Plastic is not medieval. It's a twentieth-century invention, and indeed did not become at all common until the second half of the century. In fact, you can tell if you come across an old dump if it dates to before or after WW II by whether or not it has plastic in it. These days, of course, plastic is a major part of what we throw away, and the oceans (and ocean birds) are full of it. (So are we. The average modern American has several thousand tiny plastic bits lodged here and there inside.)
The word "plastic" just meant originally something that could be molded or shaped into different shapes, which of course plastic can be, to make lots of different objects. The term now covers all sorts of different materials, including nylon and polyester as well as the versions of plastic that get official recycle numbers on the bottle.
Plastics (polymers) are made out of petroleum. When you think about how useful plastic is, it seems a shame that we're using petroleum as a fuel and burning it up. It's also a shame that we don't recycle more. But these are not what I'm talking about today.
Here I just want to discuss how different a medieval person's material possessions would have been without plastic.
Let's start with clothing. The chances are excellent that you're wearing something with polyester or nylon in it. Look at the label. (Medieval clothing did not have labels.) Medieval clothing was made of wool or linen or, by the late Middle Ages, cotton. Let's just say permapress was not known.
Beach sandals (flip-flops) are plastic. Medieval sandals were usually leather, maybe with a wooden sole or some incorporation of straw.
What did you drink your coffee out of? At home probably a ceramic mug, and medieval people had ceramic mugs (though not coffee). But if you got it as a carry-out, it may well have come in styrofoam, a form of plastic. If you ate carry-out food, there were likely plastic utensils involved.
When you go to the supermarket, the food comes wrapped in plastic, and you get bigger plastic bags to carry it home in. Medieval people had cloth or leather bags to carry things, and food did not come wrapped in anything.
Many people now carry bottled water around with them, water that is encased in plastic. Medieval people would have kept water in a stone or ceramic vessel, or in a leather skin for transportation. They had glass bottles, but these were too valuable (and breakable) to carry around.
How about in the kitchen? Your countertop is likely to be plastic. The stove knobs are. The interior of the refrigerator is. The non-stick lining of your pans is made of polymers (plastic). You stir as you cook with a plastic spoon or a metal spoon with a plastic handle. Medieval pots were iron (best) or ceramic (not as good) and stirred with a wooden spoon.
Eyeglasses these days usually have plastic frames, and the lens itself is often plastic as well (as of course are contact lenses). Medieval eyeglasses had metal frames and glass lenses.
Many a modern house has vinyl siding. Medieval houses were wood or stone or plaster (usually a combination of all of these). The plaster often had "natural" things like used straw from the stable mixed in.
Once you become aware of it, it's shocking how many things you touch on a daily basis are made of a material that went from very rare to ubiquitous in the last seventy-five years: the computer, the car's dashboard and steering wheel and upholstery, the baby's chew toy, bottles of water, stockings, phones, indoor-outdoor rugs, credit cards, camping equipment, picnic plates.... The list goes on.
These days people often want to get plastic out of their lives--dress in natural linen or cotton, only leather for shoes, house sided in cedar rather than vinyl, counter-tops of wood or stone or metal, metal water bottles, bring your own ceramic mug for coffee, ask for paper bags at the supermarket or bring your own cloth bag. They are fighting an uphill fight against a material culture that medieval people would have thought was great.
© C. Dale Brittain 2018
For more on what people used during the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.
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