Time Warp at Kentwell
This manor is pretty much exactly what I would do if I won the lottery. The owner lives in the half the house and the rest of the grounds are used as an interactive multi-period reenactment. Typically, the main focus is on Tudor, with a few weeks in the summer having the grounds and manor run like an authentic 16th century household, but this week included a vast array of time periods. It was very surreal walking around, having the home guard marching past you on one side, then the pre-historic people carrying a dead deer on their shoulders back to their camp on the other, a Tudor merchant selling wares from his cart and a band of 1970s punks calling out everyone they came across. There were also a couple of peacocks roaming the grounds, whom Grace had named 'Dave' (yes, both of them are Dave), and every time the WWI and II lot would fire their guns they would run around shrieking.
Our Norman set up was placed right near the dove cot and the moat. We were in the year 1086, twenty years after the Battle of Hastings and the reign of our glorious King William the Conqueror. My lord, Jean D'Abbasey (Bryn), had been tasked by the King to collect census information from around the country to settle disputes of ownership and tax, which was to be recorded in a book known as Doomsday. He brought Sir Adrian of Saltwood as an armed escort, his scribe Herbert (Malcom), his wife, Lady Matilda (Sarah) and her Lady-in-waiting Genevieve (me) as well as a company of servants to make rustic living as bearable as possible. I mainly spent the days embroidering new cuffs for Herbert's tunic or assisting Ingrid on a beautiful Bayeux style not-a-tapestry, and chatting to the various civilians who had come to give their information to my lord. We also played a few games of knucklebones and 9 man's morris and helped prepare the afternoon's meals of gammon and pottage.
There was a weapons demonstration of firearms throughout the ages called 'twang to bang.' Lawrence was our archer and showed the various arrow heads that would be used, including flaming arrows, bird hunting points, and the very nasty armour piercing ones as well as a cross bow demonstration. The Tudors had their bows as well, then we went to the evolution of the gun, from Napoleonic to WWII. The home guard, looking like they had just come off the set of Dad's Army, presented their array of weaponry, including a Northover Projector. I love the smell of gun powder in the early afternoon, it smells ... really bad actually. On the way back to camp we were accosted by a hoard of hippies trying to give us flowers and convince Adrian to put down his weapons. Good luck with that one. Their encampement was near by and easy to spot, you just had to look for the VW van and clotheslines of tye-dye.
One evening, upon realizing that people had never heard of s'mores and deeming this unacceptable, Malcom and I made a quick tescos run and came back with everything. A guy at a neighboring camp even had real graham crackers that a friend in the States had sent him so we used those. However, since we were lacking roasting stick we used some of Lawrence's arrows. S'mores taste better when cooked on arrowheads.
Another evening, they held a Ceilidh (pronounced kay-lee), basically a giant group dance, where as many eras as possible tried to teach the rest of us dances from their period; everything from Tudor court dances to Thriller, and tribal circles to the Charleston. Sarah and I had swapped our Norman kit for Tudor dresses and Grace looked lovely in her 1940s jacket and dress but we were nothing compared to Peter's costume changes, seems like every time I saw him he was wearing different kit. His closet must be like a time machine. It was an amazing party, the 1650s dancing with the Suffragettes, Dandifops doing the Time Warp, and Victorians doing the hokey pokey is what it's all about. It's a very weird thing to try and describe.
