Festival of History

This is being written way after the event, but with a mucked-about-with date so it appears at the right point in the flow of things.

English Heritage organise a Festival of History every year, and we heard about it via an email list that Katy’s on. It was pricey and the military side of things looked a bit more prominent than I would have liked, and the weather on the day was looking border line, so I was feeling a bit anxious that the ticket I’d bought in advance was going to be a waste of money. Then, on the way, we hit some very hard rain and I managed to get us lost so we were half an hour even later than we’d planned, so it didn’t get off to a good start.

But I’m very glad we went, and the children all want to go again next year because they enjoyed themselves so much. We took so many photos that one set on Flickr was too clumsy and we even managed to bump the “you have uploaded X% of your limit this month” thing above 1%. This is because it was a day long photo opportunity, which I shall try to remember the details of now.

The basic structure was re-enacters representing different periods from Romans up to World War 2, camped in the grounds of Kelmarsh Hall. They took it in turns to break camp and go and do something crowd pleasing in one of the arena areas in the grounds, and then there was a large march past of everyone at the end on the main arena.

As we hadn’t bought a programme (well worth it next year) we had little idea what was going on, and stumbled across lots of Vikings and Saxons about to recreate the Battle of York, where the Vikings wanted to come into York and the Saxons, who were there already, didn’t want them to. It took a little while to get going, and reminded me of an American Football match once it had, as there were periods of little activity (but much posturing) punctuated by mindless violence. The Vikings won (I think – it’s hard to tell as they look fairly similar from a distance) and the battlefield had lots of pretend dead on it at the end. I suppose it’s much like children’s games of war, except with period costume and beer afterwards. The dead had to rise at the end to make way for the Romans, who stood waiting like a column of Cylons from Battlestar Galactica.

The Romans were very impressive, and just went through a drill rather than pretending to fight anyone. The commentator was interesting and informative, and gave lots of details like the cavalry didn’t have stirrups as they hadn’t been invented and had saddles with four pommels instead. The infantry fanned out around the perimeter to do an air-stewardess-giving-the-emergency-briefing act as they went through all their gear while the commentator described it. There was some cavalry slicing up cabbages on horseback (no, it was the soldiers on horseback, not the cabbages), some impressive artillery, and my favourite bit was when the infantry did the tortoise thing with their shields. It really looked impregnable, and the re-enactors were very disciplined. The whole thing was rounded off with a horse race – again without stirrups but with funny saddles instead.

After that we saw some civil war people going through musket drill and then pike drill – this too had a very good commentator. There was a very nice bloke with a cannon who talked to the boys about all the bits and let J feel the weight of a half-size cannon ball – still rather heavy. I got talking to a very authentic-looking and slightly eccentric gent who was a polar explorer, complete with knitted balaclava, and a sledge with chests of Bovril etc. and a Union Jack on top.

The only low point for me was the World War 1 aviators. The wind was only just calm enough to allow some planes of the period to take off and stage a mock dogfight. (Surprise, one English bi-plane saw off two German mono-planes even though it flew at about half their speed and was often in front of them.) The planes themselves were fine, but there was an unpleasant commentary from people pretending to be British pilots of the time. They were authentically hostile to the Germans, but I would have preferred less authenticity for the sake of less hostility.

A definite crowd pleaser was the jousting. The knights had full armour on, there were lots of bunting and flags, and the nobles hammed it up a bit so that we didn’t think we were watching something from It’s A Knockout. There was a jester who was rather crude for something including young children, but fortunately that didn’t get in the way of the action – the chairs for the nobles did that as we weren’t early enough to get a good seat. The lances had been fixed so that the end four feet or so splintered on contact, which produced impressive showers of wood. I think our knight lost, but it was good nonetheless.

Then there was some very good Morris dancing and the big march past at the end. I’ve almost certainly missed things out – see the photos on Flickr.

Even with the World War 1 stuff I was left with a very positive feeling from the day. There were lots of people interested in preserving our roots and bringing them to life, who were friendly and informed, and all jumbled together so that you saw a Roman Centurion walking between some Civil War musketeers and a World War 2 US marine. The children all got a lot out of it I think, so we might consider doing Kentwell again next year, which will be a bit full-on with children in tow this time.