Clun, 6th and 7th July

Last weekend De Vey was invited to do a Norman show for the Dog Rose Trust in Shropshire.

Although it's a bit of a way for us, we had a good turnout.

The De Vey colour chart. 

It was rather warm last weekend, so Stephen and Simon (second from the end on the left and right respectively) both chose to portray lower status characters than they might otherwise do so that they could get away with wearing fewer layers. They are therefore just wearing tunics and braies so they didn't have to wear trousers or shoes. I dressed up for the photo, but I'm afraid I took advantage of running a food display and helping with lunch to play a servant doing kitchen chores, which enabled me to tie my wimple back and hoist my dress up slightly, keeping me marginally cooler. At the other end of the scale, Osgyth and Clare are in their nice posh clothes (Osgyth in orange, Clare is sporting a straw hat) and Tancred next to her is still partly in armour after the afternoon battle.

Symon is already far too hot sitting in the shade at 9am, let alone fighting in the blazing sun at 4pm. Photo by Caroline Williams.

Never mind danger on the battlefield, I think our warriors were brave just to go on and face heat exhaustion. As a 13th century show, this meant that the knights in full armour were wearing a full-length padded cloth gambeson (to the knee and the wrist), covered by full length mail, with mail covering their legs, mail gloves, topped by a padded linen coif (the baby bonnets the men are wearing in the photo above), mail coif on top, and a bucket helm (shown below). Over the top of this went a surcoat, a garment brought back from the Crusades, where the knights realised that it helps stop metal armour heating up too much. As one who melted simply waiting by the side with water wearing little more than a linen dress and wimple, I didn't envy them!

Conical helms in the armoury, with an upside down bucket helm in the middle and another at the back left of the table. Photo by Caroline Williams.

Most of us were wearing linen to keep cool, which has the added advantage of being hard-wearing and easily washable without risking shrinkage, so many of us washed our clothes in the evening and left them to dry in the evening. This is in fact one of the principles of early medieval clothing: linen would be worn as an under layer (under tunics, underdresses, braies) because it could be easily washed, whereas the overtunic would be made of wool, and would rarely be washed.

Early medieval laundry. Photo by Caroline Williams.

We took an extensive living history display to this show.

Trevor took his pole lathe, as shown below. I briefly discussed the lathe in my post on Stoke Potteries, but here you can see it properly in use. The horizontal segment of wood with a string round it is the piece which is being shaped. Trevor is holding a chisel against this piece of wood, and as he works the foot pedal, the piece being shaped is rotated, allowing him to hold the chisel in one place while still chiselling away at 360 degrees of the piece to be shaped.

Trevor using a pole lathe. Photo by Rosemary Watson.

Cuthwyn brought her firelighting kit. Below you can see the dry grass, flints, and charred linen.

Fire-lighting kit. Photo by Caroline Williams.

Clare brought her embroidery. The first image shown below is based on the Bayeaux Tapestry. The colour scheme is authentic: the Anglo-Saxons would quite happily give a horse blue legs to indicate that they were behind and shaded.  The gentleman on horseback is a Norman, as evidenced by his short hair.

Image based on the Bayeaux Tapestry. Photograph by Caroline Williams.

Below is a new design Clare is working on: St Catherine. St Catherine was martyred on a wheel, therefore this is her symbol and is included in the design to identify her.

St Catherine and her wheel. Photo by Caroline Williams.

Staying on the textiles theme, Osgyth brought her spinning materials. Below you can see the unprocessed sheep's wool. To the right are the metal combs which were used to disentangle and clean wool. Combs are one of the most ancient methods of cleaning fleece: carders were not introduced until much later. The combing process pulls out the long staples, separates them, and aligns them in the same direction so that they are easier to spin. Pieces of dirt and the shorter staples remain caught in the anchor comb to be discarded.

Combed and uncombed wool, ready for spinning. Photo by Caroline Williams.

Towards the left of the basket are drop spindles, nestling below a lucet. Drop spindles have been used to spin fibre for millennia, and are still used today in the Andes and parts of Afghanistan. The spinning wheel was not invented until the 13th century and did not become common in Europe until the late medieval period. Spinning on a drop spindle is a time intensive process which all the but richest in society would have participated in in the early medieval period. With a man's tunic requiring approximately 8 miles of thread, spinning was an essential skill that required as many spinners as possible.

Once spun, fibre is dyed. Below you can see Osgyth's basket of naturally-dyed fibres. We often imagine the medieval period as characterised by browns and greys; if you couldn't afford to dye your clothes at all you might well be wearing a very restricted colour pallet, but the bright yellow and lighter green shown below are comparatively easily produced, as they are made from weld, a plant which grows widely throughout Britain and which does not require complex processing or selection of a particular part of the plant. Similarly the pinks can be produced from madder which also grows widely, so even someone comparatively poor could wear quite bright colours provided they had the time to harvest the plants and dye the fibre.

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Once spun, fibre can be used for a number of things. The most well known is weaving. Shown below is a warp-weighted loom, one of the oldest types of loom. The origin of the name is clear when you look at the photo below: the warp threads have weights on them to keep them hanging straight and minimise tangling. You may notice that the cloth on the loom is comparatively narrow: this is because unless you have two weavers, the maximum width of cloth you can weave is an arm's length, as you have to pass the "shuttle" (bearing the weft thread, shown slotted into the left hand-side of the loom) from one side to another. As as result of this constraint, early medieval clothes were typically constructed from a rectangle of cloth with a hole cut for the head, with gores added at the side to increase the width, as this makes very efficient use of the cloth you can manufacture.

Osgyth's warp weighted loom. Photo by Caroline Williams.

Somewhat less well-known is tablet weaving, although this is an equally ancient technique, used to make narrow strips of cloth. The braid is made by turning the square tablets you can see in the middle of the loom below to change the position of the warp threads and then pulling a weft thread through.

Osgyth's tablet weaving loom. Photo by Caroline Williams.

Each tablet has (usually) four holes through which fibre is threaded and by threading a tablet with different colours or turning them in different sequences, different patterns can be obtained. You can see samples of these below.

Samples of Osgyth's tablet weaving. Photo by Caroline Williams.

Finally, and not very well known at all, is sprang  Sprang is a method of interlinking warp threads to form a type of net, which can be used as a bag or as a hair net, to give just two examples. You can see Osgyth's sprang loom propped up against the warp weighted loom below. Unlike the warp weighted loom where the cloth is woven from the top down, sprang is woven from the ends into the middle.

Sprang loom. Photo by Caroline Williams.

Clun was a beautiful site to do a show. Sadly the site of the castle makes it impossible to do a show there, it being primarily steep hill, but most of us went up for a visit after hours, and two of us were able to attend the tour given by archaelogist Richard Morriss.

They think the original Norman castle was up on the hill's peak, where it commanded a good view of the valley. Clun is in the Welsh Marches and the original castle would have been built as part of the Norman efforts to subdue the Welsh.

Possible site of the Norman castle? Photo by Caroline Williams.

 The original castle was rebuilt in the late 13th century to be much bigger. The remains of the keep are still standing, albeit somewhat precariously. Current thinking is that this 13th century castle was built to impress rather than on the expectation that it was likely to come under sustained attack. It is built on the side of the hill where it could be easily undermined and had large windows for good views of the valley.

13th century castle. Photo by Caroline Williams.

View across the valley at sunset. Photo by Caroline Williams.

St Alfege Millennium Festival, 2012

Blogging the Angelcynn show I attended a few weeks back caused me to go hunting through my photographs for this show, which in turn reminded me of what an amazing show the Millennium of St Alfege in 2012 was. Hence, an extremely belated write-up.

St Alfege Church, Greenwich. Photograph by Caroline Williams.

Although we regularly re-enact bloody battles, in some ways this was one of the more gruesome shows I've been involved in, due to its subject matter. According to ecclesiastical history, in 1012 the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Alfege, was ransomed by the Danes, but refused to let his flock pay his ransom as he knew they barely had enough money to survive. The Danes then stoned him to death, frustrated at his refusal to pay up. He was canonised in 1078. 2012 was therefore the millennium of his martyrdom, and  St Alfege, Greenwich hired Regia to come down and put on a five day living history display.

St Alfege would have been brought to Greenwich by boat, therefore we took "The Bear", our long-ship down.

"The Bear", most recently seen in "The Vikings". Photograph by Caroline Williams.

Photograph by Caroline Williams.

Regia's display started on Wednesday, as the church had arranged for the local schools to come and visit the site. Sadly I couldn't make it down during the week, but Tigwald and Toki from De Vey were able to do all five days. Much to our delight though, a lot of the children who had come with their school in the week brought back their friends and family at the weekend.

Also to everybody's excitement, we were asked to recreate the martyrdom of St Alfege in front of the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. Regia is lucky enough to have several people who do the ecclesiastical side of things, so we put on a very enthusiastic display, pelting the man who is normally our Lawspeaker with a variety of objects. I can't imagine why, but the real archbishop declined to be the object of this display.

I haven't found any photos of the actual martyrdom, but someone did capture an image of the nuns caring for the battered bishop:

Photo by Jane Wheatley.

Before we killed him, we also had a ceremony to elevate one of the Regia bishops to Archbishop. Rumour has it that Rowan Williams was slightly jealous of the swanky 11th century bishop's kit. Note how little ecclesiastical clothing has changed in the intervening millennium. Modern clerics are essentially still dressed the way people did a thousand years ago. Although the presumably wash their clothes more often.

Elevation to Archbishop. Photo by Jane Wheatley.

The Regia nuns, together with Conroi de Vey's Bishop Tigwald in blue, next to Regia's Archbishop. Photo by Jane Wheatley.

Definite contrast in colour schemes. Photo by Jane Wheatley.

The ecclesiastical display. Note the blue chasuble and deep red and purple cloth on the tables. These  are all immensely expensive colours, especially in that quantity. Rich colours like this would usually just be used as decoration on cheaper fabrics. The highest ranks of the clergy were some of the wealthiest people in the land. Archaeologists have even found gold-leafed leather shoes belonging to a bishop! Photograph by Caroline Williams.

We also had a great LHE (living history encampment) at this show. I don't have photographs of most of it, but between us we had a moneyer, a musician, several woodworkers (making bowls, ship's prows, and carved panels), a food display complete with quernstone, embroidery, and half a dozen other things that I've forgotten.

Brother Tigwald at his lathe. Photograph by Caroline Williams.

When complete this will be one of the wallpanels at our long-hall, Wychurst. Photograph by Caroline Williams.

Hand-carved wooden panel. Photograph by Caroline Williams.

We also had the usual archery and military displays over the weekend, but they don't happen out of hours, which is when I do my photography, so sadly I don't have photographs of them. There is a good flickr stream by a member of the public and at least one public blog with photos from the event, including one of Tigwald and Toki being "manly with axes".

Overall this was a fantastic show. The church had put in so much work to organising and advertising the event, so we had an endless stream of interested and interesting public to talk to, and it was great to be able to contribute to their celebrations.

Digression: Angelcynn at Stoke Potteries

Conroi De Vey is a member group of Regia Anglorum, covering life around the turn of the first millenium AD.

A number of us are also members of other groups, however, and so last weekend Toki, Osgyth, Tigwald, Rhelbert and myself headed over to the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery to do a 650AD show with Angelcynn. This was a really exciting event for us all to do, as the Potteries is the current home of the Staffordshire Hoard, which is the biggest collection of bling found since Sutton Hoo was discovered in 1939.

650AD is still in the Migration Period i.e. after the Romans have left and when Angles, Saxons and Jutes are coming over from the continent and settling in Britain, or moving around and establishing new territories and relationships.  In contrast, Conroi De Vey's period starts the best part of 200 years later, when the Anglo-Saxons are the settled people, and it is the Vikings and later Normans who are new.

Although political relationships, social structures, religion, and dress  are fairly different to De Vey's period (pagan women don't wear wimples - hooray!), much of the technology we used in our display of daily life are effectively the same, and contingent on ability to transport it, appears at De Vey shows.

Pole-lathe. Photo by Caroline Williams.

Above you can see a pole-lathe, an ancient mechanism for turning wood to make e.g. cups, bowls and other cylindrical objects. At the bottom of the picture you can see the long pole which is the treadle. This  pulls on the long cord attached to the top pole, and turns the item you are turning, which is mounted horizontally.

You can see that better in the photo below, taken at a Regia event last year, and dated about 400 years later (hence Tigwald being attired as Brother Tigwald). The use of the pole-lathe to turn green wood continues today, although the vast majority of woodworkers now use power tools.

Tigwald using a pole-lathe at the St Alfege Millenium Festival, 2012.  Photo by Caroline Williams.

Toki brought along his collection of shoes that need repairing, bone to work, and various weapons. As Toki is a Viking name and we were pre-Viking for this show, he was answering to the name Tobias, which is the closest equivalent.

Tools for leather and bone work. Photo by Lancelot and Carol Robson.

Early medieval drill.  Photo by Caroline Williams.

If you look carefully in the pile of objects above, you will find two bow drills (what look like long spindles with a whorl at the bottom and a cross bar at the top). We don't have direct evidence for them in this period, but they were known in Roman times and they are cited by Theodosius in On Divers Arts  in the early 12th century. We do have finds of drill bits, however, so this is our best guess at what drills of the period would have looked like.

During this show, Toki focussed on making a bone fishing spear-head, shown below, to demonstrate to the public how bone was an every day material. He also worked on one of his bone needle-cases, demonstrating to the public that a poorly wielded drill will go through skin and muscle as bone.

Bone fish hook.  Photo by Caroline Williams.

Here's one he made earlier: a bone needle-case. Photo by Stephen Shepherd.

I was delighted to be able to use Angelcynn's quern stone, shown below. A quern stone is an ancient method of grinding grain, which only went out of use with the introduction of mechanised mills. This is a rotary quern-stone, which means you put the grain in the hole at the top, then turn the top stone (known as a hand-stone), which grinds the grain. The grain then comes out the sides, between the two stones, hence the cloth on the table. 

Quern stone.  Photo by Caroline Williams.

Mechanised mills, both water and wind, do become more common during the Anglo-Saxon period, but quern-stones would still have been in use well into Regia's period, as well as during the Migration Period.

I ground rye, since rye would have been a common grain in the area. From discussion with Osgyth, this ground much more easily than the wheat they have used previously, but it still needed two grindings to make it vaguely smooth. There's nothing quite like actually grinding grain to make you realise how laborious life was 1500 years ago. Approximately half the children who had a go proudly proclaimed that they definitely weren't tired, but I bet there were some sore arms the next day.

In addition to the quern stone, I had a display showing a selection of foods which would have been available, including some leeks, celery, carrots, onions and garlic, which are out of shot. These are all available in De Vey's period as well, as from this point on, we tend to get access to new foods, rather than losing existing ones (in contrast with the previous 500 years, in which we lose Roman foods and spices).

Apples, bread, eggs, salted mackerel, nuts, herbs, sourdough bread, sourdough starter.  Photo by Caroline Williams.

Note that this display is rather generous for the season. May is traditionally known as the "hungry gap" because it is the time when you have eaten your winter stores, but the new season crops aren't ready yet. Particularly with the weather we've been having, this would have been an extremely hungry gap as the new season crops have been significantly delayed by the cold weather. The diet would probably have involved more spring greens like those shown at the front, and distinctly fewer large shiny apples.

On the bread front, I took along a sourdough and a sourdough starter so that the public could see how even an every day substance such as bread would probably have smelled and felt different. This worked really well, as did having actual ground grain on site, showing how much lumpier and harder on the teeth bread was likely to have been...and why the smoother your bread, the richer you were. 

Butter churn.  Photo by Caroline Williams.

Another popular display was the butter churn, although sadly I didn't actually attempt to make butter due to the sheer volume of mess created as you pump the plunger up and down. This is another object which both dates back to ancient times and remains in use for at least 1000 years after the date of this show.

Again, this was a great hands on exhibit for the kids to have a go at. The butter churn is also worth of note for being the solution to a number of Anglo-Saxon riddles. When Tolkien wrote of hobbits loving riddles, he was drawing directly on the Anglo-Saxon tradition, where they were very popular. The solutions were also often rather rude...

Osgyth in front of her warp-weighted loom. Photo by Lancelot and Carol Robson.

Above, you can see Osgyth with her warp-weighted loom. Note that she is portraying a Christian character so she has covered her hair, although not as much as she would do were we several hundred years later. Sadly for blogging purposes I was so busy talking to people I didn't get the chance to listen to her talking about her loom, or the sprang she also had on display, so for now I shall tantalise you with a photograph, to be returned to another day...

Finally, just because it made me so happy, I can't resist a picture of me as a wimple-free woman. My hair is covered just so that I didn't grind my hair into the flour, but as a happy pagan in 650AD I was free from the Church's requirement that I cover my hair. Hooray! Use of the wimple was already starting to come in among those groups that had converted to Christianity though, and by Regia's period women would always have to cover their hair outside the home.

 Photo by Caroline Williams.

(No Toki's were harmed in the making of this post.)