I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (2 page)

This was an extraordinary revelation. At a stroke, surviving in
The 1940s House
, even
The W.D. Sparrow House
, seemed feebly unambitious. Could I handle a spell in
The Prehistoric Hovel
? Were there really people who pressed the rewind button that long, who willingly embraced a grunting, filthy existence ruled by fear and hunger?

Intrigued, and just a little terrified, I spent the balance of that weekend delving into the history of re-enactment. It was a surprisingly long one, even if you didn't count the Roman battle victories refought in the Coliseum, which you probably ought to in honour of the many combatants slain therein on the altar of realism. Reliving famous triumphs for the purposes of propaganda or simple gloating proved enduringly popular – in 1895, the Gloucestershire Engineer Volunteers boldly recreated the defence of Rorke's Drift at Cheltenham's Winter Gardens (let us not dwell upon the seventy-five 'Zulu' participants).

The world had to wait until 1638, and an indoor confrontation played out between 'Moors' and 'Christians' in the Merchant Taylors' Hall, for the first recreation of something that hadn't just happened, and another 200 years for a re-enactment that wasn't a big fight. Though which was a succession of smaller fights.

The 1830s was, for Britain, a decade of disorientating change. The opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway; the Reform Act; the Poor Law – the old order was being swept away, and with it the old way of life. The rustic, semi-feudal, slow-paced existence that had been the centuries-old template for British society was being melted down, and no one quite knew what would replace it. One reaction, much as it would be 150 years later when the next technological revolution transformed daily life, was to seek nostalgic succour in the comforting past. Hail Archibald William Montgomerie, 13th Earl of Eglinton, and curse the 1982 A-level history syllabus, which in failing to mention him failed to leaven the dreary bilge regurgitated above.

Memorably encapsulated as 'one of the most glorious and infamous follies of the nineteenth century', the Grand Jousting Tournament of August 1839 was conceived as a spectacular celebration of medieval chivalry and pageant. When the young Earl called together 150 prospective participants from across Europe in a Bond Street armour-dealer's showroom, he pitched his dream as an antidote to the smutted drudgery of the new Industrial Age, and the insidious democracy following in its wake: one chronicler described it as 'symbolic of romantic defiance in the face of modern practicality'. The costumes, the catering, the tents, the jousts themselves – no expense would be spared in ensuring an authentic experience.

Learning that they were to fund this expense, and that here was a sport where defeat might leave a 10-foot pole lodged in your face, a large number promptly shuffled out. The room emptied further when Eglinton announced that his tournament was to be held at the family seat, a remote estate not especially near Ayr. In the end, just forty patrician diehards remained to be fitted up by the dealer – quite literally, it transpired, as a twentieth-century examination proved the 'original Medieval armour' he sold them to be entirely fake.

As the event approached, Eglinton began to suspect he had underestimated its Zeitgeist-tapping retro appeal. Beyond all the chivalric romance, the tournament winningly blended glamour with bloodlust: the flower of British aristocracy taking on
Hello!
-style Euro-royals, with excitingly lethal possibilities. Emperor-in-waiting Prince Louis Napoleon v the Marquess of Waterford, Count Lubeski of Poland v Viscount Glenlyon . . . The press build-up was feverish, and the Earl failed to dampen what soon became a national enthusiasm by promising free entrance to anyone who arrived in medieval dress. Having planned on a crowd of 1,500, he belatedly stuck up enough grandstands to seat three times as many.

Eglinton's excitement on learning that every inn and hotel in south-west Scotland was filled with codpieced, Rapunzel-hatted revellers from across the land soon evolved into a creeping sense of dread. Homeowners rented out rooms at exorbitant rates, and when there were none left, gentryfolk in fancy dress had to bed down in hedgerows. On the morning of the tournament, traffic on the thirty-mile highway from Ayr to Glasgow was muzzle-to-wheel; abandoned carriages blocked every road around Eglinton Castle. The most conservative final estimate of the colourful but careworn crowd that trudged through his gates was 100,000.

Eglinton was still wondering where to put them all, and what to feed them, when a crack of thunder split the lowland heavens. The epic cloudburst that followed leaked blood-red rain on those huddled under the scarlet grandstand canopies, and made a wet blur of the half-mile opening parade. Midway through the ill-tempered, malnourished hiatus that followed, the Earl sent a court jester out to appease the crowd: few could see him, fewer still could hear him, and those who did responded to his material with physical displeasure.

Three hours behind schedule, a squeaky fanfare heralded the inaugural joust: on cue, the rain became sleet. Unable to see the end of their own lances, the combatants tentatively converged across the quagmire, missing each other by some distance at low speed. The crowd had by now dispersed, yet soon returned: the rivers that ringed the estate were in full flood, stranding Eglinton with 100,000 unfed, blood-faced guests in tights. His ultimate reward for organising the world's first proper historical re-enactment was a bill for £40,000, lingering national ridicule and a very poor haul of Christmas cards.

Over-ambition, bad planning and worse weather, public humiliation, ruinous equipment of dubious provenance . . . in highlighting all these, Eglinton's Grand Jousting Tournament presciently introduced what I would discover to be many of living history's defining traits. If there is a more uncomfortable and expensive way of making a gigantic tit of yourself, only Richard Branson knows it.

Chapter One

If I was to start at the very beginning, then on the BC scale how low could one go? The online answer corroborated those Hampton Court cooks, and provided compelling evidence that re-enactment was a very broad church, with a far-flung congregation. A man in New South Wales was gamely trying to set up a neolithic group – 'Hi. Any takers for 4500–3300 BC?' – and some Californians had organised a re-enactment of the ancient agrarian rite known as Beltaine ('we recommend that children not be brought to this ritual'). Certainly, I hadn't expected to find an active Ancient Greek re-enactment scene in Watford. Yet a contest for the Apple of Hesperides held in a grammar-school hall wasn't quite what I had in mind – my intention was to experience, as intensively as feasible, the actual day-to-day life of our distant forefathers.

I scrabbled around in time and geography, and at length returned to my roots. The British populace at the embryonic stage of its historical development appeared depressingly resistant to progress – while great civilisations rose and fell in Egypt and Greece, we remained stubbornly mired in the rural, tribal Bronze Age for roughly 1,400 years. After the techniques for smelting iron were finally imported in the fifth century BC – some 800 years after their perfection in the Near East – our forebears happily played with their new metal for the next half a millennium, until the Romans pitched up. In those parts of our islands the invaders didn't reach, the Iron Age endured for a further 500 years. Over 2,000 years, and all we'd done was fit different tips to the spears stacked up outside our thatched-roof roundhouses.

Still, 2,000 years is a hefty chunk of recent history, and what with a reawakened national passion for Boudicca and the Celts, I imagined Bronze/Iron Age re-enactment to be a popular choice amongst living historians. It quickly became plain that this was not so, and for reasons that should have been obvious (though, as my forebears had found in the field of metallurgical innovation, only when a foreigner explained them). 'The problem with prehistoric re-enactment,' posted a Dutch living historian on one of the many relevant forums, 'is that because they didn't write anything, we don't have any information on how they interacted. From archaeology we know how they dressed, and how their tools and houses looked. But re-enactment is only a guess – all we can do is show how they might have cooked and worked and performed their ceremonies.'

Of my fellow Britons happy to declare a public interest in Bronze Age re-enactment, Neil Burridge was one of the very few who seemed to do more than 'outreach' – earning a few quid touring local schools daubed in woad. Neil's website focused on Bronze Age sword-making: a mere facet of his all-encompassing passion for weaponry, as became plain when I rang him. A deafening explosive blast assailed my ears as his wife carried the phone out to the garage; a trailing echo, a moment of shocked silence, and there I was, speaking to my first reenactor. 'Sorry about that,' said Neil, brightly. 'Just trying out a – what do you call it? – a percussion-cap navy pistol.'

With a cheerful candour I frankly hadn't expected, Neil outlined the various rival factions in the small world that was the native Bronze Age scene. 'You've got the weekenders who just like to dress up – a bit iffy and amateur in my book, though I'll certainly put the gear on if you're paying – and the super-authentics, always fighting about who's doing it right.' I'd already encountered a couple of those, duking it out in a heated online debate on knotwork that was the essence of historical correctness gone mad:
You state that the design was brought to Britain in the sixth century by Saxon Christian monks – this simply isn't so
. 'And then there's your actual fighters. You know – the warrior syndrome, guys that just want to drag people out into a field and hurt them.'

This prospect became less unattractive as Neil described some of the other characters I might otherwise be spending the Bronze Age with. There was the droning know-all who never tired of boasting that no living man had spent more nights in a roundhouse; the lascivious eccentric who held pagan rites in his bedroom; the 'complete fruitcake' who had recently diversified into Nazi re-enactment.

For a week I worked through the more promising online resources Neil helpfully directed me towards. Some period enthusiasts were motivated by myth-busting evangelism ('The Bronze Age is stereotyped as ignorant and malnourished, but these were profoundly adept people who often grew to six-foot-six'), and some by the lifestyle trappings ('They had nice big houses, chariots, hair gel – lots of fun stuff!'). But no one seemed willing to translate thoughts into deeds by actually getting out there and reliving the Bronze Age. As a fully rounded prehistoric experience, one of Neil's sword-making weekends on Bodmin Moor wouldn't quite cut it, and nor would the residential workshop introduced by this memorable phrase: 'Why not treat someone you love to the ultimate gift – a voucher for our two-day flint-knapping course?'

Happily, the field opened when I put my clock forward a few centuries, and upgraded from bronze to iron. Very soon I had my first face-to-face encounter with a re-enactor, a man of modest stature and boyish voice, hauling a rucksack twice his size through a crowded pub opposite Victoria coach station.

A Welshman now resident in Canada, Will Marshall-Hall was in town to interest the British Museum in his plans to establish an Iron Age village in his adopted homeland. 'The lack of written records means the only way to research how people lived back then is to try and live that way now,' he said, thunking his rum and Coke down on the table. 'Prehistoric re-enactment comes with a built-in academic function.' How heady was the prospect of making a personal contribution to the social history of my homeland, until Will pointed out that as an average pre-Roman Briton, I'd have been dead for twenty-four years.

Keltica Iron Age Village, as I understood it, was to be a tourist attraction-cum-educational resource, as well as a labour of love for a living historian who had rewound from youthful dabblings with medieval re-enactment. An encounter with a battleaxe during this phase had endowed him the new-moon scar above his left eye: 'In Casualty they asked when I sustained the injury, and when I told them they said, "So was that 12.15 p.m., or a.m.?" and I said, "No, AD."'

What Will had to say regarding his passion for the Iron Age introduced themes I would find common to re-enactors from all periods. 'It's a back-to-basics thing, a rebellion against consumerism and commuting and all that crap,' he said, dismissing our fellow drinkers and their lifestyles with a flick of his hand.

It was Canada's primeval landscape that had lured him, along with a timelessly rural existence that until a couple of decades back had often been led without electricity or plumbing. 'It really doesn't take long to fall back into the natural rhythms of prehistoric life,' Will said. He raised a stubby finger and thumb. 'We're
that
close to our ancient selves.' Looking at his scarred, round face, now ruddy with rum and excitement, I suddenly found it very easy to imagine a horde of Wills scuttling down a hill towards a column of Romans, spears raised, tunic tails flying.