Reenactment Trading

Last weekend we tried a new type of event: The Historical Reenactment.

A field, a weekend and two thousand years of history, fought out before your eyes. I our case fought out just around the corner in the main arena, where we couldn’t quite see. Luckily the access to that field was right behind the van, meaning at any given time we usually had a bunch of rowdy Normans, a Roman garrison or a WW2 half-track parked behind us.

On day one we arrived, were vaguely waved in the direction of our pitch and then left to our own devices. Strange, because usually festival organisers are pretty keen to make sure you are exactly where they put you, lest you sneakily try to offend the gods of health and safety. We later realised it was because this, like a lot of reenactments, was a living history event, meaning that 3000-ish folks in period costume were all trying to find a place to pitch a tent, arm themselves with blunt but still extremely weapony weapons, light a fire and then drink into the wee small hours.

Tents were also in themselves a rather complicated matter steeped in terminology. During our brief contact with the organisers we were quizzed about sleeping arrangements, and I told her we had a tent. “Plastic?” was the next question. Common sense would have suggested it was probably nylon, and that this is, of course, plastic. In my head plastic is something you make squash bottles out of. It turns out that in the Kelmarsh Fields there are two types of tent. Cloth, like all of those around me at the time, and plastic – the average modern tent.

Plastic breaks the immersion a little, so has to be pitched away from the Mops, in Plastic; the designated camping area. Mops… this confused us as well. I’ll let you have a think about it. We didn’t really fancy hauling everything we had brought with us down to Plastic and, crucially, away from all the lovely, lovely electricity, so we pitched the gazebo and decided to sleep in there, as there was no rain forecast all weekend.

The weather did not mention an entire night of rain on Saturday night. Nor did it mention the wind, the giant arsehole moth or large amounts of cut grass, but I would not, in hindsight, especially recommend gazebo sleeping when the gazebo only cost £70 and doesn’t really have walls that fit. Still, it is a much more pleasant place to get dressed than inside a tent and you can hang proper real electric lights from the supports.

Then there were the reenactors. Bankers, receptionists and doctors midweek; Vikings, WW1 Tommies and suffragettes at the weekend. Some of the nicest, most chilled out and utterly pleasant people you could wish to meet, who give up their weekend to come drink in a field. They don’t even get paid to do it. English Heritage pays the group an admin fee and then these delightful lunatics voluntarily don their war garb and thrash seven shades of shit out of each other for your viewing pleasure.

In short, these people are exactly the kind of people we like. They bought toasties, drank tea and even brought their own cups once we had run out. Reenactment trading is definitely for us, and History Live officially takes the lead as the nicest weekend of the year so far and my top recommendation for an excellent day out.