The Past Two Weeks

I spent them in a small town — population a little under ten thousand — that exists for two weeks a year. It pops into existence on a Friday in late July, vanishes starting two weeks later, is gone by noon on Sunday. For all its ephemeral nature it is a real small town. Nobody locks his doors. People know their neighbors — mostly the same neighbors year after year. People, even children, know their way to where their friends live.

The town has restaurants, most reappearing each year. It has medical services. It has one general store and more than a hundred specialty stores. It has a university which gives no degrees and no grades, charges no tuition for classes, has no admissions requirements. I have taught for pay in a variety of universities over my career but in this university I teach for free, classes on Islamic law, medieval jewelry, hardened leather and a considerable variety of other topics, a total of fifteen this year.¹ My daughter taught twelve, Renaissance dance, harp and music, her brother nine on pieces of history that he finds of interest, ranging from the death of Olaf Tryggvason to the battle of Lepanto. My wife taught only three classes under her own name but assisted in one way or another — she is, among other things, a dance musician — with fourteen others. Teaching is more fun when you don’t have to grade exams or homework and know that the students want to learn what you are teaching, there being no other reason for them to be there.

The town is called Pennsic, more properly The Pennsic War. It is in theory, was when it started more than fifty years ago, a war between the East Kingdom and the Middle Kingdom of the Society for Creative Anachronism, a historical recreation group. There are still battles, fought with non-lethal medieval weapons; if you use real armor but swords of rattan instead of steel you can really fight and only pretend to die. But the battles are not what most of the people are there for.

A two week camping event for historical recreation hobbyists would be closer, but not very close, since that is what it is for some of those present but by no means all — Pennsic has a very diverse population. There are people who are there mostly to party, get drunk, chase members of the opposite, or for some the same, sex. The area where most of them camp is called the Bog. There are people at Pennsic mostly for medieval combat, single or group, as a sport. There are people there mostly to do Renaissance dance, or early music, or Commedia del Arte, or to encourage the writing of alliterative verse in the Anglo-Saxon forms. There are people there for the shopping — they support the 100+ stores. And there are people, possibly a majority, who are there to see the friends they only see for two weeks a year. This year the friends who stopped camping next to us twenty years ago, due to moving two thousand miles away from Pennsic, were back. And, of course, there are people who are there for more than one reason — certainly all of us are

Perhaps the best description of Pennsic is a trade fair, rather like trade fairs in the real Middle Ages, a place people travel to for the chance to see distant friends, buy what they cannot find at home, trade news and gossip. A village that exists for two weeks a year.

For some of us it is an opportunity to engage in experimental archaeology, subject ourselves to some of the constraints people faced in the past, find their solutions. At Pennsic I sleep on a rope bed based on an early medieval ivory carving in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the scene where Jesus tells a man to take up his bed and walk. Looking at the carving you can see how the bed is constructed — and it is a better design than I, or anyone else I know, has come up with.

In a world without electric lights, even flashlights, you discover other solutions to finding things in the dark, mostly by touch and organization. In a world without refrigeration you find other ways of feeding people over a period of days. Some medieval options, such as slaughtering on site, are not available to us, others are. Lentils keep without refrigeration; we have medieval recipes based on them. So do sausages, cheese in wax, apples. Eggs keep for a considerable while if you get them not from a grocery store that washes off the protective covering but from a friend who keeps chickens and doesn’t. Most of the people at Pennsic don’t bother with such things, sleep on air mattresses (less comfortable than my rope bed) and keep food in coolers which have to be fed with ice and, if you are careless, dump their melt water somewhere you don’t want it. Some do — and Pennsic is a place where you can share your observations on how to live a medieval life with others who share that interest. Last year my daughter baked medieval pies in a medieval clay oven, at the price of an armload of firewood and a sixth of what came out of the oven, paid to the people who built it.

One year the display held on the middle Sunday, when people show off what they have been doing, included someone who had made sugar from sugar cane using medieval technology based on reports of excavations on the island of Cyprus, a medieval center for the industry. Another year another exhibitor had made rose water, starting with medieval varieties of roses. Someone at Pennsic this year was creating silk trim, starting with a cocoon.

Pennsic is a lot of different things for different people. For some of us, Pennsic is what the academy is supposed to be and too often isn’t, a place where people do research, teach, learn, for the joy of it.

---

Past posts, sorted by topic

My web page, with the full text of multiple books and articles and much else

A search bar for text in past posts and much of my other writing

1. For a more extended account of my and my wife’s classes and interests see the Miscellany, a 300+ page book we self-publish. For more, see the relevant page of my web site.