Ye Good Olde Days Weren’t All They Were Cracked Up to Be
Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.
Robert Frost
I once borrowed a costume with gauzy arms and legs reminiscent of Princess Jasmine in Aladdin. It was essentially bikini pants and a skimpy bodice under a bolero jacket in which I served a nine course dinner prepared by my husband for a group of college kids. I was 40. It was way outside my “eight kids, high school teacher persona”. I seriously considered a mask to disguise myself in case of unexpected cameras because blackmail photos were a definite threat. Fortunately, cell phones were not yet ubiquitous.
At the time my husband had been a member of the local unit of the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) for at least 10 years. The group’s goal is to recreate the days of knights, chivalry, and armor with the added bonuses of penicillin and air conditioning. My husband’s alter ego was a fellow named Vogg Hjalti Hrolfsson, an imaginary 11th century Viking who roamed the earth looking for plunder, adventure, and yummy food. “Vogg” built his authentic replica armor using as much historical accuracy as possible, but his breast-plate was conveniently made out of stainless steel because, though he was a knight “in shining armor”, he didn’t have a squire to polish it. (Members value accuracy unless it interferes with convenience.)
Once a month the Cook’s Guild branch of the association was held at our house. Six or eight members in faithful re-creations of their chosen character’s historical periods–all of whom were particularly interested in medieval food–took turns researching, planning, and executing medieval menus. Believe it or not, my husband owns copies of more than 40 medieval cookbooks. The only trouble with using one is that there are often ingredients listed which no longer exist and a detailed measurement is virtually never mentioned. No matter. Every member of the group was assigned a recipe, and a couple of hours later, they all sat down to a bona fide meal which might have been served at a king’s table. (Servants only got the meat off the already-chewed bones royalty tossed in their direction.) Some of the “recipes” were delicious. Some, not so much. My favorites included roasted chicken with raisins and honey, cold strawberry soup, and mashed turnips and parsnips mixed with cream–potatoes didn’t come to Europe until Columbus’s little expedition. But if you’re a hungry Viking, you’ll eat anything.
Hearing about my husband’s weird food hobby led a couple of my friends, who both taught honors Humanities classes at the U of U and BYU, ask him to do create nine course medieval meals as part of their curriculum. In between courses, he lectured on medieval history, and I served his meal selections in appropriate wear. (Plus, I always washed the dishes. Serf—a profession I’ve had plenty of experience with.)
The SCA was a regular feature at the State Fair. Members did demonstrations about a dozen different kinds of crafts—it’s pretty fascinating to watch chain mail being made—every link has to be individually riveted. (My husband says a suit of chain mail was handed down for generations in a family because it was such an exorbitant expense to commission a set.) Many of the female members of SCA created their own wimples as part of elaborate heavy velvet and satin costumes which actually weighed a ton. On a lovely September day at the Fair, they are HOT—temperature-wise, not appearance-wise. Every year we loaded up our kids and while their dad participated in mock battles with other like-outfitted noblemen, the kids ran wild. I wandered around sampling the baked goods. Win/win.
One memorable year, all the kingdom’s (divided by regions across the US) in the Southwest held a battle. Twenty-five hundred knights in sort-of authentic armor showed up to a state park in Arizona. Trumpeters sounded, and the war began. There was lots of cat-calling and fierce assault by the participants. But if a warrior suffered a blow which in medieval days would have killed him (head, neck, gut, etc.), he was honor bound to declare himself “dead” and leave the field. Fortunately, on the sidelines were a half a dozen “monks” who blessed the fallen warriors and declared them “live” again. My husband claims he had to be “resurrected” quite often because he was 10 years older than most of the other fighters!
Because I taught Beowulf and Chaucer, it became an annual event for Vogg, dressed in full armor, to put on a demonstration for all our senior English classes. It was the one assembly no one sluffed. He would spend 20 to 30 minutes talking about the period weapons of war and early European military history, then he’d open his bag of tricks (an old army duffel bag) and pull out a couple of bamboo “swords” which imitated genuine broad swords in weight and dimension but were a lot less likely to produce mayhem. He’d put on his helmet and ask for volunteers to fight! There was never a shortage of kids leaping off their chairs for a chance to take a couple of whacks at real live knight.
Most students were timid at first, but when they figured out that the armor was essentially impenetrable, they were happy to beat on my husband with the full force of their semesters in weight training. And he egged them on. As he often told me, he was pledged by the Code of Chivalry to accept all challenges—that and he was still a dewy-eyed middle schooler at heart. ( It wasn’t until firearms were imported from the Chinese that armor became vulnerable.) What the kids didn’t know, of course, is that while a sword couldn’t pierce a quality set of armor, most knights died of blood loss from the bruising of a hundred bashes from a weapon hewn by an expert blacksmith. My husband was usually saved by the bell—literally. I was the only one who knew that his middle-aged body would be black and blue for a couple of weeks.
My students, especially the males ones, talked about Vogg and his armor for days afterward. However, I admit it was still fairly demoralizing when I polled my students at the end of the year about which part of my carefully designed curriculum they enjoyed the most, and 80% voted for the armor demonstration! Sigh. So much of a degree in English Literature.