wandering around

Maze pictures!
Because of the new campsite for Living History Week, I was able to place the labyrinth much closer to the tents and make it easier to spot. Because of some great help bringing up stones, I got it finished on the first full day, and later on tweaked it a little to make the 'walls' more curved and natural looking, though I don't know whether that really shows up on the photos.
It annoys me that apparently there's no way to zoom or enlarge a photo once it's posted on Blogger. Argh.
Anyways ....

 The maze in early morning, uninhabited.

 The maze in full use by the young and spry.

The maze for contemplation by the more sedate.

The ghost of the maze, all its bones removed.  (photo credit Joan Kew)

All symbolical this is for me, because tomorrow, right after midnight, the 3-Day Novel Contest begins--though I will not myself begin until something like 6 am, because I am old and need my sleep--and I am less prepared for it than I have ever been.
Seriously. I have less of an idea than ever, no outline, no characters. I might have a setting, in that my brother suggested I write about our childhood running about in the woods and lake and so on, specifically this passage from my website bio:

"The Chronicles of Narnia and Lord of the Rings taught me that forests were full of magic, and my brother and I spent most of one summer looking for the secret door to other worlds. We thought we'd found it once, where a huge tree had broken above our head-height, and toppled to land on another, making a rough gate. We walked between the trunks as many ways as we could think of, with different things in our pockets or hands, but never got through into the other world."

Will anything come of this? We shall see. 

labours of the months, 1371

Our Living History Week is over for this year. A new campsite, just down from our previous one which is now becoming a Garry Oak meadow. I was a bit apprehensive, but it worked out nicely. So, a few pictures of everyday life in the 14th century, below.

 Isabeau at the churn. Behind her you can see information booths for some modern enterprises. She's actually quite close to the kitchen, which is just out of the shot.

I love this medieval style iron-shod spade. Unfortunately we aren't allowed to do any real digging onsite, but I got Mark to pose with it as a model for a potential calendar of the labours of the months. 

Ditto with Havise, performing one of the labours for November (rather ahead of time)--baking bread. This is a labour for every day, to be accurate. Yes, we had fresh-baked bread from the oven and fresh-churned butter. Life in the Middle Ages was nasty, brutish and short, and everyone was starving and clad in rags, don't you know?

Alicia card-weaving. Ingeniously, she is able to adjust tension by turning the tent-pole her work is fastened to. I have a video as well, but given my past lack of success at posting them, I'll wait to attempt it this time. 

My studio this year. I found the big easel at a consignment shop and snapped it up right away. I managed to finish off the two paintings on it, and begin a new one. The smaller one in front is, yes, baking bread as the Labour for November. 

A final picture of the oven, with two loaves of bread successfully produced. Beside them you can see the ashes of the fire that heated the oven and was pulled and swept out so that the loaves could be put in for baking.

making an oven again

 More extensive photos of this are on Facebook, but here's a summary of what I helped make last weekend. You may recall that our last year's Living History week's oven fell apart over the winter (sounds of weeping offstage). So we are learning from that experience and doing it better, with the help of Build Your Own Earth Oven, 3d edition. Reportedly in the 4th edition he says that making a portable oven is a bad idea, but that's what we need to make.

So! In a wooden frame that allows the oven to be moved (since we can't have a permanent oven at Fort Rodd Hill) on a layer of insulating fill, a firebrick and cob base is laid.

A sand form patted into place to be the core. This will be removed after the oven is built around it.

A layer of newspaper to make it easy to tell which is the sand form and which is the cob wall.

A layer of cob is the innermost wall of the oven. 

And here's the crew watching the door being opened up at the end of the first day.

 The second day. The cob layer has dried somewhat. Cracks have been covered with more cob.

Adding a doorway that the wooden door (leaning against the platform) can rest against. The doorway is built of straw ropes rolled in slip. 

An insulating layer of slip and wood shavings is patted on.  The sand core was pulled out at this point to allow the interior to dry more easily.

An outer layer of cob mixed with chopped straw comes next. This is where any modelling and decoration is applied. We limited ourselves to two 'ropes', similar to the decoration of last year's oven.

And here it is, smoking away with the first drying fire. Quite expressive, don't you think?

Magicians, seers and sages

 was the theme of this year's Medieval Seminar at UVic. Which was definitely one of the more interesting topics we've had, and--yay!--one which didn't leave me staring at the wall, wondering how on earth to set up a relevant display.

For one thing, literacy! Before literacy was common, writing was strongly identified with magic. Spelling. Grammar and glamour (a magical mind-control) have the same root. What is she writing, below? Perhaps a textual amulet to be carried for protection against evil.

Then from texts to textiles. Spells can be stitched or woven--think of all the mundane craft terms associated with magic. I'm tempted to mention some very good stories with textile magic, but since they're by modern authors and not medieval, I'll try to stay on topic. This below is embroidery by Elisabeth de Besancon, and lovely clean work of course. If I get hold of specific info about the stitches and so on I'll post it, but right now I have nowt.

I had to pick my moment carefully to get all three with their heads down. It's not quite the Three Fates, but evocative, don't you think? Fortunately none of them have shears.

This is just one of the more intriguing-looking bits of the display. Like the dried lizard? I always knew it would come in handy someday. I had fun writing up all the little cards.

Then there's magic associated with music. Enchanted by song, sung to sleep or madness. Fiddles that make all hearers dance. True Thomas the harper of the Queen of Faerie, the horns of Elfland.

I can promise you that none of this spread below was magicked. Just tasty!
After takedown we went home to a medieval feast of Grete Pie (the flour & water crust serves as the baking dish) of pork and chicken and dried apples, plums and raisins, side dishes of spinach salad and canabens with bacon, and a pudding of milk and almonds. (I am open to correction and addition on any of this, since all I did was make up gluten-free pastry for a secondary pie).

Oh, almost forgot. With the invaluable help of Joan (the harpist above) two smallish cloth hangings got painted, appropriate to the theme. I've been trying to pull that together for the last three? four? seminars, and never managed to set aside time. This time Joan made it happen. Yay!

Done over two evenings. The blue one is Joan's. Cool, isn't it? It made me remember how much I like painting.

pictures from the past

 Well, from about a month past. Photos from our Living History Week at Fort Rodd Hill. I've chosen a few pictures that I like or think are nicely composed, but I'll provide a commentary pretending that there's an educational aspect to this post.

Remember the clay and cob oven Joan and the kids and I were making? Here it is in action, with Joan in charge. Bread and pastry and buns every day! You build a fire inside the oven, until the interior is hot enough (there are a few different tests for this, disagreeing with each other). Then sweep the fire and fuel out, and insert the thing to be baked, either on the floor of the oven, or on a piece of stone covering the floor of the oven. Cover the mouth of the oven with that square of wood (which does scorch through eventually, yes) and let the contents bake until done.
One of those simple-sounding things that takes much experience and many mistakes to get handy with.

 The labyrinth returned after two days of picking and laying out stones. Here the younger kids make sure that it works properly. The littlest one was a babe in arms last year.

Because we're portraying everyday life and working-class artisans, it's important that everyone have work to do, whether their craft or daily tasks around the camp. Here, weaving narrow-ware. That's a stool turned upside-down serving as the loom.

Gathering for a meal in the dining tent, at a trestle table spread with a linen cloth and loaded with bread, apples, dried fruit, eggs, cheese, sausage, butter and honey. It's a hard life, but we keep our spirits up.

here presently

Back home from our Living History week at Fort Rodd Hill. After a slow start because of being so recently returned from Pennsic, followed by two days work panic, I got myself sorted out and immersed in daily life of the fourteenth century. I didn't go online, turn on my EEE, or read, except for one brief trip to 'the fried bread shop' on the day it rained a lot, when I read a couple of chapters of The Book of Air and Shadow, by Michael Gruber.
Now I am back home, a home strewn with un-unpacked baskets and bags, clothesline heavy with freshly-washed linens and lawn covered with tarps and carpets. My brain appears to be in a remarkably similar state.
So. More later, and pics. I will never catch up with the pics!

making our own fun

Last weekend I helped build a clay oven, in hopes of using it during our upcoming Living History Week. We've had ovens from time to time, the first being built of broken bricks on site, covered over with clay and straw then disassembled with a hammer at event's end, the later one being built of clay over a tall basket and fired by burning the basket inside it. That one lasted a couple of years but was a bit delicate for moving back and forth to the site. Eventually its makers smashed it up cathartically.
After that we did without. But an oven is such a handy thing to have, and opens so many possibilities, that the idea was never quite given up. At last Joan bought clay and offered her patio as an assembly site, and Ina, fresh from a course on cob-building, offered her expertise.
I brought the basket.


Here Ina directs her two lovely assistants in preparing the sand-and-clay cob mix.


After the base has been covered in clay, the inner frame of the oven is established. Rowan is eagerly squishing clay into a sheet to begin covering it.


Halfway up with the first layer. Ina works up more clay and sand. We covered the frame with an inch-and-a-bit of cob mixture, then left it overnight. The next day we painted it with slip, then added a thinner layer of cob mixed with short-cut straw.


Some decoration to the top, as with some of the English examples, in a rope-twist pattern, and the youngsters could not be deterred from painting it over with slip once more.
It has to dry for a couple of weeks before we even think about firing it. We'd like to be able to put on a hand-cart and wheel it around, but we might have to settle for standing it on a couple of trestles.

ancient lights

is a doctrine of English Common Law, that a window 'glazed or unglazed' through which light has shone uninterrupted for at least 20 years cannot be obscured by buildings or structures on adjoining land. The law came about in the 1660s, and has one of the cooler names going.
I also find it a useful reminder, for writing pre-industrial settings, that the dominant (and free) light is sunlight. Other kinds of light, candles, fire, oil-lamps and rushlights, require money and materials to maintain, and provide less trustworthy illumination. There was solid reason for most guilds forbidding work to be done after nightfall, and calling it 'false work'.

I try to be aware (a habit picked up from painting) of the light source and direction within any scene I'm writing. Overall, I think I have the hang of it, and I've been quite pleased with the effects in some night scenes I've written.
Which is why I was more than a little embarrassed recently, reading over a scene from Cost of Silver. The scene involves Tom/Griffin, by night and rain, cutting the hand off a hanged woman. At first I found it quite satisfactory, jus needing a little polish. Then I realised that I'd written it leaning heavily on the visual, as if the gibbet in a small English village would have been lit by streetlights. Aaarrrgghh.
So. Must rewrite, swapping out all visual detail for tactile.


Last week was our annual Living History Week at Fort Rodd Hill historic site. Not as big a group of us as a couple of years ago, but livened by the addition of a party of Vikings up the hill, who joined us for dinner most nights.
The stone maze was set up just below the dining tent, and that proved an excellent position, visible and accessible for visitors, but discouraging people from wandering straight up into the dining tent. The pathway was very thoroughly trodden down over Thursday, and even easier to follow post-takedown. A few photos were taken of our ceremonial post-labyrinth walk-through, and if I can get hold of one I'll post it.

This is me trying out a different head-wrap, with a rather 15th c. look, and the stylish addition of a huge smear of ink on my face. Amazingly, I didn't get any of the ink on my veil--everything I own eventually does get ink on it, though.
By the end of the week I had cut all but 4 of the feathers into quills, and given several away. My theory--that lefties would find a quill and a writing slope easier than joined writing with a modern pen--was confirmed by experiment by two left-handed youngsters and one adult. I was quite chuffed.

I do rather wish that there was less ambient light on the site, and most especially that the horrid bright sodium light on the washroom building was either turned off or dimmed. You can see so many more stars then. Still, the site remains beautiful with deer grazing fearlessly nearby, and the company unmatched.

This year we had the diversion of repeatedly escaping chickens, including one roosting in a tree. It's surprisingly difficult to catch hold of a chicken that's flying straight at your face.
Partway through the week, the rowdy hens were replaced by a sedate and dutiful hen with three half-grown chicks. She was tethered by the leg, as per the illustration in the Luttrell Psalter, and the chicks stayed nearby.
One meal was enlivened by the sudden stoop of a hawk onto something small and furry (odds say gray squirrel) followed by the hawk flying away with the small thing going squeaksqueaksqueaksqueaksqueak in its talons. The chickens, who had been talking amongst themselves up to that point, were abruptly entirely quiet and still for quite some time.

This is Elisa weaving, always a great attraction. A little trouble with the loom this year because of the ground not being quite level, but eventual success, and an opportunity for many visitors to try weaving a few rows.
The Fort Rodd Hill group was this year so female that the guys were joking it should be renamed from Medieval Village to Medieval Convent, with Mark and Paul to be the priest and the gardener (there's a Boccaccio story being referenced there, but I can't remember which one).
There are several children running about, so it would have to be a convent that took in orphans, but that doesn't seem like an insurmountable obstacle.

Meals were fairly low-key, with breakfast and mid-day being a matter of foraging through what was laid out on the table: smoked meat and sausage, hard and soft cheese, apples, cherries, dried apples, plums and raisins, bread, honey, dripping, pear butter, mustard, boiled eggs, and suchlike. Supper was usually a pottage (barley, lentils or rice) with vegetables and a little meat (beef, rabbit, bacon or lamb) mixed in. One roast of lamb and one roast rabbit, which led to many entertaining discussions about the ethics of eating meat--beef never seems to provoke the reaction that rabbit did from visitors.
This photo is of me and Alicia making sure that the last of the barley pottage didn't have any bits of bacon in it before it went to the hens.

The oddest names I was asked to write this year (Your Name Written With a Feather!) were brothers named Rylan and Shaunison. Rylan sounds like a blend of Ryan and Dylan, but I wonder if Shaunison will be calling himself Shaun once he's on his own? His mother even said it was easier to spell than pronounce, which seems a bit counterproductive.
Olivia is still popular, and Kayleigh/Ceilidh/Kaylee/etc. holding its own. One pair of sibs named Kayley and Kaydon, and a charming group of ladies from Trinidad or Jamaica whose names included Edith , Lauren and Theda.
Luthien and Elanor were very pleased that I not only knew how to spell their names but recognised the source (how should I not?) and their sister revealed that her middle name was Galadriel so I added it to the page.

Silliest thing said by visitor
That Paul heard:
Young boy (pointing at rabbit): What's that?
Paul: It's a rabbit. I'm roasting it for supper.
Mother (pulling young boy away): He didn't need to know that!
That I heard: On the last full day, an older lady with (I would guess) her granddaughter, about 7 or 8, the lady being of the sort who lectures rather than converses, and the little girl being carefully kept from engaging with any of the activities. Four or five of our kids, ranging in age from 12 to 6, were running through the labyrinth, shrieking.
Lady: The children had very short childhoods, and were put to work at an early age ....
(Kids reach the middle of the labyrinth and collapse onto each other in a giggling heap)
Lady: Their clothing was a miniature version of their parents' dress ....
(Kids get up and start racing back out.)
The kids are, indeed, dressed in clothing similar to the adults, but simpler and cut shorter.
The little girl is wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt and black stretch trousers. The older lady is wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt and black stretch trousers, plus short vinyl jacket.
So I guess the great emancipating advance of today is that adults' clothing is an expanded version of their children's dress?

a week under canvas

The week of Canada Day saw us, as usual, camped out at Fort Rodd Hill, a medieval village under canvas. Fewer than last year, with the changed date of the Pennsic War making scheduling awkward, but still a lovely time away from the present.

Building the maze was the easiest it's ever been. Tess and Rowan, Effie, Brandy and Brianna did all the heavy work, bringing the barrows of stones over to a spot near the tents, and leaving only the layout to me. Even with that I had help from Brenda and passing children.
The system of laying out the maze is:
First, lay out 7 (or howevermany) rings of stones. The width of each passage should be a long stride (of mine - if you have longer legs, you'll have wider passages and more stones needed).
My trick is to make the innermost ring a comfortable size to stand in, take an apronful of stones, choose a direction, and pace out the next 6 rings, laying a small pile of stones at each stride. Do this for 4 quarters, then the eighths between.
The best way I've found of keeping the passages even is to work outwards from the innermost ring, walking backwards with one foot in each passage, and laying the stones as you go. Sort of like planting in furrows.
Once I had all 7 rings, Tess and Rowan were running around them as best they could, somewhat tricky when the rings don't join. As I marked off the switchbacks, they ran back and forth, and by the time I picked up the stones that had barred the entrance, the whole maze had been test-run.
I'm not using quite the classic Cretan labyrinth, because I find that one a bit boring. The design I've been using has several switchbacks to add challenge, but one long run around the outermost ring, where the young and active can get their speed up.

Tess and Rowan are 5 and old enough to stay overnight, which they insisted on whenever possible. Even sleeping with the chickens didn't deter them.

The chickens laid us an egg a day, though the 21-gun salute on Canada Day stopped eggs for some time, even though their box was covered with straw bolsters during the firing.




Here's our dining tent, the table laid for breaking one's fast. Bread and cheese, sausage, boiled eggs, apples, dried apples and prunes, butter, dripping, honey and jam. Water and small beer (which has less alcohol than ginger ale and is quite refreshing on a warm day).

Brandy and Brianna, with help from the small children, churned butter every day, and later in the week made cheese.



I tried a different layout for my atelier this year, since Mark wasn't going to be working in the other half of the tent, and I'd been finding it a bit crowded now that I've got more paintings stretched out.
The feathers are to cut quill pens from, and the little 3-legged pot has size-glue in it--gelatin made from soaking and simmering parchment scrapings and clippings. On the left corner of the tabletop is a slab and muller for grinding pigments, and a little jar of red ochre.


The weavers' village at the entrance to our camp is well established now, with two looms flanking the path, and people carding and combing wool as well as spinning with both drop-spindle and wheel.
This year Maria had her new baby with her, and yes, visitors did ask whether she was a real baby, as well as whether the chickens were real, and the perennial question of whether we were really going to eat that food.
Yes. Because it's very good food indeed.
And yes, we are sleeping here, on a good straw tick with a featherbed on top, and wool blankets.
And yes, it's a real fire. If you put your hand in, it will give you a real burn.

It was a good week. Takedown on Sunday was sad, even though it goes so much faster than setup.
Brenda and I took the straw ticks home to mulch for the gardens. Brandy, Brianna, Tess and Rowan picked up the stones from the labyrinth, leaving nothing but tracks worn into the grass.

Actually, it IS a pen.

Dear parents who are bringing your children through our Living History exhibit, please refrain from the following two behaviours:
1) From a distance, carefully not speaking to the people who are actually doing things, tell your children 'look, that's what they did before they had (blank)', most especially when you do not know what those people are actually doing, and you are guessing wildly.
2) When your children have come closer and are excitedly trying out whatever the re-enactor is demonstrating, loudly say to your child 'That's really hard, isn't it? Aren't you glad you don't have to do it that way now?'

I understand that in the first case you are trying desperately to maintain the illusion for your child that you do know everything, and in the second you want your child to appreciate his/her advantages. But the only solid way to achieve the first is to lock your children in a cellar without an internet connection. The second one is self-defeating--how can someone gain and maintain interest in the world around them when they constantly get the message that other ways of being and doing are inherently difficult and second-best? Might as well stay in that cellar, provided it has internet access.
Admittedly, I subvert both of these tactics every chance I get. When I hear from one of the passing blurs (I don't wear my glasses when I'm 14th c.) "Look, that's what they used before they had pens." I say clearly "But this is a pen. It writes well, and I can make it myself. Would you like to see how to make a feather into a pen?" If I'm feeling stroppy, I ask cheerfully if they can show me how to make one of their pens.

Fortunately, the majority of kids who come through are straightforwardly interested in everything we're doing, from weaving and cooking to woodturning and cutting quills. The armour and the Fiore school combat, of course, is teh sexxorrs, and the rest of us get a break when the wooden waster swords come out. Mark had more armour this year, and there was much excitement.
Many children went home with cut quills--Harry Potter has been good to the craft of writing with a quill. Many children also went home with 'your name written with a feather' which is my reliable turn, and gives me a snapshot of fashionable kid's names.
The old-fashioned names like Olivia are holding up (three Olivias) along with the oddly-spelled standard names. I collected about five different spellings for Kayley including Ceilidh (only one this year, last year I had two Ceilidhs), and a Kimber-leigh. The most gratuitous, I think, was Mhina, which her parents(?) admitted was spelled that way just because.
Probably these children will not be bothered by the spellings because their whole generation will have to spell their names out routinely. Mind you, because of bleddy Streisand, I've had to spell my perfectly ordinary name out for most of my life anyways. And medieval names had no standard spelling so it doesn't matter how anyone spells Linot.

Anyway, to celebrate Mark's new armour, here's a pic of me gazing adoringly at it--or at something just behind his head, according to him.

off to the past

To be absent from the keyboard for the next week, for our annual Living History demo at Fort Rodd Hill. (The photos at the link are from several years back, and the encampment is considerably more elaborate now. But the current photos are on my laptop, and the laptop and the desktop are not speaking to each other. Sigh.)
For the next week, I will be Linot Fitton, painter of the Peynter-Stayners Company of London, one of several artisans gathered for a fair in the year 1371. I will sleep on a featherbed over a straw tick, eat meals cooked over an open fire or in a clay oven, wear linen and wool, and stick my nose right up to whatever I'm working on, because I don't have 14th c. eyeglasses.
Fortunately, the strict interpretation is only required while the park is open to visitors. Once it closes, we can break our roles, and the Norse encampment or Cavalier encampment can mingle with the Plantagenet encampment. And those who wear eyeglasses can see clearly again.
Canada Day is the big day, and for that I expect to be writing children's names--Your Name Written With a Feather--for several hours. Harry Potter has been good for the business of writing with a quill. If it slows down (and during the week, when traffic is less anyways) there may be time to show how to cut a quill and for interested children to get ink on their hands trying one out.
Which pales before the thrill of seeing the guys working with wooden waster swords. That draws a crowd, always. As does the weaver (not the same crowd) and the cooks. "Is that real food? Are you going to eat it?"

The only accessible electricity is a plug in the women's washroom, so the laptop stays home. I will rediscover the joys of writing in a notebook (not tm) with a pen. I won't know what anyone is doing online until July 3d. Try not to get into trouble while I'm gone, okay?