I followed a recipe from 1907 for "Scotch beer" (which is to distinguish it from "hop ale" which doesn't have any barley at all in it - just sugar and hops). The recipe reads:
Add 1 peck of malt to 4 gallons of boiling water, and mash for 8 hours. Strain, and boil for half an hour with:
1 lb honey
4 oz hops
1 oz coriander seeds
2 oz orange peel
1 oz bruised ginger
Strain, and ferment in the usual way.
So detailed! I used 1 peck (which is a unit of volume, not weight, equal to 2 gallons) of 2-row pale malt, which I measured in a spare plastic brewing bucket marked off by gallons. 1 peck is about 7 lbs, by the way.
I boiled 4 gallons of water, and added the hot liquor and malt to my mash tun. I left it there for 8 hours and strained it without sparging (since the directions don't mention sparging). This left a lot of gluten behind, and probably a lot of sugar, but also the grain soaked up almost 2 gallons of water, leaving me with 2 gallons remaining.
I brought that to a boil, and added the other ingredients, hops all at once. That should make for a pretty bitter beer - 4 oz of hops in 2 gallons of beer. The recipe didn't say anything about adding water to increase the volume of the wort.
Now as for fermenting "in the usual fashion". I strained the wort into an open brew bucket, let it cool, and pitched some dry English ale yeast, then covered it with a tea towel. Since this recipe comes from a book of household recipes, I figure it'll be "farmhouse style" so I'll ferment it open, with just the towel to keep out the worst greeblies. I may rack it and put it in a carboy with an airlock for a short secondary fermentation, since there was a lot of sediment left over from the hops and coriander that I'd like to settle out. I think the sediment might also have thrown off my hydrometer reading - it showed 1.072 which I think is a little high, but then again 7 lbs of malt for 2 gallons of beer plus a pound of honey might put it that high. We'll see what it ferments out to.