Huzzah for St. George!

Yesterday we went to Wrest Park in Bedfordshire for an English Heritage thing to celebrate St. George’s Day. It was like a mini version of the Festival of History, with extra St. George. As is becoming traditional with English Heritage outings, I got us lost on the way there, but not too badly. English Heritage is all about England and tradition, and so I show us more of the lovely English countryside and road network.

The first thing we saw were some Medieval jugglers who were fun, juggling clubs around a line of volunteer children. Then one of them did some cringe-inducing but impressive lying on a bed of nails – fortunately he knew his stuff and there was no blood. Interesting quick discussion with Katy and J about pressure – I think he initiated it.

After that there was an excellent show about Nelson. It was narrated by an actor who got children out of the audience to dress up in silly clothes and take on the parts. The Battle of Trafalgar was recreated by children wearing hats with ships on the tops thwacking each other with foam truncheons. Occasionally the children had little speaking parts, with the actor whispering and the children repeating. This was J’s favourite bit of the day, apparently.

It’s a bit of a blur after that, but we wandered about a bit avoiding a squad of Romans who were marching back to their tents, looking at the stalls and the very impressive lawn that was so big that it had 3 croquet lawns set up on it. We saw an excellent display of birds of prey – they were beautiful to watch, and the falconers were dressed up in Victorian gear as it had to be Historical. They did talk about the history to be fair – apparently larking about comes from using the birds to hunt larks rather than proper prey.

Next J and K joined the Roman Army, although they didn’t have to stay the regulation 25 years (just half an hour or so). A Roman re-enactor played a sergeant major and did the proper shouting, shuffling the troops around etc. The children had wooden shields and swords and lined up in rows and followed orders explained in English but given in Latin (sin[ister] and dex[ter] for left and right, smash your shield into the face of the enemy, stab them with your sword etc.) Its shoutiness and gruesomeness were pitched correctly for children, although we did have to explain afterwards that some of the nasty things that the Germans supposedly did to the defeated Romans might not have happened but were just told to other Romans to make them angry and fight hard! They did the tortoise with the shields which looked very impressive, a slow menacing march banging swords on shields, and a charge. Fortunately no-one got hurt and later on when we watched adult re-enactors being Roman soldiers the boys could appreciate it more as they’d done it themselves.

There was a fairly poor Medieval thing, some kind of play including dancing and fighting but we couldn’t hear any of the words. Another show from the Nelson people, but this time about Queen Elizabeth I (Don’t Mess with Bess). This was as good as the first one.

At the end of the day there was a kind of panto on horseback, with St. George defeating a dragon. While waiting for it we bumped into the Beans and the Manor born posse, which was very nice. (Us Dads discussed the type-casting of dragons and deleted enough space on our cameras for even more photos.) As the poor dragon didn’t breathe fire, bite, scratch or fly it was a fairly quick and one-sided fight. So that it wasn’t over too quickly there was a warm-up villain in the shape of a Saracen on horseback. He at least had a sword (and a ridiculously large nose for some reason) and temporarily defeated St. George, but the shouts of the crowd healed him 😕 and he came back to dispatch the baddy. Huzzah!