We went to our usual club, and this time it was holding a Medieval Day! Unfortunately I didn’t have a costume that suited the event too much, but Mummy said my German dress looked quite a good outfit. It has a really long black skirt and green flowers embroidered on the top above a waist line, and three silver buttons. It’s my favourite dress and also the only one for Medieval Day! We had the same lady talking to us today that we did doing our Viking and Saxon Day. She said her name was Catherine, so that’s what I will call her.
At the beginning, we all gathered round a big mat in a scruffy circle, while she talked to us about general things in the Medieval period. She came in a very long, white nightie, and then she put on all her clothes over the top to show what women would have worn. I can’t remember every single thing exactly, but she did put on a lot of tunics and long dresses – some of which that came right down to the floor! Apparently, in those times, married women had to cover up her hair, from just a little bit in the early centuries, to every single strand of it in the later ones. First she had to put on a thin white piece of fabric that tied underneath her chin and up on her head, a bit like the sort of helmets people wear nowadays, but it didn’t cover her fringe or the back of her hair. So on top of that she wore a black elastic band around her head, and then a very long sheet of off-white fabric that dangled to her shoulder blades and came just above her eyes. She tied it on with a piece of cord, and we couldn’t see any of her hair at all – and most of her face was hidden too!
Then we got on with some activities. We did a famine game where we pretended to shoot back to the past and go through the seasons and acting out what it would be like to raise a farm in what would then be Medieval Times. We had to do enough cutting and colouring to earn us some shillings, and then we had to pass through the year without creating famine. Some of the things we had to do were quite tedious and a little bit pointless, but most of it was really quite fun. We also tried to write with a quill – a real swan’s feathered quill – but it was really hard! We had a big wood block with two holes in it, one much smaller than the other. In the smaller one we put our quill, and in the larger one, there was a tiny little cute pot of ink! Then we dipped the nib into the ink and blotted it on the side, and were given some paper that looked a bit like parchment, for a sheet of real parchment was too expensive for Catherine to buy for all of us. Unfortunately, when I tried to write in the cursive writing that was shown on a poster, it kept on blotting and blotting on the paper, and when I tried to scoop off the blobs of ink on the side of the pot like the lady told us to, it just went all dry and scratchy! I had fun, however, managing to write ‘Lady Margaret’, which is not my name, but the letters in my name were too difficult to do! My friend Grace and Tilly wrote a whole cut-up page worth of stuff like ‘My name is Matilda. I am the scribe of Lady Catherine. I am also a monk’, and I didn’t see how they could possibly do it!
At the end we all went outside to practice shooting with bows and arrows and killing each other with swords and shields. However, it got so chilly that Grace and I had to go inside to warm up, and we played ‘Performing Crime Scenes’ in the pretend stocks! I pretended to steal some valuable leather that lay on the sacks, and then Grace came and arrested me – but I’m very skinny, and that’s good news for someone in the stocks! Grace said, ‘The day passed, and eventually, the hour of Midnight arrived,’ and I slipped my hand out of the wrist holes, lifted up the board of the feet holes, grabbed at the leather patches, and ran off the stage with my stolen goods!
I thought it was really great. It was much better than last time because then we had not very good worksheets to do, but this time we had brilliant activities. I hope that Catherine does another just like this day’s Medieval Day!