Rufford Abbey, 2013

Last weekend saw De Vey at Rufford for EventPlan's Grand Historical and Vintage Bazaar, our first local show of the year.

Sadly the weather wasn't entirely in our favour the whole weekend; hopefully this doesn't augur badly for the rest of the season.

Our warriors bravely fending off the hail. Photo by Jane H Smith.

The warriors put on a great show though, despite getting hailed on torrentially.

Anlaf Swerkirsson did a good job of terrorising the local children:

Photo by Jane H Smith.

He also got into a dispute with Tancred the Tall:

Photo by Jane H Smith.

I think Tancred regretted getting into the dispute, especially since the local children took Anlaf's side and started mocking him as Tancred the Small.  Interestingly it was primarily men who were named by contraries. A man named the Tall was likely to be short; a woman known as the Beautiful was likely to be stunning.

Photo by Jane H Smith.

Tancred subsequently attempted to salve his ego by defeating somebody smaller than him in combat:

Photo by Jane H Smith.

Note that Tancred is carrying a sword. This is the mark of a wealthy man, since the sword is a weapon with no other purpose than combat. Swords are very expensive, and owning one is a marker of social status.

Photo by Jane H Smith.

Tancred also tried his luck against Toki the archer. You would think he would know better really, since his betrothed is also handy with a bow. 

Roswyn showing that men were not the only ones to wield bows. Photo by Jane H Smith.

 There was plenty of activity on the wic as well, with mutton stew for lunch on Saturday and onion soup for lunch on Sunday. We are currently in the hungry gap, so called because it's the time of year when the winter stores have run out but the summer's food isn't ready to harvest yet. In choosing these meals we therefore went for foods which we think would likely be available at this time of year.

Photo by Jane H Smith.

Anlaf is less blood-thirsty on the wic. Here you can see him chopping wood for the fire. This photo is also a rare opportunity to catch a glimpse of early medieval underwear. Anlaf has hoist up his tunic so it doesn't get in the way while he works, so you can see his red hose tied over his braies. Behind him is Brother Tigwald, ramming in stakes. We unfortunately have to rope off our displays since we have things like fire and sharp edges, but with the weather we had I think some of the public would have given anything to be on the other side, huddled next to the fire.

 Another post to follow, looking at life out of hours...

Thoughts on bread

My family likes bread. 

We can get through over a kilo in a day. 

I also have an addiction to flour, and so in my ceaseless mission to provide bread for the bread bin, I have been getting my hands dirty with a number of different flours recently.

I mentioned in a post on the banquet a few weeks back that bread was a staple food in our period. As a result, we almost always have some type of bread on the wic as it's one of the comparatively few authentic foods.

Trying to have authentic food on the wic is actually quite hard, because even where the same food existed in our period, it is very different to the modern product.

A loaf made of heritage flour

As regards bread, this is for a number of reasons:

• type of flour: wheat, barley, rye, acorn etc
• method of milling: ground with a quern stone vs stone ground at a mill vs a modern roller mill
• raising agent and time to rise: unleavened vs sourdough vs modern commercial yeast 
• method of baking: period ovens vs modern ovens
• properties of the wheat

It's the last point that I want to talk about a bit today.

Unless you're another bread freak, if I say "bread" to you, then you probably think of something like this:

(Image taken from this classic white loaf recipe)

This loaf doesn't look much like the picture I posted above, and not just because I made it rather than a professional baker.

I have baked with two pre-20th century varieties of flour: the Doves Farm Heritage Wholegrain and their Einkorn. It is the heritage wholegrain which you can see at the top. The einkorn is a prehistoric hulled wheat, and the Heritage wholegrain is a recent free-threshing variety, so both are quite a long way from the wheats that would have been cultivated in our era, but sadly, they are the closest I can obtain. As almost all other wheats you can buy are the result of the green revolution in the 1960s which  produced short stalked wheats with a high grain yield, however, they're close enough to provide interesting practical insight into what bread in our period might have come out like.

 Both varieties come out significantly flatter and denser than any other flour I bake with:

Two einkorn loaves on the left and a modern loaf on the right

On the left you can see two einkorn loaves, both baked from 500g of flour. On the right is a loaf of modern flour. Even accounting for the accidental perspective in the shot, the einkorn loaves simply don't rise as much as modern flours. Partly this is because they tend to spread out more than rising, so my suspicion is that they just don't develop gluten structure the way modern wheats do.

The cracks and holes in the surface of the bread in the photos below also suggest this: instead of stretching, some of the gluten strands have just given up and snapped under the pressure of the air bubbles which are forming, creating the cracks and holes you can see below.

Einkorn loaves with cracked crusts

If I'm right - and I don't have any authentic flours to play with - then even though we know that they did have yeasted breads which rose, I'm guessing that by our standards they were pretty flat and dense. They would take a fair bit of chewing, rather than being the light fluffy loaves we eat today. Of course both of these flours are wholemeal, which is naturally slower to rise anyway because the sugars aren't quite so easily accessible, but I let these rise as much as I dared without risking them collapsing.

Just for interest, see the difference between the pure white roller-milled sourdough on the left, and the stoneground wholemeal einkorn on the left. They're pretty much opposite ends of the wheat spectrum: the one is silky, smooth, and stretchy, and the other is tight, textured and dense.

One other point: the Heritage variety is a blend of two older varieties, April Bearded and Spring Wheat, both from between the 17th and 19th century. If you're interested in reading more about these heritage varieties, then Brixton Windmill have an interesting post on their efforts to grow it, as do Howell Farm in America.

Spring training, 16-17th March 2013

Waes hal! Min nama is Leofwyn ond ic eom baecestre. Min gemaecca is Toki, scipwyrhte. [1]

Our national society, Regia Anglorum, organises a spring training weekend every March to give us all a chance to practise together before the show season starts. As described in a previous post, the warriors had a splendid time with their usual weapons training.

Line fights in the woods

Od the Slight training with a single-handed spear

13th century combat

 This year, however, in preparation for our 1213 show at the Royal Armouries some of the warriors have been learning to fight in thirteenth century kit. I have to say I was glad I wasn't fighting in it as it didn't look as if they could see much!

Most of De Vey, however, used the event to train on the archery range. 

Tigwald works on his aim.

Toki teaches some of the Regia children to shoot.

National trainings are also an opportunity for civilians to get together and learn new skills. Below you can see a member of Regia who is a blacksmith in "the real world", running a session on repousse. Other sessions included bead-making, costume-making, and Old English. As you can probably tell from the text at the top, I attended the last of these. Can you work out what that text says? Answer below the picture.

[1] Hello! My name is Leofwine and I am a baker. My partner is Toki, a shipwright.