(Not) A Steel Age

We, you and I, are currently living in a true Steel Age. People throughout most of the history did not, even though they may have claimed picking up the secret recipe of the precious metal from the gods themselves.

Most of people in developed countries are personally surrounded by 6–16 metric tons of iron or steel every second — basically, a whole parking lot worth of high-quality iron. Most of these come in forms of building elements, but transportation, machinery and appliances also soak up a lot of iron.

Humanity produced 1.9 billion tons of steel in 2021, precisely 10 times more than in 1950, and, crudely, 30-something times more than in 1915. Basically, we add 240 kg of steel/530 lbs to the stock of existing iron for every person in this world every year.

Remember that number.

Early Industrial/Late Medieval Age

Earliest consistent data on per capita iron production I’ve managed to find does not cover the classical Middle Age, only the early Modern England: Peter King uses production and imports data to come up with numbers for iron consumption in England in 1490–1815. Arguably, most of the “consumer-friendly” iron came in the form of metal bars ready for further smithing, with some small and unnaccounted exception of cast iron pots, cannons and shots.

The lowest estimate of per capita iron use comes from 1500, at 1.6 kg or 3.6 lbs of iron per capita, which basically means an average person could get an axe head worth of iron every year.

And it gets worse if we consider the whole economic context.

First, iron was very unevenly distributed during the age: richer people used up most of the produced iron, but the rest got almost none of the expensive good. For every knight in a new 15–30 kg/40–80 lbs shiny set of a relatively high-quality armor a whole village worths of average Joes had to forget their Christmas presents.

Second, we are talking about England, one of the richer countries of the time on the brink of the Industrial Revolution, not a typical Middle Age hellhole. Funnily, some claim that Medieval England was much better off even than the poorest countries of the modern age, and I tend to believe that. Most people around the globe were nowhere near as rich, and had to cope with much less iron produced.

Third, finally, it’s the beginning of the Modern Age, not the High Middle Age of 1000, and most certainly not its lowest point during the Dark Ages: the very same Maddison data hints that an average Englishman was almost half as wealthy in 1000, and we can only imagine how bad it got at the lowest point in economic history.

Moreover, between 1000 and 1500 at least one key iron smelting technology, water-powered bloomery, was widely introduced — and before that, production of iron and steel was even harder. Given the fact that this tech increased the batch size in bloomeries tenfold, I would not be too surprised if before 1000 AD the yearly iron production/consumption per person was few hundred grams/less than a pound.

If we think that iron lived through the similar lifecycle in the Middle Age — which is not improbable: yes, it was much more cherished and treasured, but on the other hand we have gotten much better at making durable metal and making it last overall — an average Medieval person’s share of iron, every little piece of iron or steel he or she would ever own, weights less than 10 kilos/25 pounds.

P.S. The highest per capita consumption in the paper was reported in 1800: whooping 19 pounds of iron per person per year — still 30 times less than the modern person.

Real-life consequences

Throughout the most of the human history, iron was surprisingly scarce.

Look around: most of the things we are used to seeing crafted of metal would be made of wood, clay, bone, stone or maybe not made altogether.

Cutlery? Everything, besides knives and some rare cooking pots and pans, could be made of clay (cooking pots, jars or plates), or wood (plates, laddles , spoons— even the word “spoon”, they say, was derived from chips of wood). And, given the costs of the material, knives and pans were seldom and used by whole generations.

For example, in the Early Medieval England dig sites (p.21), for every single knife archaeologist found, they also dug up 2 loomweights/fixtures (made primarily of clay), 8 querns (an archaic utensil for grinding by hand, used primarily to make flour from grains) and 200 miscellaneous kitchen items for cooking, eating, drinking, and serving.

Weapons? Jewellery, bracelets or metal charms? Ordinary coins? You’d need to be really wealthy to boast owning even one. The very same “Elitism and status” by Hana Lewis I’ve just cited makes these even more precious than knives: for every lost coin, they find 1.5 prestige items like pieces of jewellery, and 2 weapons. And, if the proportion is correct, for any such rare cool finding you’d find 400+ ordinary knives used by the non-wealthy people.

Building elements like nails? Naaah, you don’t build houses with precious metals. Most of the woodworking was done painstakingly by hand, and wooden nails and a whole deal of ingenuity were used to fix these piece of wood together. When and only when wood or stone would not work well enough at all, iron was used because of its superior defensive properties — but still as sparingly as possible and mostly by the elites.

What does this mean for your own world?

If you are using a cookie-cutter medieval setting for a start, just imagine that every piece of iron just suddenly turned into much rarer titanium or maybe even silver. Everyday items just got MUCH more expensive, rare, and brittle: most people would suddenly hesitate to use and risk them unless really necessary, cover them lovingly with ornaments, cherish the items and look after them properly, encrust give them as expensive gifts or inherit them from parents and grandparents.

An ordinary “grey” or “white” RPG sword (or even an even cheaper axe or spear head) suddenly feels like a treasured family heirloom. Yes, it’s not magical and does not give any additional bonuses — but it may be more expensive for the peasant family than a whole car is today simply because of the amount of metal and effort it required to produce.

And maybe… just maybe, even the ordinary weapon or metal item actually is somewhat magical! Ore was painstakingly dug out by hand, furnaces burned for days to produce few kilos of iron bloom, metalworkers manually had to beat the piece of metal to drive out the slag and make iron bars, and finally a blacksmith has worked for days to form every nook and curve (and defects too) of the blade. Unlike the modern iron products, first mass-manufactured in soulless factories, and then used and discarded without second thought, every item of the old has a distinct creation process and decades of history — it can have its own, unique character.

And a tiny piece of fairy tale or a bit of magic could wiggle into that item at any moment in the past, just ready to be discovered by the players or characters. Items don’t have to be of orange quality to have a legend attached.