people will own a lot less stuff, furniture included. But what does that look like in practice? What is a person’s house likely to include and exclude?

Probably the first thing to be invented was the chest or box, and not just because it’s useful for keeping your belongings from rolling around loose on the floor. It gives them (some) protection from vermin, and also — once locks are invented, about six thousand years ago — protection from thieves. Chests are useful for organization, for transport, for a bunch of different purposes.

Including subbing in for other pieces of furniture! I’m sure we’ve all experienced the phenomenon of every available flat surface ending up with stuff on it; well, boxes have a long history of doubling as tables, perhaps with a set of boards laid across the top to expand the surface and give somewhere for your knees to go, which can be removed when the table isn’t in use. Smaller boxes become stools to sit on, with or without cushions for padding. Long chests, topped with a mattress, have served as beds — which probably adds to the security if your valuables are inside. It’ll be one heck of a skilled thief who can get in there without waking you up.

Sleeping atop a chest is also good for getting you off the floor, which means you’re away from cold drafts and less likely (though not guaranteed) to have a mouse or a beetle run across your face. But we’ve already covered beds, back in Year Four, so I won’t repeat all that here. Instead let’s go back to what’s early and common: the shelf.

This can either be a freestanding structure or something fixed to the wall, and it has the obvious merit of expanding your storage options vertically, making better use of the space. But while people nowadays tend to use shelves in the public parts of our houses for storing things like books, photos, and pretty knick-knacks, in earlier times they’ll be much more like a modern pantry or garage, holding utility items. And, again, holding them away from vermin, though enterprising critters will still find a way. Meanwhile, purpose-built tables (as opposed to repurposed chests) offer storage room beneath, again making better use of what would otherwise be wasted space.

(By the way, if you want to see “making better use of the space” really take off in a modern context, look at tiny houses or watch a Japanese home remodeling show. When you’re operating in close quarters, ingenuity around where to put shelves, cabinets, closets, and other storage rules the day. I have to imagine the same would be true of some futuristic person living in an orbital habitat or other confined place.)

Combine shelves with chests, and you get cabinets. As anybody with a chest-style freezer knows, a top-opening box can be a nightmare for internal organization; one that opens on the side and has subdivisions within is vastly more useful. Drawers seem to be a much later development, though, which makes sense when you think about the additional material required and the woodworking challenge of getting the drawer to slide in and out anything like smoothly.

What about chairs? These are shaped by both history and culture. They exist going back for thousands of years, especially when you include stools (folding or rigid) alongside chairs with backs. But they’ve often been elite or special-use items, with most people — even rich people! — sitting on floor cushions; Elizabeth I’s ladies-in-waiting took their meals in chairs at tables, but sat on the floor the rest of the time. There’s a practical reason for this: when most rooms are heated by wood fires in a hearth, being on the floor puts you below the worst of of the smoke. As chimneys improve, though, smoke reduces, and chairs become more appealing places to be.

But bring your cushion with you. I haven’t been able to find out when attached upholstery was first developed; quite possibly we don’t know, given how poorly materials like that would survive archaeologically. Regardless of timing, it’s definitely only for the wealthy, and not just because of the added expense: think about the difficulty of keeping it clean and vermin-free. A ruined cushion can easily be thrown away, but ruined upholstery has to be torn off and replaced, or a new chair acquired.

Then there’s the category of furniture that goes under many names: couch, sofa, settee, and more. These have come and gone, and they blur into other categories as well (a “couch” originally meant a bed). Once again, I think these more often had removable mattresses and cushions rather than the installed upholstery we’re used to. The Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans dined on such things, chaise longue-type couches where they could recline while they ate, rather than sitting upright. After that went out of fashion in Europe (apparently during the medieval period!), the sofa, to use its Turkish-derived name, came to be associated with the Middle East, and only filtered back into Europe later.

Furniture, of course, comes in many more kinds than this. We have specialized versions of the items I’ve already mentioned, like end tables and footstools and étagères and curio cabinets and trundle beds and recliners and . . . you get the point. We also have pieces of furniture built for specific purposes not needed in most of the past, like the filing cabinet in my office. But that all comes later, with wealth and especially with the cheaper production afforded by industrialization. (Though it’s not purely a one-way street: we no longer have things like free-standing braziers to help heat our rooms.)

That doesn’t mean, however, that the future is going to be even more furniture-crammed. Fashion plays a role here; one generation will fill their houses full of stuff, and then the next will rebel against all that clutter and strip down toward a more minimalist look. The shift to digital technology and other modes of entertainment has greatly reduced the need for bookshelves in some households, or filing cabinets, or other things meant to wrangle paper in its various forms. If we improve both 3D printing and the recycling of its materials, then we might be able to create furniture when it’s needed, then get rid of it as soon as the use has passed.

The key point is that our current state of furnishing is neither universal nor inevitable. And changing up what’s in the room may change how the characters behave there!

Don’t assume corridors.

This is my mental shorthand for reminding myself that, when you’re looking at history — and when you’re building a secondary world — certain things you take for granted as natural and inevitable may not be. Back when I started drafting the Elizabethan faerie fantasy Midnight Never Come, I had two characters conversing while walking down a corridor and out onto a balcony at Hampton Court Palace. Got to London for my research trip and discovered that not only does the building have no balconies (which I would have known if I’d looked more closely at pictures), but back in that era, it had no corridors. No hallways, passages, or whatever word is used in your locality for the interior spaces that connect rooms to each other. Instead, rooms just opened directly onto one another: an arrangement you may have seen if you’ve visited a stately historical home from the eighteenth century or watched the kind of movie set in such places.

Hallways give you greater privacy, by providing a buffer of empty space between rooms and by making it possible to come and go without tramping through other rooms that may be occupied. But they also kind of waste space, since the hallway is only used for coming and going, maybe with some decoration to liven it up. I’m fairly sure they became more common post-industrialization, when cheaper materials and greater efficiency in construction made it easier to justify empty space like that.

But the idea wasn’t unknown in earlier ages; it just tended to appear somewhere else. Specifically, on the outside of the building, rather than in the middle. Quite a lot of places are fringed with covered colonnades, peristyles, loggias, verandas — again, there are a number of terms. These not only grant shelter as you pass from room to room, but shelter the rooms themselves, preventing the rain and sun from beating directly on the walls, doors, and windows (while still allowing for some natural light). In Japan, these spaces could sometimes be closed off with removable shutters in the winter, thereby providing a modicum of insulation for the rooms behind them . . . and, yes, turning that space into a corridor.

Going back to those stately eighteenth-century European houses, though, some of them did have corridors — just not for general use. If you were rich enough, then not only did you have servants, but you could afford to build in a fashion that minimized how often those servants had to be seen. If you’ve ever spotted a camouflaged door in the wall, paneled or papered to look like everything around it, that’s a servants’ door. It probably gives access to a narrow passage behind that leads to the service areas of the house — often including a dedicated staircase — so that servants could come and go with minimal disturbance to the inhabitants and guests. (In the really ugly scenarios, e.g. those where the servants are actually slaves, there might even be an intent to segregate them so they don’t “sully” the regular doors and stairs.)

This points us toward another broad principle of layout, which is the separation of the public and private. Even in a one-room peasant’s hut, odds are good that the bed will be at the back of that room, and the work area is at the front. That’s partly for practical reasons — you don’t want to be carrying firewood and buckets of water and dead chickens past your bed, or hauling those things any farther than you have to — but the pattern persists throughout many types of residence, even when there are multiple entrances giving direct access to other parts of the building.

Quite simply, we tend to differentiate “that which strangers are allowed to see” from “that which is only for the family.” These lines aren’t hard and fast; people sometimes chose to entertain guests in their bedrooms, with the host even lying in bed during the conversation. But that was usually a mark of intimacy, an honor of sorts offered to select guests: “You may enter my private sanctum!” Less privileged guests were received in public rooms.

Private space comes in two kinds, though, one of which is bedrooms and other personal areas, the other of which is the service quarters I mentioned before. The shift toward open-plan architecture in recent decades is a deliberate, though not complete, breaking of that latter distinction: rather than the kitchen being separated from the dining and other social areas, it’s incorporated into them, in ways that genuinely reflect changes in the status of women and how we entertain guests. The laundry room, however, is still probably separate, or tucked into a closet: that part remains not for public viewing. (Though attached garages in car-centric cultures can make a weird hash of this, if you pick up a guest at the airport, drive them to your house, and then . . . bring them in through the laundry room.) Worth thinking about when worldbuilding, even if household tasks are carried out via magic or handwavy technology — where do you put your matter replicator?

How the spaces get separated will depend on the overall architecture. In a house built around a courtyard, reception areas will be toward the front, service and private chambers toward the back. If you have enough space, the service areas — including quarters for the servants to live in — might even be one or more separate buildings; as the kitchens essay in Year One mentioned, this is important for removing smells and fire risk from the main building.

If instead you have one structure, but it’s multi-story, then many of the personal spaces will be upstairs. Not too far upstairs, though; a place big enough for servants’ quarters often sticks them in the attic, where you have to climb a lot of steps and then probably put up with sloping ceilings encroaching on your space. Or, if soil conditions permit, service rooms and servants’s bedrooms are placed in a half-basement: not fully subterranean (as that creates its own problems), but with only a thin strip at the top where windows can let in light and air.

None of this, to be clear, is a hard and fast rule. The specifics will always depend on circumstances — which include fashion. Once garden design really got rolling, a lot of European houses placed their main entertainment rooms on the “piano nobile,” an Italian term for the first floor above the ground, from which you could have a nice view. Meanwhile, in the days before indoor climate control, it was fairly common for Mediterranean households to preferentially occupy the cooler ground floor in the summer, then move upstairs for the winter.

And shifting like that was made easier because of the last principle to bear in mind: that we are far more committed these days to the notion of dedicated, single-purpose rooms than people used to be. We even have regulations saying things like “bedrooms must have exterior windows for safety” and “you can’t list a rental space as a bedroom if it doesn’t have an attached closet.” But when the function of a room depended largely on what furniture you put in it and people had a lot less furniture, then rearranging according to the needs of the moment was much simpler to achieve.

So the layout was what you made of it. But the underlying principles were common enough to be fairly safe bets to lean on!

Having referred a few times to the concepts of purity and purification, maybe we should circle back and talk about what those mean.

If your thoughts immediately went to the online meme of the “purity test,” you’re not entirely wrong. That checklist of sexual and sex-adjacent acts hints at the idea that you’re “stained” by such behavior — an attitude that shows up in full force when you start looking at, say, evangelical Christian attitudes toward sex before marriage. Those offer a constant drumbeat of imagery that associates the non-virgin bride with something irreparably soiled, like a chewed-up piece of gum. It’s about more than just her body; she herself is made worthless by the act.

But it isn’t all about sex. So let’s step back and look at the bigger picture.

Impurity, in a spiritual context, is a metaphysical contamination, and it’s distinct from sin; it’s not about doing something wrong. It may be associated with bodily matters — in fact, it often is — but the stain goes deeper than the flesh. Impurity can make someone unfit to engage in certain religious acts until they are cleansed. It can cause them to pollute those who come into contact with them. Sometimes it’s actively dangerous: a tainted individual has the power to blight and curse, causing misfortune, withering crops, even harming unborn babies.

(Because these essays are written with an eye toward the use of these concepts in stories, that power may sound cool. In societies where this kind of thing is seen as real, though, it is definitely not admired.)

What makes you impure? As I said above, it’s often linked to the body. Elimination of waste might be a minor defilement; washing your hands afterward is a good idea anyway, but it might be required before you’re allowed to touch sacred things or engage in certain rituals. In some cases sex is also considered polluting — not because it’s inherently bad, but because it involves the emission of bodily secretions from a region of the body that’s already pretty suspect.

The two big sources of impurity, however, are blood and death. There’s a reason why, if society has some kind of “untouchable” caste, they probably engage in occupations deeply concerned with such forces: butchers, executioners, gravediggers, and so on. Coming briefly into contact with blood and death is polluting, but when your life involves regular and sustained interaction with them . . . it’s not hard to see why the stain starts to look indelible.

What about warriors, though? Here, we see the double standard at work. After all, their occupation involves killing: maybe less often than a butcher cuts up a carcass or an executioner hangs a person (especially once you factor in how many deaths in war don’t happen right there on the battlefield), but they’re still murdering their fellow humans. But warriors also tend to be — not always, but often — among the elites of their societies. It isn’t that they aren’t defiled by combat; they very well may be! That contamination, however, is seen as removable, not inherent. Purifying men becomes a routine post-battle or post-war activity, part of how they shift gears back to domestic life.

Women, by contrast, very much get the short end of this stick. If blood is polluting, then being an adult woman generally involves a regular cycle of contamination. I’m not going to rehash Year Four’s coverage of practices around menstruation, but refer there for discussion of the ways in which the impurity of that gets handled. Childbirth likewise involves quite a lot of blood and, particularly in the historical past, a high risk of death for mother, child, or both: that fraught, liminal act may leave all parties in need of purification before they’re allowed to return to normal life. To us that sounds like a negative thing, and indeed it can be so; on the other hand, it can also mark out a stretch of time for recovery.

Even when there’s a positive angle, though, attaching the notion of impurity to menstruation and childbirth tends to have an underlying negative effect. Look a few paragraphs back to the discussion of untouchables and their indelible pollution; now look at the situation women are in. No few religions have denied women full participation in key ritual activities, positions of power, or even access to sacred spaces because they will never truly be pure. (Exceptions can be made for pre-pubescent girls or post-menstrual elders, but as far as I know, they usually aren’t.) This, in turn, loops us back around to that question of whether sex is a source of contamination: sometimes the answer is “yes” because it involves contact with women, and specifically with the most impure part of them.

Assuming that a person’s impurity can be removed, how does one go about doing that? Unsurprisingly, physical washing is the number one method, though sometimes the cleansing is more symbolic than anything else: witness the little dippers for water at many religious sites in Japan (they spread to Buddhist temples from Shintō shrines), or the Islamic practice of tayammum (a dry cleansing used in situations of water scarcity, or where full washing would cause problems). In some cases ordinary water suffices; in others, you need a properly sanctified ritual bath, or running water, or salt water.

Salt is a great symbolic source of purity overall, which is why it crops up so often as a way to repel demons and the like. In Shintō — that being a religion greatly concerned with purity — it’s used to cleanse people after funerals, and set in dishes to keep away evil spirits. Also, if you’ve ever seen a Shintō priest wielding a stick with one or more white paper streamers attached, that’s an ōnusa, which acts as a kind of magnet to draw impurity off of people or objects. Because people aren’t the only things that can be impure! Pollution can attach to places and items, too, especially if they’ve been connected with death or blasphemous acts. Just as with a person, physically cleaning the object or space may be part of how you purify it.

In worldbuilding, though, you don’t have stick purely to washing as the route to purity. The real world contains any number of other methods; they’re just individually less widespread. Roll an egg over someone’s body — especially a white egg? Fan them with a special fan? Prayers are pretty common, especially if they’re conducted by a duly authorized religious leader. The important thing, from a setting perspective, is whether the reader can see why that act is considered cleansing. They’ll have a hard time believing in a purification rite that involves dung.

And, as with all our ascetic topics this month, you have the question of what metaphysical effect, if any, this has in your world. Maybe your spiritually-based magic really doesn’t work if the character is polluted, because the divine powers won’t answer them in that state. Maybe someone can use their defiled state to blight those around them. It’s up to you . . . but if you go this route, remain aware of the political dimensions noted above, the ways in which these principles have been used to oppress entire groups of people. You don’t have to mimic those patterns, but you should know how they happened, and take that duly into account.

Having mentioned celibacy in the previous essay, I now want to return to it and unpack in full.

Celibacy is a more complicated term than it seems on the surface, because we don’t consistently distinguish it from abstinence: witness the rise of the term “incel,” or “involuntary celibate,” which might be more appropriately framed as “inab.” Abstinence, in the sense of limited-time disengagement from sexual activity, can happen for a wide array of reasons, all the way from purification and discipline, to saving one’s energy (physical or spiritual) for other purposes, to birth control, to waiting for marriage, to the incel situation of not being able to attract a partner. (Though in that latter case, many of them are unlikely to be refraining from masturbation, which abstinence proper would usually imply.) By contrast, celibacy often takes on the more specific meaning of a lifelong vow to forgo sexual activity of all kinds. That vow is most frequently taken in a religious context, and as such, it goes hand-in-hand with other kinds of religious asceticism.

For certain kinds of people, that vow may come as a relief. While celibacy and asexuality are not the same thing, the religious justification for celibacy can free asexuals from the societal expectation that they will marry and have children. (For them it is not a sacrifice, and celibacy is supposed to be a hardship one undertakes for the betterment of one’s soul, but it can still be a good option.) Homosexuals in a homophobic society may likewise find refuge in celibacy . . . though since that often entails living in a single-sex community, it can lead to intensified temptation as well.

For women, it means freedom from the significant risks posed by childbearing — and for that exact reason, many societies have side-eyed the prospect of women taking such vows. Too many nuns would mean not enough children, and in pre-modern society, that’s not merely a threat to patriarchal control; it could genuinely lead to population decline. But if you were female and horrified or terrified or merely bored by the prospect of giving birth, devoting yourself to God/the Buddha/some other religious focus instead offered an escape hatch.

It’s worth noting, though, that the celibate life can be taken up at any point in time; it doesn’t have to be synonymous with virginity. Plenty of people throughout history have sworn off sex after years of marriage and reproduction — because while celibacy is not restricted only to monastic communities, the link between those is extremely widespread, and retirement into religious life was a common end-point for those who made it that far and could afford the graceful exit. (Monasticism will get its own essay at a future point!)

It’s even possible to be celibate and married. While some of those retiring into monasteries are widowed, others still have their spouses. So, even though “celibate” etymologically refers to the state of being unmarried, in some contexts people can formally vow not to have sex with their husband or wife again. (Historically this often accompanied entering a monastery, but not always: some couples remained in secular life.) Unsurprisingly, the traditions that allow it often require that both parties agree! No abandoning your partner to a cold bed without their permission. If divorce is allowed, one spouse might vow celibacy and the other go off to remarry, but if it isn’t, both have to take the vow.

We in the West, of course, are likely to associate celibacy above all with priesthood. I’m not going to attempt to rehash here the entire complex discussion of which branches of Christianity have required celibacy for which levels of clergy and when they have required it (because the answer has changed over time); that could fill a whole book on its own. But where it is encouraged or mandatory, the rationale is much like that for asceticism in general — only more so.

Because it isn’t just about abstaining from sexual experience. (Yes, masturbation is usually outlawed, too. Monks and nuns often sleep fully clothed, and some orders mandate shared dormitories rather than solo cells specifically to stop people from doing anything in private.) Before quite recently, sex in these societies went almost universally hand in hand with marriage and children, and therefore with a host of worldly obligations. A married man or woman had to provide for their household, invest time and energy in the raising of children, and make arrangements for their futures: apprenticeships, spouses, inheritances, and so forth. No one could properly attend to those things and focus on the divine.

. . . though yes, it’s true that more than a few supposedly celibate clergymen had bastard children running around. Some of those clergymen were very highly placed; some of them even got their bastards high places within the Church itself. Just because they were theoretically focused on God rather than the advancement of their kin didn’t mean they followed through in practice.

But not every faith says that marriage and devotion to God are incompatible. In fact, some of them go the other way! Shinto priests are welcome to be married; Islam does not require marriage but certainly promotes it, and the same is true in Judaism. Sikhs are supposed to be householders, i.e. engaged in normal married existence. In some ancient Greek cities, failure to marry could mean a man lost his citizenship! For those religions, the godly life is not separate from the ordinary business of living, but intimately bound up with it.

As for whether one can be relieved of a vow of celibacy — not just abandon it, but be let out — that can be complicated and situational. I’m pretty sure I’ve read of historical shenanigans in the Catholic Church, usually in situations where a nobleman’s younger brother took holy orders and then was suddenly needed to continue the family line when his elder sibling died, but I can’t remember the specifics well enough to look them up. (If any of you know what I’m thinking of, let me know!) In general, though, the answer is no: if you ditch your vow, then you’re officially condemned for it. After all, a promise doesn’t mean much if you’re allowed to break it at will. That having been said, Vestal Virgins — the only instance of Roman culture championing celibacy — were allowed to exit that life after thirty years of service, though not all of them took the proffered out.

Celibacy, like asceticism, is something we rarely see in main characters. A huge percentage of our stories feature romantic relationships as at least a minor side plot, and where asexual protagonists appear, they generally don’t want to have sex, as opposed to it being an impulse they have chosen to deny. When a major character is under such an oath, odds are high they’ll wind up breaking it before the end of the story. We’re sufficiently invested in the idea that people should act on on their (non-harmful) desires that it’s difficult to sell many readers on the triumphant resolution of someone feeling sexual attraction and then not following through on it. (And if you write that story, the odds that someone will immediately write fanfic where they do get it on are pretty high.)

But there’s power in the notion of celibacy — including the sort I mentioned in the last essay, a literal spiritual power generated by the denial of that impulse. I’d be interested in reading stories that make use of it!

Fasting is one form of asceticism: the renunciation, whether short- or long-term, of material pleasures. But hoo boy is it the thin end of that wedge!

People can adopt an ascetic lifestyle for purely philosophical reasons; Stoicism in the classical era headed in this direction, though I think most of its adherents were more concerned with restraint and moderation than with absolute denial. The overwhelming majority of the time, though, asceticism is linked with religion — and specifically with transcendental religions, i.e. those which treat the divine as otherworldly and separate from the material world we all live in.

The logic there is pretty easy to follow. The divine is more important than the mortal, so it ought to be the focus of our attention. And if that’s the goal you’re pursuing, then aren’t mortal, material concerns a distraction from what really matters? You should set them aside so you can devote yourself more fully to God and the pursuit of salvation/the Buddha and the pursuit of enlightenment/etc. In some strands of thought, this world gets characterized as fundamentally evil, a trap we have to escape. Ascetism is the way to freedom.

Note that this isn’t (necessarily) the same thing as subjecting oneself to pain, or seeking that out for its own sake. A number of religious traditions involve practitioners doing horrible-looking things to themselves in pursuit of triggering a religious experience, but that doesn’t mean they think one should eschew pleasures as an ongoing habit. The latter, from what I can tell, seems to have cropped up most frequently as a feature of Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism: not to say that there haven’t been ascetic movements in Islam (e.g. Sufism) and Judaism or other faiths, but they haven’t achieved the same idealization and centrality as in those first four. (And yes, I’m aware that Buddhism’s “Middle Way” advocates against extremes of asceticism. That doesn’t mean lighter versions haven’t been very important to a number of Buddhist traditions.)

The basic practices of asceticism often involve disciplining oneself to live with a reduction in material comforts. I led into this essay with the one on fasting because it’s extremely common for ascetics to limit what they eat, how much of it they have, when they eat, and so on. Although “Buddhist temple cuisine” in East Asia can rise to the level of high art, in most cases the emphasis will be on plain, monotonous food, discouraging sensual pleasure from the act of dining. The purpose of food is to sustain the body and nothing more.

Next up is sleep. If you’re pursuing ascetic ideals, your bed should not be soft, and you shouldn’t spend much time in it, either. If you’re a normal Christian monk or nun, you might be getting up in the middle of the night to pray; if you’re St. Peter of Alcántara, you sleep standing up with a beam of wood for your pillow. As for doing anything in that bed other than sleep . . . you likely won’t be surprised to hear that celibacy is hugely common among ascetics. We’ll leave that one for the next essay, though, because it deserves to be unpacked at greater length.

What about bathing? While we have the idiom “cleanliness is next to godliness,” historically, not everyone has agreed. Quite aside from the obstacles (described in earlier volumes) that used to make regular bathing difficult, some ascetics have held that, since the body is unimportant at best, actively corrupting at worst, attending to it more than absolutely required for survival is mere vanity. So: minimal bathing, or none at all — and although that sounds horrifying to us now, some people thought of the resulting stench as the “odor of sanctity,” proof of the unwashed one’s holiness.

Secular entertainments, of course, are off the table. Ascetics aren’t supposed to watch plays, or read frivolous literature, or participate in dances. Music and literature are usually limited only to holy matters. Prayer is a far more suitable pastime, perhaps carried out under uncomfortable conditions: for a Catholic that might mean kneeling for a long time on a hard floor, while a Buddhist might stand under a cold waterfall.

Clothing should not only be un-ostentatious but quite possibly uncomfortable. The proverbial garment here is the hair shirt — in Catholicism, formally known as a cilice — which is an undergarment of coarse, skin-irritating fabric. Often worn for penance, it was therefore ideal for people wanting a more constant experience of humility. Going without shoes is another option, though “discalced” (shoeless) orders in Christianity may permit sandals: enough to protect the sole of the foot from danger, not enough to keep the rest of it warm.

Enduring cold is a recurrent option in temperate climes. Historical Catholic monasteries often had tight regulations forbidding the lighting of warming fires before a certain date, regardless of what the weather was doing; I wouldn’t be surprised if the same is still true today, except it applies to central heating instead. Similar regulations governed when you broke out winter clothes — which still might be what other people would consider inadequate for the weather! Basically, if it would make you more comfortable, you should limit it to the bare minimum necessary for safety and health.

. . . or you could go further.

Self-mortification can describe any of the above practices, but we often use it to mean the more severe end of the spectrum. In Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, the mortification on the flesh can be framed as a way to draw closer to Christ, by sharing in his suffering. This can involve everything from adding twigs to your hair shirt to scratch yourself more, to harsher and more extended fasts, to active practices like self-flagellation.

Which, from an outside perspective, sure does invite the label of “self-harm.” And the Catholic Church is not unaware of that risk; there’s a recurrent thread in its history of trying to discourage the extremes, and making sure that people only go there under the supervision of an appropriate spiritual director. In modern parlance, that person’s job is to make sure the behavior in question isn’t a manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder, anorexia nervosa, or some other mental illness. But Church history is also full of devout people who desperately wanted to mortify themselves more than they were allowed — especially in pursuit of mystical visions during which they felt themselves to be in God’s presence.

Because that’s one possible result of ascetic life: spiritual power. Depending on your religious framework, it may purify the body and spirit, burn away karma, concentrate and intensify your personal energy, or enable you to contact and perhaps even compel the attention of the divine — the Sanskrit epics contain many instances of people practicing austerities (tapas) until the heat generated thereby forces a god to respond. (I recall my Hinduism professor phrasing this informally as “lighting a spiritual fire under their butts.”)

We see this occasionally in fiction as a thing the wise old mentor does, but I feel like it’s generally less common for protagonists. Not hard to imagine why; we tend to want our characters to partake in the full range of ordinary experience, rather than swearing off three-quarters of it. And since many of us disagree with the basic principle that one ought to subordinate the self and personal desires to the concerns of a higher power, it may be hard to get the reader on board with the idea that doing so is anything other than a tragic tale. But the notion that exercising self-denial is necessary to the generation of spiritual force seems like a fruitful one to me, with plenty of tasty potential for inner conflict!

Somewhere in the course of childhood, I got the impression that “fasting” meant “not eating anything.” This isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete: as shown by the well-known custom of Lent in the Roman Catholic Church, there are degrees of fasting, from the token to the incredibly strict.

On the lighter end, one might fast by abstaining temporarily from a particular food. For this to be meaningful, the change in diet should be more than trivial; if I abstain from mushrooms, which I don’t particularly like and almost never eat, how is that different from my ordinary life? Abstaining from meat or dairy is much more significant (and common) — though for a vegetarian or a vegan, again, that’s just business as usual. The stricter the fast, the less nourishment is permitted, until you reach the point at which no food may be eaten at all.

What about liquids? Again, it’s a spectrum. In religious contexts, temporary abstention from alcohol is (unsurprisingly) a common prohibition. People fasting before a medical procedure like a colonoscopy are allowed to have clear liquids, so they can get some calories in them for the day or so preceding. Other kinds of fasting might permit only water, to avoid dehydration; the absolute strictest forbid anything at all.

As you can imagine, that latter is not very sustainable, which is why timing also matters. During Ramadan, observant Muslims take nothing during daylight hours — which, depending on where you live, makes the fast much harder to maintain in the summer! (There are various religious opinions on how to handle this at extreme latitudes, or in space.) Once the sun sets, however, they’re free to eat and drink as needed. If your fast means continual abstention from food, or especially from drink, then you can only keep it up for a little while before you’re in medically dangerous territory. Which people have voluntarily entered, for all kinds of reasons!

Medical fasting usually tries to avoid negative side effects; it’s done for safety purposes before going under anaesthesia, or to test baseline blood sugar levels. Some people use intermittent fasting (which, like Ramadan, limits consumption to certain times of day) as a weight loss method: done right, fasting can indeed bring some health benefit.

Religious fasting sometimes goes much further. It often has overtones of purification, with the participants exerting conscious control over the base needs of their bodies and ridding them of the filth of excretion; because of this, a short fast is a common element before rites of passage or other such rituals. It may also be a form of penitence, showing your contrition for your sins by denying yourself the comfort of food. Extremely pious individuals, seeking to focus on the spiritual rather than the material, have taken it to great extremes — including all the way to the end. The Jain practice of sallekhana (fasting to death), meant to destroy karma that would influence your next rebirth, is officially not considered suicide; the Cathar endura was somewhat similar, with people on their deathbeds refusing everything other than water after they received the funerary rite of consolamentum. In historical Japan, some Buddhist monks underwent a process of lethal fasting designed to ensure their bodies would become natural mummies after their deaths, known as sokushinbutsu.

Or perhaps your fast goes beyond orthodox religion and into the realm of magic. Despite its dramatic-sounding name, a “black fast” is merely a strict form of Catholic fasting, akin to Ramadan, with nothing during the day and only a vegan meal and water at night. According to folklore, undertaking a black fast on certain holy days could bring special benefits, like protection from harm or sudden death. But some people took it further, using it as a form of spiritual vengeance: they would “fast upon” someone who had wronged them, with the intent of harming or even killing them outright.

Take away that magical angle, and you have the notion of fasting as a protest against injustice. In this form we often call it a hunger strike, and in Ireland, this appears to have roots stretching back to before Christianization. The practice there was usually to fast on the doorstep of the person from whom you wanted justice, and scholars theorize that this interfaced with the deep-seated customs around hospitality. (Letting somebody starve on your literal doorstep: the opposite of being a good host.) It’s not just an Irish practice, though, being found in India as well — and in modern times, Gandhi might well be one of the most famous examples of a hunger striker. His fame played a key role in the success of his fasts, as the Brits knew very well how bad it would look if somebody that well-known died in one of their prisons. Meanwhile, a no-name agitator might be allowed to starve to death without comment.

Because for a protest fast to work, it generally needs publicity. In pre-modern times it’s enough for a fast to be known within the community — which is another reason doing it on someone’s doorstep is useful; even if you get forcibly evicted, people will notice that happening. As society gets bigger, hunger strikers depend on news media to report their actions . . . and, if necessary, their deaths. In 1981 Ireland, Irish Republican prisoners made a point of fasting one at a time for more sustained attention, ultimately resulting in ten deaths.

Not all such fasts end fatally, of course. Some hunger strikers flinch; others succeed in achieving their aims and return to normal eating. But sometimes, their fasts end involuntarily, as authorities either decide they have a moral duty to prevent death or refuse to let the guilt of the striker’s death land on their heads. In these cases prisoners get force-fed, usually by means of a tube placed down their throats, though some slavers at the height of the trans-Atlantic trade used a speculum to pry open the mouths of slaves who refused to eat. Suffragettes in particular received this treatment, as the chauvinism of the era meant deaths of women would have cast their captors in a particularly bad light.

Before wrapping this up, I should make mention of the concept of inedia, i.e. the ability to live without eating. Some claimants of this ability insist they need only air, and are called breatharians; others say that sunlight is all they need. Mythologically, the concept seems to have its roots in South and East Asia — and of course, in speculative fiction it might be literally possible! Lots of cultivation novels assume their characters can build up the spiritual power necessary to survive without food, though they might still enjoy it as a sensory pleasure afterward.

In real life, however, there are no confirmed cases, because this simply doesn’t work. By all means, abstain from food or drink for short periods of time if it benefits you medically, spiritually, or politically. But be careful not to take it too far!

Uniforms, heraldry, flags. In a military context, these all serve the crucial purpose of communication. And if they seem like fairly primitive methods of achieving that, well, for most of history, primitive methods are all we’ve had.

When it comes to communication — whether that’s signaling to troops on the battlefield or sending a message to a different part of your force elsewhere — your options are fundamentally three: it can be visual, auditory, or written (a special case of visual). Touch and taste are far too short-range to be of any use, and while scent can theoretically travel farther, our olfactory senses are too poor to make much use of it. Even an alien species gifted with a better nose would face the problems of slow movement and dissipation over distance, reducing the signal’s utility.

Written communication is great in some ways, terrible in others. So long as everybody involved is literate, the message won’t get garbled in transmission: excellent! Unfortunately, it’s also vulnerable to being intercepted, altered, even forged outright. Prior to modern times, it’s also slow, being limited to the speed of whatever’s carrying it, whether that’s a guy on foot, a rider, or a pigeon (which, as Year Four discussed, only works in very specialized circumstances). Writing is handy for sending a message to another military detachment, but you’re not going to be able to use it to communicate with the guys currently locked in combat.

What about visual signals more broadly? Movies give us tons of examples of a flag being raised or waved to communicate with the troops . . . but those examples are often deeply flawed, with the same movement of the same flag having the magical ability to communicate whatever is needed in the moment. Worse still is the version where the commander just lifts his arm, and suddenly thousands of men know it’s time to march forward.

Visual signals only work if you can see them. Which sounds like an obvious statement, but now imagine that the flag — much less the raised arm! — is two, three, ten football fields away from you. (Doesn’t matter which type of football. The point holds regardless.) How well can you see it? Remember that battle lines can get extremely long when the armies involved are big; are your eyes good enough to pick out a bit of cloth half a mile or more away? Are you looking in the right direction when the signal goes out? What about when you march forward, and now the flag is behind you?

Flags and similar kinds of standards, like the Roman legionary eagles, mostly get used at much shorter range, to drive individual smaller units. Your standard-bearer is at the front of your group’s block, not the back; when the flag advances, so do you. When it stops, you stop. When it retreats, you retreat. (When it falls, you say oh shit. And then probably try to pick it up, or hope one of your buddies does.) It’s useful for moving a limited mass of soldiers around, but you can’t use it to transmit orders from the commander to that mass.

There are other visual ways to signal, e.g. by sending flares up into the sky, but you get the idea. Any such method is subject to these limitations on the battlefield, while over longer distances, you’re looking at the kinds of communication systems described in Year Eight. They are, generally speaking, blunt instruments at best, not capable of delivering complex information or instructions.

So what about sound? You won’t be surprised to hear me say this also has problems. Speech only goes so far; studies suggest that if you have a close-packed and quiet crowd and a good set of lungs, your voice might carry to a few thousand people, but “close-packed and quiet” does not describe battlefield conditions, nor communication at a distance. It’s a little unclear how long ago speaking trumpets (megaphones) were invented, but even those only boost your range a little.

Musical instruments do better, and they don’t require you to be facing them to receive the signal. As with flags, though, your “vocabulary” is limited, because relying on a complex melody to communicate “third unit of cavalry, circle around the army’s flank to intercept their reserves” is not so much courting failure as doing a swan dive into failure’s arms. It also turns out that, like flags, instruments have mostly been used to control the movements of smaller units: you’re only being cued to move if it’s your group’s horn or drum sounding the advance or retreat. (I presume, though I don’t know, that you know it’s yours because it’s loud enough to be obviously nearby, as opposed to farther down the field.) Once again, the commander can’t really use this to send orders from his post, because which group is he trying to signal?

Pretty much the only thing he can use is a messenger. Send someone on foot or on horseback with orders (written or verbal), and hope the messenger doesn’t get captured, killed, or ignored by the officer on the receiving end, who’s annoyed that some lackey claims he’s supposed to change his plans or move into action. There’s a reason we have that idiom about “don’t shoot the messenger” . . .

With all of this in place, you can see why modern technology had such a revolutionary effect on warfare. Telegraphs and radios, not to mention their later successors, mean that suddenly you can transmit your written or auditory signals vastly quicker — and that goes both ways! I’ve been talking as if everything is supposed to go from the commander to the troops, but he needs updates, too, and being able to send word more or less instantaneously that the center is collapsing or the right wing is about to be flanked opens up a whole new world of tactical responses.

Because if you were wondering how anybody managed when signaling was so crude and inefficient, the answer genuinely is “they kinda didn’t.” If your communication is limited, your control is limited. You deploy your troops for battle and then press play, with maybe one or two tricks held in reserve; everything else is up to the guys in different spots on the field, because there’s no way to manage more complex coordination and maneuvering.

But with every improvement in your signals, you acquire new options. Maybe your infantry units can not just advance, halt, and retreat, but wheel to face a new direction. Maybe you can tell in something like real time that your far-distant left is hard pressed, so you can dispatch reinforcements in time to do some good.

Which means that if you’re writing speculative warfare, the communications aspect is vitally important. Do they have telepathy? Flying animals with more capabilities than homing pigeons? Long-distance scrying or satellite surveillance? Teleportation? Anything that can transmit detailed information faster than a guy on a horse is a major advancement in tactical and strategic capability over most of human history. Meanwhile, the weaknesses of that method open up fascinating possibilities for trouble: can it be intercepted, altered, forged entirely? How can you use that to screw over your characters, er, I mean, make their lives more interesting?

The comedian Eddie Izzard has a bit in her show Dress to Kill where she characterizes colonialism as sticking a flag in the ground to claim a place, then ignoring the assertion of the locals that their home is their own because, well, they don’t have a flag, do they?

While obviously exaggerated for the purpose of comedy, the idea in play there isn’t without basis in fact. Nowadays, flags are the premier emblem of a country — and often smaller units thereof as well, like provinces and states and even cities. We march our flags in the parade of nations that starts off the Olympic Games; we brand our exports with them. We fly them high over our governmental buildings and lower them to half-mast in the wake of tragedy, as a signal that the whole community is (or should be) in mourning.

Flags probably have their origins in a military context, and we’ll get into how they were used there more in the next essay. Fabric banners, as opposed to standards more broadly, may have been invented twice: one in south or eastern Asia, the other in ancient Rome, though I can’t swear that there wasn’t influence from former on the latter. They can be attached to the side of a pole, to a horizontal cross-bar at the top, or both; the advantage of a horizontal attachment is that you’re not dependent on wind to lift the flag and display its design.

Nowadays almost all flags are not only rectangular but adhere to one of a small number of ratios in their proportions (2:3, 1:2, or 3:5). There are still exceptions, though, and they used to be more common. If you look at the state flag of Ohio, you’ll see an example of a swallowtail pennon: a flag wider at the hoist (attachment) than at the fly (loose edge), with a forked edge rather than tapering to a triangle point. Heraldic rules used to dictate who carried what style of flag at what size, along with what could be placed on the flag; for example, differentiating a banner from a pennon helped differentiate a knight banneret from a knight bachelor.

Speaking of heraldry . . . As you might expect, a lot of early European flags consisted of sticking one’s heraldic arms on a pole. Because of that, the rules governing design ensured a fairly high degree of clarity, like you would want on a battlefield. But the intersection of various emblem traditions has in modern times produced some fairly terrible flags, especially at the level of cities: the city has a seal, and it needs a flag, so it just sticks the seal on a flag and calls it a day. The result is a fiddly, complex image nobody would ever have bothered with if they needed to embroider or appliqué the entire thing, instead of mechanically printing it.

The term for flag design is vexillography, and boy howdy do people in that field have Opinions about the right way to go about it. These days, there’s general agreement that a flag should be relatively simple — often characterized as “a child could draw it.” Many countries have adopted a triband, i.e. a flag divided into three bands either horizontally or vertically, which may or may not be equal in width. Some of these have a “charge,” an emblem of some kind superimposed, usually at the center (but not always). When each band is a different color, it’s termed a tricolor, and since the late sixteenth century, that style has been associated with republicanism and revolution. As democratic governance has spread around the world, tricolors have followed — though of course nothing stops a government from adopting that design as a fig leaf over very un-democratic rule!

Of course, these get very repetitive, and (outside their charges) they can fill up the available color design space very fast. Modern flags often depart from the heraldic rules for tinctures, both in the colors they use and how they’re positioned. The green/yellow/red of Pan-Africanism or the black/white/green/red of Pan-Arab nationalism don’t always avoid putting a color against a color; the flag of Argentina specifies a pale blue instead of the more midline hue seen in many other flags. Non-triband flags also sometimes reach for ways to distinguish themselves from the herd; the redesign of Minnesota’s state flag (which used to be a poster child for bad design) cleverly inverted the sideways triangular charge called a “pile” so as to echo the shape of the state itself. When everybody has a flag, it helps to get creative!

But the reason we need so many flags boils down to modern nationalism. It’s not that kingdoms didn’t have banners in the past — they absolutely did, on the battlefield and in their castles — but often those banners were simply the arms or emblem of the ruling dynasty. Or a country might use multiple flags in different contexts, like sixteenth-century Spain flying both the arms of the Habsburg king and the saw-toothed Cross of Burgundy (that one deployed particularly on ships). As national identities coalesced in the late eighteenth century, though, it became increasingly important to have a national symbol separate from the person in charge, and those symbols appeared more and more often in contexts other than military ones.

Not that flags have ever been limited to military use. Taken in the general sense of “a piece of fabric meant to fly in the wind” rather than the distinctive emblem of a person, group, or locale, flags can serve all manner of purposes! Signal flags came up in Year Eight as a means of communication; Tibetan prayer flags are flown to spread their blessings on the wind. We use flags to mark everything from the finish line of a race to where your tour guide is in the crowd (though when you get down to it, that latter is probably a direct descendant of their role on the battlefield . . .). When a player commits an offense in certain sports, we signal it with a flag. When a city wants to advertise a festival or a special museum exhibit, they may dangle banners from the streetlights.

And when they want to assert their right not to be governed by a colonial power, they might just design a flag.

Heraldry is a peculiar mix of localized and universal.

By “localized,” I mean that it’s very specifically a medieval-and-later European phenomenon. The idea of individuals or groups having emblems is vastly older and more widespread, but that isn’t heraldry per se; it lacks the hereditary element that turns idiosyncratic choices into an organized system. In Europe, that system started forming during the High Middle Ages, around the twelfth century. By the middle of the fourteenth century you start having heraldic authorities responsible for recording and enforcing unique designs and color schemes, so that you can truly identify a member of a particular family by seeing their coat of arms — whether on the battlefield or off.

To the best of my knowledge, no other place in the world has quite this same practice. Japan comes close; mon or kamon (“family mon”) developed in the Heian period as a way of identifying members of the nobility so their order of precedence would not be in doubt. (It’s extremely useful to be able to answer that question at a glance! Heralds in Europe had similar responsibility for memorizing coats of arms and knowing who outranked whom.) In later centuries, certain mon like the imperial chrysanthemum were restricted, while others saw multiple uses by different groups. But although mon are hereditary — and, like heraldic arms, can be assigned to organizations as well as families — color is irrelevant as a distinguishing factor. And although mon can be modified to indicate a cadet branch of a family, there’s nothing equivalent to European heraldry’s system of quartering, where multiple emblems can be combined into one.

Tamgas on the Eurasian steppe are the other noteworthy candidate, as these are again a hereditary emblem of a family, clan, or tribe. Unlike Japanese mon and most of the charges (images) of European heraldry, tamgas are highly abstract, and their original purpose — still in force today — was for branding livestock. They’ve seen use outside that context, though, e.g. on funerary monuments, thereby expanding and strengthening the sense that these images represent the lineage more broadly.

The full system of European heraldry is ridiculously complex, its difficulty compounded by the fact that half its terminology is taken from medieval French. I’m not going to try and cover it all here (that’s a job for a specialized book), but I do want to note that the complexities of it very much developed over time. In fact, a lot of it dates to the early modern era and later, when coats of arms were no longer nearly as important for identifying men on the battlefield or in a tournament; instead they had become a decorative art, a little game played by the upper classes of society (gentlemen and nobility) and powerful organizations like universities and guilds.

In this game, the range of permissible emblems and how you deploy them expands enormously. Early heraldic arms went for a small number of impressive signifiers, like dragons, lions, and crosses; in later use you find mice, fish, and the tools of different trades. New colors came into use. Quarterings started to get out of hand; the arms of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, consisted of no less than twenty distinct components, representing all the places he ruled — some of them more than once, because of how he inherited them! (The most ridiculous example I know of cranks that up to three hundred twenty-three quarterings.) Furthermore, the emblems acquired add-ons like supporters, helmets, mottos, and crests, all of which were equally subject to the specific rules for heraldry.

But let’s loop back to that color thing for a moment, because this is where heraldry unexpectedly taps into something universal.

Do me a favor and take out your phone. Look at the icons for the apps. Or while you’re going through your day, look at the logos for corporations, the signs along the road. Count how many of them consist of either white or yellow on a colored background, or some color on a white or yellow background. This is a fundamental rule of heraldry in action, and it persists all these centuries later for good reason.

Heraldic tradition dictates how tinctures are organized and juxtaposed. For our purposes, we can lay aside the furs (specific background patterns); we’re concerned only with the metals — gold, silver — and the colours — blue, red, purple, black, green. (Heraldic history also includes a mulberry color between red and purple and an orange-to-brown color, but they were not commonly used, and later folklore decided those were “stains” that represented a dishonorable act.) According to the rule, you can juxtapose a metal with a color or a color with a metal, but not a metal on a metal or a color on a color. In other words, you can have white or yellow (representing silver or gold) against some other shade, but not white and yellow together, or red and blue, or green and black, and so forth.

More than just arbitrary aesthetic taste underlies this rule. By following it, you create a high-contrast design that is easily “read” even at a distance or in poor light. With modern pigments and dyes, we do have the capacity to make a green bright enough to stand out against black, or a red vivid enough to contrast with a pale, desaturated blue, but those rely on a command of coloration not easily attained when working with historical materials — especially when you consider the propensity of dyes to fade! If you want to be sure someone can make out your emblem at a glance, whether it’s on a battlefield or driving seventy miles an hour down a highway, following the medieval rule for tinctures is the safe way to go.

So I roll my eyes a little whenever I read a novel where the author, clearly in pursuit of badass vibes, describes the villain’s heraldry as being red on black. Sure, it sounds cool . . . but odds are high that somebody trying to make out the specifics at anything past close range just sees a blob of something red. Which I guess is fine if nobody else is running around with a red-on-black banner, such that the colors alone are sufficient, but still: nobody’s going to appreciate the artistic effort that went into your skull-and-snake design, because they can’t really see it.

Putting full-blown heraldry into a book is automatically going to make the setting read as European, which means it won’t suit every story. But as the examples of Japan and the Eurasian steppe show, there’s room for different systems of hereditary emblems, even if they aren’t as complexly elaborated as heraldry became in later centuries. On the other hand, the latter offers all kinds of potential for narrative fodder, whether that’s making a reality out of the “stain” notion or somebody starting a massive diplomatic incident because they confused one coat of arms with another that’s very similar!

Uniforms aren’t purely a military thing. Sports teams wear them; so do students at certain kinds of schools. Some jobs mandate uniforms for their employees, including servants in the past wearing the “livery” of their masters. But we associate this idea so much with soldiers (and with the not entirely unrelated police) that being “in uniform” can be shorthand for military service, “uniforms” shorthand for the personnel of such groups.

Why, though? What purpose does the uniform serve?

The knee-jerk answer is “to tell friend from foe on the battlefield,” and that’s not entirely wrong. But if you’re envisioning that thing you’ve seen in movies where two armies smash into each other and instantly dissolve into a confused melee with enemies on all sides, erase that from your mind. If your battlefield looks like that, something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. Uniforms are more likely to serve their purpose in letting you know that the unit you see approaching from the south is your reinforcements — or, alternatively, the other side about to flank you. (Disguising yourself as the enemy has both its merits and its perils . . .)

Identification goes beyond knowing who to stab in the heat of battle, though. Uniforms can also tell you which part of your own army you’re looking at: is that guy an infantryman? Gunner? Cavalry soldier? Which lord’s retinue or modern squadron does he belong to? If you find some dead bodies in the woods, which unit got ambushed, and what does that mean for your subsequent situation?

Or you can read “identification” in a slightly different sense. Wearing a uniform signals not only to others but to you that you belong to a particular group, whether that’s your specific unit or your army as a whole. And this isn’t merely a nice side note; that sense of identity is key to battlefield performance, since the bond with your buddies and your unwillingness to let them down play a vital role in getting you to fight instead of running away. There’s a reason soldiers often take pride in their uniforms; those represent membership in something bigger than just themselves.

The psychological angle also turns outward, having its own effect on the enemy. By now you won’t be surprised to hear me say that not all armed forces achieve uniformity of appearance; that requires money, effort, and the organizational capacity to make it happen. Modern states take these things for granted, but historically, not everyone pulled it off. Those that did signaled to their opponents that they were well-funded, committed to the cause, and organized enough to handle the necessary logistics and discipline. Who would you rather fight: that guy, or the one with a ragtag assemblage of fellows in whatever clothes they happen to be wearing? Uniforms are a tool of intimidation as well as cohesion.

Of course, it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. Modern uniforms are incredibly codified, even down to mandating the exact chemical composition of the dyes used on the fabric. Everything from a soldier’s boots to their haircut is governed by regulations (which may also prohibit the addition of personal touches on top of required bits). Before industrialization, though, that degree of standardization was much harder to achieve — and very few armies tried.

Instead, you can go for more limited elements. Maybe everybody is supposed to wear a coat and trousers of more or less the same color and cut, but everything past that is up for grabs. Maybe you issue tabards, which don’t have to be fitted and are easily thrown over whatever else your soldiers are wearing. Maybe it’s headgear or, in an absolute minimal form, armbands to identify which force each guy belongs to. In Japan it was sashimono, small banners on poles attached to the soldiers’ backs; you’ve probably seen this in films.

You also don’t have to outfit your entire army with uniforms. Elite units tend to get these first, both because they have the money to do it, and because it makes them look special — which I don’t mean in a derogatory sense! They’re elite for a reason, and dressing them in the same gear both gives them confidence and advertises their badassery to the enemy. Sometimes their “uniform” is just better and more complete armor, but that counts; if your infantry are in boiled leather and your elite cavalry are in mail, or the infantry have mail and the cavalry have plate, it doesn’t matter as much whether the plate is all identical in style. Just seeing all that polished metal shining in the distance signals that a real threat is about the enter the field.

Officers are a special subset of this. Up until quite recently, we took it for granted that officers should be immediately identifiable by their appearance, without having to check for small markers like the stripes on a patch. This wasn’t just to make them look important; it was because you needed to be able to find them as fast as possible so you could follow their orders. One of the best ways to do this was to give them taller hats, with crests or feathers or big ol’ spikes or anything that made them stand out in a crowd. They might also look archaic; there’s a distinct tendency for officer garb to lag a bit behind current fashion, probably because we associate tradition with authority. But the flamboyant visibility of officers declined very sharply around the time we got better at long-distance sniping: being immediately identifiable becomes a fatal liability when that helps a hidden enemy pick out the most valuable target to drill through the skull.

Flamboyance can become a problem for regular soldiers, too. For a while in the nineteenth century, French soldiers wore trousers in a particular shade of red called garance, which came to be seen as a proud symbol of French identity. Then we developed smokeless rifles, and battlefield visibility improved enormously. After they lost 27,000 men in a single day in early World War I, France decided their national identity would be better off without red trousers.

Finally, uniformity can be situational. Modern soldiers may have a service uniform and a full dress uniform, both of which are distinct from their combat uniform, i.e. the kit they’re wearing in the field. That’s multiplying the investment and effort by three! In less organized forces, soldiers might be permitted to wear whatever they like most of the time, and only don their uniforms for battle or for ceremonial occasions. Or alternatively, they’re supposed to be in uniform at all times, and their officers simply fail to enforce that discipline: coats get hocked to pay gambling debts, torn up for rags, or left behind because the soldier just doesn’t care.

Because remember, one option for uniforms is “nothing at all.” Though I sometimes see writers forget this, it’s entirely possible that an army deploys no uniformity whatsoever, because they just don’t have the money or the organizational oomph to make it happen. Soldiers show up in whatever assortment of clothes and gear they can scrape together, or whatever the recruiting authority managed to scrape together and then hand out. They won’t look very good, and they might not feel very good, either, but they’ll just have to cope. It’s the best their particular force can do.