I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History by Moore Tim

Author:Moore, Tim [Moore, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407021034
Publisher: Random House
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

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

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