Confessions of a weekend wool-wearer

By: Lily Stancliffe

Keywords: Re-enactment, re-enactors, medieval faires, renaissance faires, battle re-enactors, role players, blog post

Confessions of a weekend wool-wearer

I’m watching the last wisps of last night’s woodsmoke play with dust and frozen breath in the shafts of sunlight bisecting the house. I woke up a lot overnight. There was water falling through the thatch onto the floorboards by my face; little splashes tugging me awake but never for long enough to warrant shifting my bed out of the way. The smoke bothered my modern mind as well, a breeze reigniting some primal fear of fire. I can still hear the soft, slow breaths of the others and I’m hoping that someone else wakes up soon. I don’t want to be the one to open the door and let all that icy November air into our sheltered little nest.

The memory of that morning is so clear. Even ten years on I can feel breath-dampened wool on my cheek and a sort of hominess (nowadays someone might call it hygge) that I haven’t experienced anywhere else. Surrounded by sleeping friends on that freezing morning, having spent my first ever night as an Anglo-Saxon, I didn’t want to be anywhere else. A big part of my admissions interview for University revolved around a discussion of the merits of re-enactment, and i’ve been thinking about that “why?” ever since.

The relationship between academic communities and re-enactors is almost as complicated as that between archaeologists and detectorists, and there is surprisingly little overlap. In my opinion, it’s the academics who are missing out. Aside from being the most generous, grounded and passionate group of people i’ve ever had the pleasure of sleeping beside, re-enactors are often insanely knowledgeable. I would identify most of us as experimental archaeologists with a healthy respect for public engagement before answering to any kind of accusation of childhood regression.

On my sixteenth birthday I sailed a fresh coracle down the river Lark, being the lightest possible guinea pig. The way that the light hull responded to my body and the current made it far easier to manoeuvre than a kayak and I raced downstream unhindered by the rocks and eddies that make the shallow water so difficult to navigate. That journey, better than any lecture, seminar or book, gave me a perfect understanding of the way that watercourses connected rather than divided communities. The same thing will be said by any self-respecting medievalist, but without walking a mile in turnshoes, it is impossible to properly comprehend how liberating even the smallest stream would have been to the people living alongside it.

Experiments in ground-forging were similarly illuminating. The structure we built was perfect for the little decorative iron brackets we were using for a reconstruction of the Coddenham bed burial, but anything larger would have been impossible to work with. The shape of the opening too meant that bellows had to be held at an awkward angle, increasing the risk of sucking embers into the body. That experiment is the reason I have worn a little bit of charred pig skin round my neck for the last seven years. I was given it with the words: “You could be a great blacksmith one day”. They stuck with me, just like the pig-skin necklace, as a sort of escape plan, an assurance that somewhere there’s an anvil waiting for me. The thought of a hot forge deep in an ancient woodland keeps me warm through the dark nights of self-doubt that plague anyone trying to have original ideas.

I think that’s part of the primary value of re-enactment. It’s the emotive bit that captures imaginations and inspires people to ask questions of the past. For me, it forces me to remember that the people we study were real, whole people with preoccupations and inconsistencies. It makes me look for personalities and anomalies and it keeps me conscious of how supremely wrong it is to ever generalise. We can pretend that we work on cool logic, but the messiness of human lives demands creative interpretation. ‘Living’ a little bit of the theory helps me to see the holes in my knowledge, recognise where evidence is lacking or where the interpretation is too far-fetched.

Re-enactment (alongside documentaries and exhibitions) creates the public interest that funds our museums and research projects, and allows archaeological sites like Sutton Hoo, West Stow and Battle Abbey to reach out to wider audiences. As long as it’s presented as a dialogue between research, practice and the public, re-enactment can only add to our knowledge of the past. There are definitely problems with re-enactment, but I think no more than exist within academic communities. Misrepresentation is rife across museums, television programming and ‘medieval fayres’, but that’s the risk of sharing information. You can’t ever control how something is understood once it’s out in the world, and maybe we shouldn’t try. If people are interested and engaged, and willing to take on new knowledge- aren’t we doing our jobs?