Regina approached the carpenter’s. On the walls were arrayed hammers, saws, axes, adzes, billhooks, files, awls, and gouges, and wooden boxes of nails were stacked on the floor. Today Oswald—the head of the little manufactory, a great bear of a man with huge scarred hands—was working his new toy, a pole lathe. A rope ran from a beam above to a foot pedal, and when he worked the pedal the central spindle ran smoothly. He was still getting the hang of the device, but already the stool legs and wooden bowls he was turning out had a pleasing symmetry.

Meanwhile, in the pottery, the kiln had been fired up. One worker mixed clay with the crushed flint that helped avoid shrinkage and cracking, another shaped a pot by hand, a third prepared the kiln itself. The kiln was an updraft design, far advanced over the simple pit clamps Regina had used on the farmstead. Firing took a whole day, with the temperature raised and lowered in careful stages. Maybe one in ten of the pots still failed, but the rest was solid red earthenware. The potters were even learning how they could control the color of their product, from black through gray or red, by changing the amount of air available in the kiln. It was still coarse stuff—they had yet to master the technique of using a wheel—but it was solid and useful.

Regina’s old friend Marina ran the largest of the cloth works, from a big roundhouse she ruled as firmly as Artorius did his kingdom. The looms themselves, three sturdy frames taller than Artorius himself, were set just inside the entrance to the house, so the weavers could get the best light.

Regina liked to watch the weavers. The most skillful of them was another Marina—a docile sixteen-year-old, one of the old woman’s own grandchildren. Young Marina worked steadily. A warp, threads of spun wool, was suspended from a top bar and kept under tension by small triangular stones. Marina pulled the horizontal heddle bar toward her, opening up a gap between alternating warp threads. She pulled the weft, a horizontal thread, through the shed, and then released the heddle to pull the alternate threads backward, and then passed the weft back through the gaps. Every few passes Marina would pause to push her weaving sword, a flat wooden board, into the gap between the warp threads, and thus compacted the weft. All this was done fluidly and without pause, and her speed of working was remarkable; just standing here, Regina was able to see how the cloth’s crisscross pattern was emerging, row by row.