by Moore, Tim
If a common theme connected all the previous periods I'd stuck a grubby toe into, it was the daily struggle for survival. The Iron Agers had led a hand-to-mouth existence; with the others it was more fist-to-face. Only now, emerging from the Middle Ages, was I entering an era when a West European might reasonably expect to enjoy a life untroubled by the fear of war or famine, albeit one cut rudely short by disease.
In Britain, certainly, we had by the mid sixteenth century established a generally prosperous and stable society, where most people had a roof over their head and enough to eat, and therefore no longer routinely felt quite as eager to kill each other. The delightful consequence, as described in Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, was a celebration of human happiness more universal than any previously known. Or, indeed, since.
'Beginning in England in the seventeenth century,' states the author of the aforementioned work, 'the European world was stricken by what looks, in today's terms, like an epidemic of depression.' Having at last resolved his basic human needs, European man looked around at the jolly, prosperous realm he had created and sighed, 'So, is this it?' The instant mankind was no longer preoccupied with the lower end of his hierarchy of needs, existential world-weariness kicked in. One minute our sample Englishman was gaily skipping around a maypole, the next he was bitterly pissing on the ribbons, despising himself for the empty-headed pointlessness of it all. In other words, I had better make the most of 1578. It was going to be all downhill from here.
Inaugurated in 1979, Kentwell Hall's three-week Great Annual Recreation is generally acknowledged as Britain's most venerable large-scale, long-term historical re-enactment. Hosted at a period manor house in Suffolk, Kentwell was familiar to me from a tiny box advert that ran for many years in the Guardian's classified section, headed 'Live as a Tudor!' It had been yet more familiar to my wife, frustrated sixteenth-century aristocrat and card-carrying period obsessive (the card in question: her Hampton Court season ticket). This was the one event she envied me: when the application forms and brochures dropped on to the doormat she eagerly tore them open.
It was rather sad to see the vicarious excitement drain from her features as it became apparent that first-timers were not considered gentry material – by hallowed Kentwellian tradition, a place at the high table came as grace-and-favour reward for years of lowly servitude. No madrigal-backed feasting and erudite Shakespearian repartee; no velvet and lace. 'You should expect to perform dull but necessary jobs quietly and without complaining,' she read, with growing disgust. 'Menial . . . privations . . . exhausting hard work . . .' She tossed the welcome pack on the table. 'You're going to be some shitty peasant.'
Such was Kentwell's repute that a two-stage selection process was required to sort the Tudor wheat from the chaff. So it happened that a full four months before Kentwell would open its magnificent gates to the first jeering school party, I found myself approaching them up a muddy carriage drive flanked with blasted oaks. This was certainly the most peculiar job interview I was ever likely to attend, but also the one I most dearly wished to go well; only after much wardrobe-wringing had I decided against the paisley trousers that would have declared an eager willingness to make a vast and very public tit of myself.
The 'new participant's form' I now retrieved from the passenger footwell read like a village idiot's CV. Having awarded myself a bottom-grade D for each of the thirty-four listed 'Tudor skills' requiring self-assessment, I'd thought better and Tippexed in a few face-saving Cs: Animal Care, Herbs, Part Singing and – as the closest approximations to Shitty Peasantry – Scything and Coppice Crafts. 'If you feel you have no talent,' one of the accompanying letters had stated hopefully, 'we may discover otherwise.' You may, I thought, aware that the absence of period ordnance at Kentwell made this very unlikely.
There were a good couple of hundred wet people queuing outside an octagonal gatehouse to register, perhaps a third of them fully Blackaddered up in doublet and hose or coif and kirtle; most wore weather-resistant expressions of bright-eyed, wide-eyed, almost evangelical glee. Beyond the queue lay a 100-yard stretch of immaculate greensward, and beyond that, girdled with a broad moat, the turreted majesty of Kentwell Hall.
I joined the queue behind a young girl in a parka with a big mod target on the back. The two basket-bearing, cloak-wearing veterans in front kept her fitfully supplied with banter as we shuffled towards the gatehouse. 'Thing is, you're always out under the trees, so it carries on raining for about four hours after it's stopped . . . I can recommend the Kentwell Diet – you eat loads, but shiver it all off . . . It's kind of like Glastonbury, in tights, with work.'
Our meeting point was the overcroft, an unheated barn attic filled with many rows of plastic chairs. We trooped in, sat down and watched through clouds of our own misty exhalations as an imposing rural statesman of late middle years, in tweeds, brogues and an age-worn Barbour, rose to address us. In sonorous, barnfilling tones this rather superb figure introduced himself as Patrick Phillips, resident owner of Kentwell Hall for the previous thirtysix years, and, for the previous twenty-seven, co-ordinator of what he billed as Britain's oldest and largest period recreation. 'Just to get things straight,' he boomed, fixing all newcomers with a challenging glare, 'this is my house and my show, so what I say, to a very large extent, goes. Feel free to tell me what job you'd like to do, but remember the final decision is mine.'
My relief as Patrick brusquely dismissed the trend for reenactments dominated by 'all that fighting malarkey' was soon swept away by a wave of new misgivings. 'Can I just say how glad I am that it's cold and wet?' he announced, with a grim smile. 'We don't want any fair-weather fainthearts here.' He theatrically cleared his throat, looking about the overcroft as if expecting those who recognised themselves in this description to make an exit. When they didn't, he treated himself to a sceptical harrumph and continued. 'You are to be part of a genuine sixteenth-century entity,' we were weightily informed. 'Nothing should detract from that – no glasses, no false teeth. People tell me they're stone deaf without their hearing aid, and I say, "How fantastically Tudor!" It's a terrible crime in our world, a horror story, if you forget to take off your watch. These aren't minor things – these are our core values!'
No other event, Patrick declared, demonstrated so eloquently 'how we are all products of our past'. With his rich voice cracked and quavering, he reminded us that as Tudors we would know everyone we saw, and greet them accordingly; what a tragedy that the decline of integrated communities had now sapped Britain of its sense of mutual trust and fraternity. As he detailed how we were to resurrect the age of collective joy, his language, and increasingly strident delivery, seemed more consistent with a cult leader. 'You must unlearn almost everything you know – purge from your minds all knowledge of the last five centuries. The house is not some ancient monument, it's only forty years old!'
'Two score,' piped up a voice from the rear, inciting a round of sniggers which Patrick silenced with an imperious glower. He strafed this slowly across the audience, face by cold-cheeked face.
'What you are about to do is going to change your lives for ever.'
With these portentous words still hanging in the cold air, Patrick let it be known that without the funds the Great Annual Recreation brought in, Kentwell would not survive, 'at least not without a tainted government grant of some sort, which I certainly shan't be begging for'. This was his cue for a protracted, sweeping tirade against 'the astounding incompetence of today's politicians'. After a detailed indictment of Suffolk County Council's recycling policy, a weary sigh signalled that his ire was now spent. 'You may wish to put me down as a complete nutter,' he said, trailing off into a mumble, 'as others have.' With that, our lord and master turned away from the lectern and departed through a rear entrance, leaving the overcroft in a silence punctuated by the distant lowing of unhappy cattle.
Each Great Annual Recreation was set in a different Tudor year, and this time Patrick had stuck his pin in 1578. 'I'll need
to get this outfit seen to,' said the cheery fellow deputed to show newbies around the grounds, glancing down at his red and black puffball hose through a pair of Reactolite prescription shades. 'Not baggy enough for 1578, even allowing for Suffolk being a little behind London fashions.'
We were led past the ice house and along a stretch of manicured yew. 'The thing to remember is that everyone services the manor,' he said, pointing out the Hall-adjoining moat house that would be home to the bakery, dairy and sundry herbalists and seamstresses. I gazed up at the mighty flank of red brick and soaring mullion windows: it wasn't hard to empathise with awed Tudor ruralites experiencing this unimaginably rarefied other world for the first time.
For an hour we trooped around the extensive grounds, inspecting each of the many far-flung outbuildings that would house all the 'stations' manned by craftworkers and tradespeople. The muddy tracks that linked these were topped with a frigid crust; a vicious wind, tainted with the pervasive stench of free-range, rare-breed agriculture, carried away our guide's words. The rain evolved into sleet, and then an ear-stinging hail. Someone shouted out a query about bathing facilities, and was told that the showers – both of them – were in a block about 400 yards from the campsite where all 200 of us would sleep under twenty-first-century nylon. Never before had the great unwashed been so aptly named. The bulk of my fellow first-timers were students or recent graduates in search of a budget summer break with a twist; but to paraphrase the Sex Pistols, this was a cheap holiday in your own misery. I looked at the many disconsolate faces around me and accurately predicted I wouldn't see half of them back at the second open day.
'What job are you going for?' asked one of the young women shuddering along beside me at the column's rear. In the previous hour my occupational ambitions had become very tightly focused. 'Anything fire-based,' I said.
We returned to the overcroft, now home to a period careers fair. Old hands with name tags identifying their 'station' rushed up, trying to secure our services; I looked vainly around for a badge reading 'bakery' or 'smithy'. (Later I learned that these stations, and a few others, operated long-established closed shops.) A kitchen job was out – in a humbling interview with the genteel head cook it emerged that even an entry-level culinary assistant would already have mastered several pastry-making skills I had never heard of. At her recommendation, I went off to meet the sutlers: outdoor-based camp cooks, serving up pottage for the masses. During a swift chat these hearty dinner ladies made it plain they would welcome anyone who could cut a turnip in half, and swear a lot while doing so. I gave them my provi sional pledge, and joined a long queue leading to the storeroom where Patrick was passing final – and very feudal – occupational judgement.
'A sutler?' he repeated scornfully, when, over two hours later, I at last filed in to meet him. 'Oh, no, no, no, no.' He ran his patrician gaze over my application form, then over me, then over the hand-scrawled register laid on the crowded desk before him. 'I've been making these decisions for twenty-six years,' he murmured, 'and you can count my mistakes in single digits.' As he drummed his large fingers together ruminatively, I tried to imagine how these mistakes manifested themselves: some Lord Percy caught jet-skiing round the moat, perhaps, or the Baldrick who bellowed Kwik-Fit jingles from the dovecote roof, hose round his ankles.
At length Patrick clapped his hands, sighed magnificently, and delivered his verdict.
'Chamberlain,' he boomed.
I felt my brow furrow. 'Actually, it's Moore. Timoth—'
'Chamberlain!' he cut in, sharply. 'Head of the household. Second week. Next!'
How head-swelling, how chest-puffing Patrick's adjudication had sounded, even before I learned what a chamberlain was: I'd walked in to meet him as a shitty-peasant-to-be, and walked out as the grandly costumed master of Kentwell Hall's entire domestic staff. And how little these bodily engorgements subsided, even after I'd deduced that my appointment was entirely attributable to my advanced years, and a desperate shortage of age-appropriate male applicants for the role.
The first misgivings had taken hold at the follow-up open day two months later, in May, as we filed up to present our outfits for approval. I smiled encouragingly at all those queuing up with armfuls of unfinished linen and wool, many of them still stitching frantically away at ruffs and coifs – with the Great Annual Recreation now just over a month off, all costumes were expected to be very nearly Kentwell-ready. How fortunate I was to have stepped out of Patrick's interview and immediately been offered a complete outfit by a Kentwell regular who had served many years as a steward, a sort of assist ant chamberlain.
'Who's doing the alterations?' enquired the wardrobe mistress when I blithely told my tale. I remembered the steward as a vertically conspicuous figure, but now learned – from an eavesdropper who revealed herself as his fiancée – that only a supreme feat of needlecraft could adapt for my use an outfit tailor-made for a man of six foot five with a twenty-six-inch waist. My wheedling attempts to procure this feat were shortlived: as an end-of-week-two steward, her fiancée would be needing the outfit himself. 'I expect he was just trying to be helpful,' she concluded, with a tight smile. Only through a great effort of willpower did I resist the graceless impulse to wish her a long and happy married life as Mrs Lanky-Arsed Twatbollocks of Cockshire.
An undertone of reedy panic accompanied me through the How To Be Tudor workshops that occupied the rest of the day. Like spies about to go out into the field, we were briefed on how to blend in to 1578 – what to wear, what to know, what to say and how to say it. There were lectures on everything the visiting public might ask us about, from current affairs to fashion. 'A few bullet points for you all,' called out one old hand. 'Mary Queen of Scots is still in prison, fears of Spanish invasion are very real, ruffs are big and getting bigger. Oh, and summer months always brought a terror of plague, so that's something to talk about.'
As a prominent go-between 'twixt gentry and serving folk, I would need to be familiar with all national news, as well as the minutiae of local gossip; another steward-to-be handed over a great sheaf of sixteenth-century family trees and advised me, with a look that implied he'd long since etched every name and date deep into his cortex, 'to have a little glance through'. While compiling our own character's back story, we were urged to ensure it tallied with others. 'If you go around telling visitors that the cook's your mother, make sure she knows.' Because there was nothing the public liked better, it seemed, than catching a Kentwellian out. School parties – the only midweek visitors – were inevitably the worst. When an aeroplane passed overhead, they would mischievously point it out to the nearest man in tights; we were instructed to cup a hand to an ear and complain of 'loud hornets about the manor', or stonewall with a blank-faced 'I know naught of what you speak'. They would sidle up with cameras, hoping to elicit a telltale grin into the lens; the recommended response to all requests for a photograph was a quizzical shrug and the non-committal declaration, 'You may do what you will.' They would plunge their hands into your linen haversack in search of compromising possessions: the advice was to secrete asthma inhalers and the like in a smaller linen bag kept within this, and to ward away any concerted probings with a cry of, 'Away from my privy business!' (If asked to smuggle some larger item of modern contraband into the manor, the procedure was to wrap it in linen swaddling, move fast and repel curious enquiries with a disarming over-the-shoulder call of, 'A dead baby, master!' 'It's become a verb,' said Bella, Kentwell's resident administrator and a jovially reassuring presence. 'Could you dead-baby this first-aid kit to the limners?')
It was Bella who chaired the masterclass on the event's curious lingua franca: some called it Kentwellese, others Desperanto. 'It's probably best not to speak for the first two days,' she began, 'but I promise you that after you get home you're going to find it hard not to greet people as "good master" and "mistress".'
As I knew only too well from my awful – but mercifully irrelevant – preparatory flounderings at Haut-Koenigsbourg, peri
od speech was the most appalling historical challenge I had yet faced, and I scribbled desperate notes throughout Bella's lecture. Aye for yes, nay for no. 'The dreaded OK' – substitute with 'good enough'. Other dos and don'ts: don't say don't, or isn't, or any other similar contractions. Do say 'I spin', not 'I do be spinning'. No Archers accents or cockney, please.
Cruelly, I was to be denied the very tempting 'thee' and 'thou', which I'd hoped to sprinkle liberally into any flawed conversation as a kind of instant Tudor seasoning. Both were apparently appropriate only within one's own family, or when addressing servants or children: 'The next low player who addresses the high table as "thee",' said a stern voice from behind, 'is in with a good chance of a starring role in the stocks.' How grateful I was when Bella handed us a get-out-of-jail-free card, to be played when a visitor backed you into a corner, linguistic or historical. If no old hands were around to help you out, and pretending to be mad hadn't worked, one need simply run off, with a shout of, 'Prithee, master, I must away!' 'Though obviously,' she went on, 'you can't use that one too often.' Let me be the judge of that, good mistress, I thought.
I drove home with the notebook open in my lap, its arcane hints and tips consulted at every set of traffic lights. 'No scented toiletries (lavender OK good enough). Stop wearing watch now: risk of telltale tan-lines. Underwear? Half don't wear any. No slacking on Tudor etiquette – acknowledge betters with bob of head. Wear Tudor gear to supermarket – learn to think of it as clothes, not an outfit.'
This last one elicited a bark of mirthless laughter. I now at least had a hat, a musty, fifth-hand black velvet number of a design associated with obscure academic ceremonies, acquired along with a handmade wooden spoon and a thin black belt from a stall set up outside the overcroft. But given the complete and utter absence of other period apparel, that Sainsbury's run would probably have to wait.
Six weeks later, with a kiss, a snigger and a sigh of envy, my wife bid me farewell and drove away down Kentwell's tree-lined approach. We'd set off at dawn, and I hadn't slept well. Ill had I slept. I do be sleeping ill, master, bob my head, good morrow. The Great Annual Recreation had already been running for a week, and a scaffold-framed, self-proclaimed 'time tunnel' shielded the hall from view. I stepped through the plywood portcullis, from the now to the then, and beheld a front sward dotted with knights-of-old type stripy-canvas pavilions. A bead of sweat rolled down my back as I surveyed these and the imposing Tudor edifice beyond, and not just because since my first visit here we'd moved near a score degrees up the centigrade scale.
