funniest thing would be if when Queen Elizabeth dies or steps down and Charles is all ready to assume the throne, here comes King Arthur, Excalibur in hand, sauntering back from Avalon like “oof what a nap! thanks for keeping the chair warm I’m back to be king again”
like, given that “King Arthur isn’t actually dead, he’ll be back to be King again someday” is, like, an actual aspect of the legend and a thing that a lot of people purport to believe, has anyone ever actually triedit? showing up to buckingham palace claiming to be Arthur Pendragon, The Once And Future King, and assume the throne? does the british government have a protocol for checking whether someone claiming to be King Arthur actually is? does parliament have a secret picture of the Real Excalibur kept under lock and key, only viewed if someone claims to be King Arthur, that they can use to confirm or refute the identity of alleged Kings Arthur? if not, how do they deter every jackass with a sward from pretending to be him? does filing a false King Arthur report constitute treason?
The rules are simple. “Arthur” has to show up with a sword. They give the sword to the Lady of the Lake, and if she throws it back to the claimant, he’s legit and gets to be king again.
So the test for King Arthur’s identity falls to the even less officially identifiable Lady of the Lake. No one can even agree on which Lady, or which lake, is the official one, much less how to tell if you’ve got TheLady of TheLake. All of which suggests that all you need to accomplish this is one (1) sword, a willing female acquaintance, and a nearby body of water.
There isn’t even any requirement for “Arthur” to catch the sword, so the Lady can just javelin an epee right at him.
Well when you look at it that way, one might conclude that strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Okay but I want someone claiming to be Arthur as a book now. It would be such fun chaos.
Concept:
Bored out of their minds in lockdown, a small splinter group from the Society for Creative Anachronism decide to put on a short play about King Arthur as a quarantine project.
The Arts & Crafts folk immediately set to making costumes and props, after some brief bickering over whether to base goods in the 12th or the 6th century. (They end up going with the 12th. This will be hilarious later.)
The role of Arthur is naturally given to a Millennial/Gen Z guy who does SCA jousting demos and, crucially, owns his own horses. Guinevere is a trans woman who is very good at acting improv and Heavy Combat. (She is widely known and feared at Pennsic. This will be hilarious later.)
King Pellinore is a beloved older SCA veteran who is basically everyone’s favorite eccentric gay uncle. His husband, a retired fireman, is more introverted and gruff in a kind of benignly grumpy way, and usually limits his participation to being an excellent camp cook or occasional field medic. However, he has been talked into portraying Merlin and setting off some small ‘magic’ fireworks, on the condition that he doesn’t actually have to say anything.
The Lady of the Lake is a Black woman whose other hobby is free diving. They set her costume up to accommodate a hidden thermal wetsuit and snorkel tube.
Morgan le Fay is actually Morgan le Fay.
Like, most of the Arthurian legends were completely made up or didn’t happen exactly the way they were later portrayed, but she is genuinely an immortal entity with magic powers who did some of the stuff attributed to Morgan le Fay, and has been keeping a low profile for the last few centuries just bopping around doing whatever the fuck she wants.
They’ve just finished a dress rehearsal and the Lady of the Lake is scrolling through Tumblr when she sees the above posts by @raptorific and reads them out loud to the group, for the lulz.
Morgan le Fay gets a terrible, awful idea.
She teleports the group to the Kensington Palace Gardens at a strategic moment in their performance. Shit ends up going down like a cross between the con artist plot of “A Knight’s Tale” and an inverse version of “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”.
Between their sudden appearance, Guinevere’s brilliant improv skills, and the fact that Merlin (with Morgan le Fay’s secret help) can suddenly turn policemen into trees, they attract a ton of media attention. A jaded professor is the first to figure out the truth of what exactly the fuck is going on.
She has a bitter grudge against a misogynistic Arthurian scholar and decides to troll the hell out of him by coaching the SCAdians in how to answer interview questions in the most infuriating, quasi-plausible way possible.
Shenanigans ensue, stuff happens, Prince Andrew is impaled on a spear, Morgan le Fay has a dramatic magical duel with the court necromancer who’s been propping up the Queen
Can I be honest, I think if we went back in time and told that “MYRRH-DER” “*gasp* Judas! No!” joke to a group of medieval peasants they would completely and utterly lose their shit. They would be grabbing each other and crying with laughter. idk I just love the thought of a joke created through a modern, 21st century medium being accessible and enjoyable for devout practising Catholics hundreds of years ago
You’d be burned as a heretic, but sure, imagine they’d laugh.
No, you really wouldn’t.
When I wrote this post I specifically had in mind the liturgical plays enjoyed by medieval folks, especially from the 14th century onwards. These plays were once performed at liturgies, in Latin, under the direction of the priest or bishop, but later became plays that were enjoyed on the village green, recited in English, and performed and produced by players. Gradually, more and more comedic and farcical elements crept into the plays, because that’s what audiences loved and demanded.
They would tell the lives of saints and Bible stories such as the Fall of Man, Noah’s Ark and the Nativity. Because plays were enjoyed at carnivals and because religious spirit and merrymaking aren’t incompatible, certain characters became humorous and stereotyped. For example, Noah’s wife was a shrew who would smack her husband to get him into the ark, Herod was a ludicrous, blustering tyrant and poor old Joseph was particularly derided and used as comic relief, especially in the Nativity plays. Apparently, being cuckolded by God was not the way to appeal to a medieval man, though he would gain respect after the Reformation.
In the context that medieval peasants watched and loved ribald and slightly irreverent liturgical plays, something that would later evolve into the English stage as we know it in Shakespeare, it is entirely accurate and harmless to think that during a Nativity play the last wise man might say “I bring thee myrr…” and after Jospeh has thanked him, he would unmask to reveal his red hair (sorry guys Judas was ginger) and exclaim “MYRR-DRE!” causing Joseph to gasp and cry “JUDAS!! NAY!!” and probably trip over himself falling backwards, to the unparalleled surprise and delight of the devout medieval peasants who, guess what, still have a damn sense of humour.
i read some medieval mystery plays this semester. there’s one where mary, having pregnancy cravings, is like “oh, husband, won’t you go get me some cherries from that tree there?”
and joseph basically says “eh, that tree is really tall and I don’t want to. how about you ask the guy that got you knocked up to get you the cherries?”
and the tree ~miraculously bends down~~ so she can eat them
A couple people commented on my high heel origin story post that they thought everybody knew that high heels originated with horseback riding. And it’s true. I did know that. I was a dyed-in-the-wool Horse Girl, endlessly obsessed with the topic. I absolutely knew that.
What snarled me up was that I could not believe that it happened circa 1580. I simply could not fathom the idea that nobody in Europe or its immediate neighbours wore high heels on horses until the 1500s. That is more than a thousand years after the invention of the stirrup! Wearing sturdy, closed-toe shoes with at least an inch of heel is and always has been the universal rule for being around horses… isn’t it?
Tumblr, you know the answer from the way I phrased the question. No, it hasn’t. This is from a 1556 manual of horsemanship:
(That type of form-fitting shoe they’re wearing is called a “turnshoe”, which means they have the protective value of a bedroom slipper or a soft leather glove. Because I’m such a nice person, you can get a better look here in this carefully-chosen detail from a 1459 fresco of attendants walking in a mounted procession:)
Also, you know how riders in medieval art always look like the artists are just drunk and out to lunch with foot and leg position?
NO REALLY THAT’S A REAL TECHNIQUE THEY DID ON PURPOSE. Armored foot protectors (”sabatons”) were genuinely jointed to let them do that super droopy toe thing! Even pointing down!
This is the same kind of betrayal I experienced when learning that there are approximately dozens of types of distinct regional and/or utility styles of saddle still being used and manufactured, today, all over the world. And that actually, my entire frame ofknowledge around horses had been carefully molded through a highly specific cultural lens and there was a ton I didn’t know squat about.
When I was young and I’d read big books from the library with titles like Horses: The Absolutely Complete Book of All Human Knowledge About Equitation and they would earnestly assure me that there were exactly two types of saddles in the world: English, and Western. Perhaps three; the Australians were gauche enough to use… some hybrid of the two? And did the different types of English saddle count? Wait, are we counting sidesaddles? But in conclusion, there were exactly three types of saddle in the world. Anything else left must be a rustic relic from premodern times.
Which is… just its own miniature class in ethnocentrism and the limits of the British colonial lens. Part of it is because people get raised inside an echo chamber never learn of the existence of alternatives; part of it is that they learn to privilege some information more than others, so what’s considered a “real saddle” worth teaching children about is skewed; and part of it is because for centuries, Europeans in general and the English in particular have been extremely evangelical in telling the entire world that their way of approaching horsemanship (and everything else) is the Best, Rightest, Most Correct Way of Doing Things.
I’d been preparing to go all primary source on this topic, which would have delayed this post’s public appearance considerably, but today I actually found someone else who’d done it all for me. Over at The Works of Chivalry, Giovanni Battista Tomassini says:
[I]n spite of the crucial role that the horse has played in the history of civilization, historians have so far rather neglected the study of these kind of works and, more generally, have paid little, or no systematic attention, to the equestrian practices, the study of which has been mainly confined to the scope of enthusiasts and equestrian professionals.
That’s been changing a lotin the last decade or two, and I applaud him deeply for making his findings accessible to an international lay audience, in English and Italian. I have a few posts I found most interesting:
“A la brida” and “a la gineta.”:Different styles of riding from the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, at least as different as modern “English” and “Western” schools
Anglomania&Anglomania Part 2: How English styles of equitation became popular throughout continental Europe during the 18th century
“Maneggi and Jumps”: Gently debunks the idea that many of the classical “airs above the ground” performed by the Lipizanners of the Spanish Riding School originated for medieval combat, since the earliest texts we see them in say, “These are rad as hell, but this is a SEPARATE SCHOOL OF HORSEMANSHIP, do not teach your warhorse these.”
That last one is especially funny because Hollywood always thinks that the epitome of a Historical Horse being Fearsome is them rearing up on their hindlegs! This is not actually what horses look like when they’re scary, but horses are not good actors, so that’s the closest thing we can train them to do. (It’s called “making a pesade”). And a 1562 manual on equitation actually says this:
Young horses learn pesades easily, and once they have learned them they make them willingly, as they think that once they have done them they do not have to do anything else. For this reason if they are [given the cue] they think they should not do anything else than stop and make a pesade. So they stop very often to rear against the will of the rider, and in a place where it is not required, and they do it even higher than what it is appropriate
Enough ppl have expressed confusion about my use of the word “conroi” in fiction that I’m beginning to suspect that may in fact not be common knowledge that a squad-sized element of knights is called a conroi
How many knights are in a conroi? I know in the Byzantine sphere it was anywhere from 3-8
Iirc, 3-8 was pretty standard for western Europe as well. So really more like a fire team than a squad.
The FBI will occasionally try to infiltrate the Society for Creative Anachronism because it gets typo’d as the Society for Creative Anarchism
“They have rattan, sir.”
“Sir, it appears that they have a large number of people dedicated to weaving. What? No, as in cloth, sir.”
It’s one of the largest organizations of people who could genuinely go completely off the grid if shit hit the fan. None of this doomsday prepper wannabe bullshit. The world goes pear-shaped, all the networks go down and SCA people will go “huh, that’ll make it slightly less convenient to organize the next event, might have to get Doug to teach me about his carrier pigeons,” and go back to doing the things they were doing anyway.
