Iron, How Did They Make It? Part II
It's an often repeated fact that steel swords and the like were quite valuable during the middle ages, but it is a revelation that the reason they are so expensive is that they required hundreds or thousands of man hours chopping trees, managing slow burning fires, carting ore and wood around, etc... Modern media always just focuses on the last step (and usually gets it completely wrong to boot) while ignoring the small army of peasants needed to produce the raw materials for that smith to work into the sword/axe/helmet/etc...