Of Swords and Stuff

In my profile I mention how a motorcycle accident was one of the best things that happened to me. Well part of that was that I got into games. Another part was that I joined a re-enactment group called the Lion Rampant. Here's the story.

I joined the Lion Rampant almost by chance back in the mid 14th century. OK maybe it was slightly later than that but it was still a long time ago!. After the motorcycle accident I had lost my 'proper' job which involved a degree of heavy lifting and I had somehow managed to land a part-time job in Not Just Stamps, my local games shop; an event in itself which lead to me setting up my own shop years later and of course fed my gaming habit.

I'd come in on a day off really because I just liked being there and the then membership sec. Sue Harrison was putting up a the 'LR Wants You!' leaflet on the notice board. If I hadn't had the bike accident I wouldn't even have known the shop existed let alone worked there,  if I hadn't been there when it was going up I wouldn't have spoken to Sue, if I hadn't spoken to her I would probably have ignored the leaflet, if I hadn't come in on a day off I would never had had all those years in the LR and crucially I wouldn't be writing this story now.

I thought that the whole thing sounded rather amazing, so I arranged to take a day off work. As I remember practices in St Mary's Church in Chesham back then were once a month but people used to meet around members quite regularly – and made my way to Chesham. The directions I'd been given were bloody awful, especially given that St Mary's is not hard to find really, and I very nearly gave up on it as a  bad job, but I found the local police station and they set me straight. Another close call.

St Mary's Church

One of the hardest things I've ever had to do in the Lion Rampant was walking through that door to the church. I'd not (really) met anyone, seen anything about the Lion Rampant, and had no idea what I'd be getting into. Worse, when I stepped though the door, what greeted me was a small(ish) group of people who clearly knew each other very well, were doing their thing and ignoring me completely! Not being at that point in my life sufficiently self-confident to intrude on conversations with people I didn't know, I was stuck in a corner watching until Sue turned up and I could get introduced and things got better.

Still that first practice (all 5 hours of it as I recall) were almost a complete waste of time, except for a glorious 5 minutes when I got to swing a mild steel sword which bent every time you hit something had to be straightened across my knee at least 3 times. Not knowing anything about how swords were supposed to feel and perform I just assumed that all swords were like this. I also discovered that I'd be required to fight right handed, because no-one was allowed to be a lefty back then.  I went away wondering if it was going to be worth it. 5 minutes out of 5 hours was not a lot, but what an amazing five minutes they were!

Well I thought hard and took a day off again, which didn't endear me to the shop owners where I worked, and duly turned up to the second practice which was a lot better (for me at least). I had a couple of great sessions with the 'banana sword' which was it's official name, poor tired thing that it was. (I wonder if it still exists somewhere or has been consigned to the scrap heap?) I was introduced to the two handers of the day which were huge great unwieldy bars of iron made out of railway sleepers and required you to be Conan the Bloody Barbarian to lift, let alone swing properly – I went away from that particular experience with a hernia and in terrible fear that in short order I was to become a twin brother of Richard III!

It was in the second practice that I really came to Graham's notice I think. Graham was nominally in charge of fighting practice. We didn't have a formal Battle Captain back then (at least as far as I was aware) and knights were responsible for training their own squires. He decided he was going to have a session where we all got to have a short go against him one-on-one with the weapon of our choice. I can't imagine something like that happening today, and indeed in all my years as BC or BC's  assistant I never did anything like that, but everyone lined up and we got to have a go. New squires go to try out their skills with a one hander and we had some rather better stuff, from the top swords of the time

Then it was my turn and I picked up an ash pole.

Of course I got the living crap beaten out of me, but I'd had some quarterstaff training from 'Pizza Face' Martyn (for the two of you that remember him) and I managed to defend myself a bit and even landed a blow or two! That got me invited to the next Sunday afternoon session where I was introduced to garlic bread and found out that Jethro Tull was popular here. I had listend to their music for years which consigned me to the musical dustbin of life.

For me It was the first of many, many, awesome times. I also was invited to a society visit to the Tower of London, where they let us view the 'how a man shall be armed' video they'd made and we got to handle a few good replica swords – which started me thinking about how we could have stuff which felt a bit more like these did. The rest, in the words of the cliché, was history.

Sort of.

My First Gear

Back then there was no re-enactment industry to speak of. For those of you that don't know you can pretty much buy most things off the peg now, but back then it was rather different. A place called Tudor Armoury made some very poor 'fighting quality' stuff (particularly the weapons), and as far as I recall that was pretty much it. You could get gear for martial arts quite easily, but it was all a far cry from today's fairs and the relative ease with which arms, armour and costume can be obtained; providing your bank balance can handle it!

As a result we were forced to make our own stuff. When I joined Ken had sorted out the mail side of things, and we had people wearing some excellent mail shirts which were better (in my opinion) to any of the non-riveted kit which is available today.

For helmets, gauntlets and body armour we were forced to make do with what we could manufacture ourselves. Lacking the knowledge of how to raise helmet domes , and if I'm honest not knowing much about what these helmets were supposed to look like we'd use the good old ARP helmet (the helmet that Chief Warden Hodges wears in Dad's Army) as a basis for much of what me made and wore. That's . For my first hat I took a 'firewatcher's' as we called them, and riveted some metal strips to it which made it look a bit like a medieval kettle hat. Of course it looked terrible, but it served its purpose and I thought it was great!

Wild eyed nutters is dodgy kit

Our gauntlets were largely made out of mail. The universal use of plate gauntlets that's taken for granted today was a pipe dream and the vast majority of what we had was mail stitched to motorcycle gloves. Some of us had 6-linked the mail over the fingers , which worked better hand protection waslessthanadequate lets say.

By the time I joined body armour was largely mail, which was a tribute to the industry of the LR's mail makers. Ask Animal and Griff to tell you about the mail shirt they made by hand in 24 hours for a wedding sometime! Plate armour, such as we had, was made by bending the sheet steel around the body/leg/arm of the person it was intended for and properly articulated leg and arm armour was years away!

For me, mail was out of the question due to constraints of time and budget so I made my first body armour by riveting some steel plates to a turquoise blue leather jacket, which I manfully tried to dye black, only to have it run  the first time it got wet, leaving me with blotchy black skin! The blue was so horrible I kept on trying but I never could get anything else to take until I eventually gave up on the dyeing thing as a bad job! I did eventually manage to make a very bad set of greaves, but that was my basic armour for a long, long time. It wasn’t quite ready for the first show so I got thrown into an old surcoat and a norman nut helm and that was it! One new squire ready to go. Yessir!

Soft costume was a bit different. Mum made me a nice surcoat with the Beaufort portcullis on it, but boots were bought from Freeman, Hardy and Willis, a floppy shirt from Top Shop I think – and 'hose' which happened also to be in fashion then, from the same place! I do remember having fun winding up the poor shop assistants there, having in depth discussions with the other guys about the perfect colour to go with our doublets! Someone had thrown a pink doublet my way – very dapper! Still I put it to you that a man who chooses pink as his colour can't be afraid of very much.

Finally, we come to weapons weapons. Swords were extremely hard to get (well usable ones anyway) and my very first weapon was a large bill-hook which was a Victorian hedging bill (Ken gave me the head as I recall) which I shafted and put some metal stuff on the end to protect the pole. Really quite authentic, except the pole was a straight bo stick I'd bought in a martial arts store and the metalwas aluminium. I couldn't use it in a mêlée of course which was to have consequences for my first show or which I’ll talk about in a second.

My First Show

I was very lucky in my first show. It was at Wingfield Castle in Suffolk. I'm hoping to get mt firend Valerie to let me post her article about it  later so I won't mention it here, except to say that for a very long time it was the best venue we got to play at, with a lovely, intimate showground and a great tea room, with the most amazing chocolate cake!

My vrey first show - thats me in the dogy kit to right. I've not been in long enough to be a wild eyed nutter yet.

There were a few downsides. We were paid based on the gate, and since the Castle owner, Gerrard, had proven untrustworthy in the past two of us were on gate duty at all times, greeting visitors, but in reality counting them as they come through to make sure that Gerrard's gate figures were correct. Being new I never got to see what went on behind the scenes, for which I am profoundly grateful!

Gerrard, being the skinflint he was, also made us pay full price, not only for the cake, but for basic things like water and tea. Knowing us I do understand the cake, but a free cup of tea would have been nice and so would something different to Clannad's 'Robin Hood' album as the music they played. That beautiful, haunting music still sends me off in an axe murdering frenzy whenever I hear it!

Still the venue was amazing, except for the Oh-so-tasteful naked plastic bronze woman sat on a stone pedestal with a small pot plant growing out of her – well I'll leave it to your imagination! We had the run of the place, especially at night and being young and full of energy the parties were bloody fantastic and went on until the sun came up. I'm told we could be heard 5 miles away.

More Wingfield This one's for you Duke Henry Plantagenet (Right)

The castle didn't open for visitors until the afternoon, so we got to play more in the morning and made the first of many infamous LR videos. For this one everyone had to line up outside wearing different surcoats and charge the castle. Then we all had to get on top of the castle and shout at the bad guys, except that we didn't realise the sound was on, and while faint, the dreadful war cry of 'your mother was a hamster!' could still be heard. Next the archers had to go up top and six of us had to die to their dreadful volleys before we got to the gate. The only problem with that was that our archers had had no practice shooting from the gatehouse towers and only one arrow landed anywhere near us and we all had to go down to it! That's the 'Volley of Arrow' story – clearly it had been loaded with high explosive fragmentation warhead. I really had no idea they existed back then. Honours for the one arrow vaguely on target go to Jenny Pilling.

After a mighty fight at the gatehouse, the good guys were overcome and the women carried off to the single pav; (square tent) for tea and biscuits (I think) and we got ready for the show.

Our shows contained many of the elements anyone whose ever been to an LR  re-enactment event will be familiar with today i.e. archery, dance, music, fighting and our scripts, but they were all presented within two half-hour slots, which were in fact the two halves of a scripted 'play'.

The 'Good Earl', as it was called started out with some music and dance, being nobles at play (well except for we squires in our firewatcher's hats) and the bad guys would turn up and there would be some singles – which bear a mention because the two combatants would step out and do their fight, and when it was over they'd pass 'the weapon' they'd used back to it's owner because there just weren't enough decent weapons (swords especially) to go round!

Then, in the second half, everything went down, the archers were trotted out and we dutifully formed our shield wall to be shot at; hoping against hope that Vanessa wouldn't decide to shoot you in the balls – the archers weren't very far away  - AT ALL After that we got to wreak our dreadful revenge on the archers and the bad guys except that being new and utterly crap even by the standards of the day I had been issued with a cross-pein hammer with strict instructions not to hit anyone with it and stay away from the audience. Even the most half blind ignorant fool could see that the poor thing was an impostor! So my first mêlée consisted of finding someone with a large shield, hitting it once or twice with my 'warhammer of ultimate doom' and falling over quietly in a corner. I did love it so!

Even More Dodgyy Kit at Wingfield (but slightly less dodgy than last time)

On day two I got to do a single combat with my billhook, which a huge rush,  nut in the melee I got the banana sword which was as hilarious as the hammer, since Animal came screaming up to me with his giant Conan the Barbarian 2-hander, bent the thing in half, and smashed me over the head while I was desperately trying to straighten it over my knee. So I began my long assocoaiotn with both the grass at Wingfield and with Animal which lead to me being his best man. Revenge is sweeter than choclate....

So that, in a nutshell was my first show!

What Happened Next

I wasn't able to make many of the shows that year; I was still working weekends and getting time off was hard, so I missed the infamous Henry's Bar (though I know all about it of course). I did take part in the battle of Tewkesbury which was a very different experience from what it is now (and is a tale for another time) and some show in the middle of a football pitch, which was far more typical of the kind of venues we got back then.

The Infamous Henry's Bar Agin Duke Henry (front right) and Jacqui Maunsell (front Left) and Look GRIFF! (cente)

But over the summer I worked on a number of things, a sword being one of them, and turned up to the first practice of 1985 with a new job which gave me weekends free, and two finished (and much lighter) sword blades, one of which broke to due really hard use a year or so later. the other now lives on my cousin's wall 25 years on.

If I'm brutally honest about this time, we sucked harder than a Dyson Big Boy on Steroids. By today’s standards the costume was poor, we didn't practice enough and our weapons and armour (mail aside) were crap. But we did love it, and our audiences seemed to love us and we at least knew we had to improve if we wanted to realise our castle dream and were passionate about realising it.

Over time we started to specialise in various areas – swords of course were mine if you haven't worked that out by now. Griff did everything but specialised in armour, loads of people worked on improving our costumes, and Animal did a lot of research into exactly how mail was tailored and put together, becoming a very skilled mailmaker indeed – in which he wasn't alone.

There was a real joy in finding things out. It was all so new, each discovery had to be worked for and I think was part of a series of things which caused a massive sea-change in the way museums work. Many of the hugely skilled craftsmen (well the British ones) you deal with now were making their first faltering steps into an enormous and largely unknown world back then as re-enactors.

As for us, we worked hard and got better and better at what we did. Our shows and skills developed, we practiced hard, and eventually we realised the castle dream and had it by right for many years. The great thing was, we had such a huge amount for fun on the way! Some heartache but on the whole it was all so much incredible, intense, glorious fun!

And for me it all happened because I had an accident on my motorcycle!