Medieval Lighting: History with Candles, Rush Lights, and Roman Oil Lamps 

Thanks for watching! ☺️ If you had a choice, would you prefer to use rushlights, beeswax, tallow, or paraffin for your lighting needs?

Great work!! Thank you!!

Oil lamps in the winter season served as wax lamps because of the freezing of oil. Wildfire-made burning of beehives might have shed light on beeswax in pre-historic humans. The same wildfire also leads to the invention of animal fat. Plant-based fat arrived much later. Good work and informative video.

This is an interesting topic.

Great video, thanks!

One more helpful video for me and the work I do, and this one provides all the details I was looking for. Keep up your great work. Thank you.

thanks for letting me post in my profile and subreddit. This is an interesting topic

Great video Lynne! Always a pleasure to discover a new (to me) historical crafts channel, I'm definitely going to be binging all the videos that are relevant to me. I do have a couple pieces of constructive criticism (I know unasked criticism can be annoying so feel free to ignore): Your audio quality is probably the weakest link in your production quality, it could likely be improved with even a super cheap external microphone (whether a lavalier mic that clips to your shirt or a more traditional mic) and following some RU-vid tutorials to improve the acoustic qualities of the room (basically using thick fabric to reduce sound bouncing off hard surfaces and being picked up by the mic multiple times which creates a "muddy" sound). You could probably use less artifact pictures or just point out the relevant information about them to keep the video at a faster pace and keep more watchers engaged, it felt like some of the examples were redundant and the spoken information (such as the Museum they are from) unnecessary when it's already on screen. This last one is very minor for this video but I think it's worth keeping in mind. Making broad claims about eras of history and large geographical areas without hard proof can lead to problems, while I think you did a decent job of backing up the claim that oil lamps fell out of favour after fall of Rome I do see many RU-vidrs making incorrect claims about Medieval society as a whole because they over-extrapolated some narrow evidence, e.g. everyone drinking beer because water wasn't clean. Whether you take these criticisms onboard or not keep up the good work; you and your videos are already gems, they just could polished brighter ♥

Spermaceti candles were the gold standard in lighting until kerosene lamps and gas lights came about. Nantucket was a leading whaling center and thus and center of candle making, Candles and oil from whale blubber[unlike the clean burning spermaceti from the head case of sperm whales] were rather smelly but much used by the masses. Whales were hunted to the farthest seas to provide illumination and lubrication for the machines of the Industrial Revolution.

500 years in the future: "These people only made around $15 an hour, most made less. Imagine working an entire day, to only afford six candles from Bath and Body Works."

One thing that always bothered me in D&D was the use of the torch. A torch burns 20 minutes to an hour, but they were not used for illumination as often as people think. Of course, D&D is a fantasy game and you can do anything you want, but if you want some realism in you game use csndles and oil wick lanterns as these were used far more often than torches. Miners had helmets equipped with oil wick lanterns. Halways and rooms were lit with lanterns or CANDLES! A candle burns 7 to 9 HOURS!!! A modern lantern with a bottle of oil will burn 180 HOURS or 7.5 DAYS!!!! A modern lantern with a 128 ounce (1 gallon/3.8 liters) supply of oil will burn for 768 HOURS OR 32 DAYS!!!! Medieval oil was often made from animal fat, vegetable fat (e.g. olive oil, almond, walnut, seasame) or whale oil it was not nearly as combustable (but still very dangerous) and was not as bright as modern lamps. Rush lights were also often used. These burned the pith of small rushes dipped in tallow.