I managed to delete an incomplete first draft of this, and I now have only a bit of time before we go out to Darmstadt to eat and to watch Germany vs. Turkey in a bar somewhere.
Last year we did 1584. The troubles with Spain were just rumbling, and the main thing was the change between Julian and Gregorian calendars. This year was 1588, so Armada fever. I was on the gate again, and we were telling the children to watch out for any Spaniards or Catholics. Some of my colleagues used err… colourful but probably authentic language that I didn’t think entirely appropriate to use in front of school children – racism and sectarianism are fine, but I draw the line at swearing ;-).
There was occasional rain, but nowhere as bad as last year – there wasn’t the deep mud on the camp site or the track to it like last year. One of the other people doing the gate also does Sealed Knot or some other kind of military re-enacting, and he said if he ever wrote his autobiography it would be called Damp Wool and Wood Smoke. I managed to forget the poles that hold up the curtains in the tent the Haricots had lent us, and also all the poles for the small castle tent that the boys were going to have inside the main tent. So we all slept in the one bedroom, which was probably just as well as the nights got quite cold.
The very first time I did Kentwell (pre-children) it was also 1588 and there was a pike drill, that I found scary and I had no idea what was going on. This time there was someone who’d been doing Kentwell for ages who was determined to have a proper pike muster at the weekends, so we had daily drill. I now know some of the orders, and also the value of wearing gloves (no splinters) and what happens if you drop the blunt end of an 18′ pike on your foot (it hurts).
I also learned a possible origin of the phrase run the gauntlet. Some people didn’t show up for pike drill one day, and the next day the rest of us were told to line up in two lines facing each other with a glove each, and the people who’d missed drill had to run up through the lines while we hit them with the gloves (in the spirit of camaraderie, of course).
There were a couple of teenagers on the gate too who’d been doing Kentwell since they were tiny, and they had their own swords. They sparred a bit with each other, but their blades were so notched through parrying that they were more like saws. One managed to get the other on his thumb and take several layers of skin off. He’ll remember to wear gloves next time.
As well as scaring children and bad-mouthing our various enemies, and giving a health and safety talk in Tudor-ese, some of the children came to us to look at armour and weapons. The most popular thing with the teachers was when they chose their most vexatious child and we put a helmet on them. “I know you beat your childer soundly each day, but when you do, do you use such as this?” Holds up warhammer. Teacher looks on enviously but says “no”. “Would you care to?” Scarce believing their luck, the teacher takes the warhammer and hits the child on the head. Some gave a gentle tap, but some were surprisingly enthusiastic.
I think my favourite bit was the military intelligencers’ tent. They had painted a huge map of the South coast and North France on silk (see Flickr photos), and made little clay ships. The whole thing was a bit like the control room charts used in WW2 with little planes being pushed around with small rakes. They managed to get across the fact that, given the prevailing wind in the Channel was from the SW to the NE, the British fleet would actually want to hang around off NW France and allow the Spanish into the Channel. If they started off between the Spanish and England (as you would with land armies) then they’d be trying to sail into the wind towards the Spanish and probably come to a sticky end. You have to appear to leave the coast undefended in order to defend it properly.
It was nice to meet new people, and to deepen friendships with people we’d met last year. J would disappear after he’d been let out of the school room with a small posse of boys. Unfortunately he picked up some eye-popping language that he used in front of us without any idea of how strong it was, which suggests that it was normal speech inside the posse. He soon learned its significance (not its meaning), and in general to be careful in what he picked up from other Kentwellies.
We got home on Sunday, fed everyone, put them in the bath to get rid of a week’s worth of dirt, then pack for Germany. I’m now in the delights of asparagus (Spargel, in German apparently) country near Frankfurt.
