Saxon Soapery

Soap making goes back through time. A time when ingredients were limited to what you could grow or gather. The ingredients have improved but the process to get real Soap (not detergents) remains very similar .
This is how they used to do it.
What you will need:

Ashes from an oak tree
Tallow – which is animal fat
Lime – which is heated to become quicklime
Salt
Flour
Water
A pot
A pan
A strong stir stick
Put “clean shifted ashes of oak” into a pot that is three or four gallons in size, and then add two gallons scalding hot water Stir, cover and let this sit for an entire day. This mixture is now called lye, and then you add “two generous ounces of quicklime” as well as two more gallons of boiling water to it. Stir and let stand for another day.

And then take three quarts of that lye and put it in a brazen pan three potels [a potel is a type of small pot] and make it seethe, and then when it does, immediately take and add to it half a pound of nice clean tallow of a sheep that is completely melted . Then take a good large stick, or else a pot-stick, and stir your materials together well with it. And when your tallow is completely molten in your lye, take and add to it half an ounce of nice white salt and stir them together well; then take a quarter of an ounce of nice wheat flour and mix it with a little portion of your cold lye, and then draw it through a linen cloth into a dish in the manner of a starch; then put that same ‘starch ‘ to your other materials in your brazen pan, and then stir them well all together with your pot-stick; and if it rises up, take it and beat it back down with a ladle, and continually be stirring in it until your material becomes so thick that you can see the base of your vessel during the stirring, and also such that it stands when you push it with your pot-stick without any running together again, that is the true sign of when it is enough.

Reference from Medievalists.net

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