So, having survived my first season as a re-enactor in the NTB and having largely enjoyed the experience including helping, in a minor way, running NTB’s first ever Major Muster am I looking forward to the new season with unbridled optimism?
Yes and no.
Yes because the weekends away last summer were very enjoyable, aside from the fact that I find it difficult to sleep in a tent yet always seemed to be up and about early thanks to my wretched internal body clock. Socially I met an awful lot of very interesting people both within and outside the Regiment, I drank far too much alcohol (impossible, I hear you cry), I saw parts of the country I wouldn’t normally have seen at all and I found the efect of dressing up and walking around the crowds an incredibly weird experience. Not because everyone looked at me and thought I was a nutter (though doubtless some did) but because they seemed to be fascinated by me.
This is where the "no" part of the above answer comes in. I have been involved, over the winter, in a sometimes heated debate via the ECWS website over what we are doing at these musters. This stemmed largely from the events at Wallingford and Yeovil last year. You see, my understanding is that we should be out there to entertain the public as well as enjoy ourselves, since if we just indulge ourselves and bore the pants off the public they will not turn up any more and we will not have any more musters. Obviously, then, we need to compromise between our enjoyment and theirs. Who, after all, wants to watch 40 pikemen charge into eachother with their pikes at comport, except at King of the Ring? Great fun to do but boring to watch. By the same token, fighting pikes at point only, as the KA tried to impose last year, may well look realistic (or not, the debate still rages about that one) but if the participants are bored by it and the public see they’re bored then where’s the enjoyment for anyone? At Yeovil we managed to persuade the Oxford Blues to play with us against their leadership’s orders and we plowed into eachother with pikes just above head height, the public saw we meant it as a real contest and followed us along the crowd barrier cheering their favourites on. Will that, I wonder, persuade those at the top that this compromise betwen the two styles works?
Ah yes, those at the top. One of my other hobbies is wargaming. I’ll face my opponent over the tabletop, move my units where I want them to go, roll the dice to see how effective my fire is and watch aghast as my carefully assembled battleplan falls apart when my Guards are unexpectedly routed by his Militia. This is all well and good, inconveniences nobody and is usually fun. Unfortunately our leadership occasionally indulges in a little wargaming too, only they don’t use metal figurines, they use us. If they knew what they were doing this might not be such a bad thing but as they don’t we get events like Wallingford.
I went there counting it as my fist Major, since Kirby Hall was washed out. The vast numbers there looked impressive, the battlefield looked interesting, the battle itself was poor. On the Saturday we were scheduled to lose, so the deployment of the King’s Army didn’t really matter. We attacked, fought Blackwells, enjoyed ourselves and routed when the appropriate time came. On the Sunday we noticed that the KA artillery was hopelessly exposed out on our flank. We couldn’t ignore it (you do not march past guns firing away at you as the public will wonder why you aren’t dying in droves, more of which later) so we attacked it. A KA regiment blocked our path, refused to fight properly, eventually retreated and we captured some of the guns. Eventually we took all of them and turned them on their former owners. Well, many gunners at this time would have been mercenaries.
This was all well and good, but on both days a number of re-enactors left the field during the battle because they were left standing around waiting for orders for long periods. Why? Well, our beloved leadership were trying to get one over on eachother by outflanking or otherwise surprising the opposition. From what I’ve heard this is not the first time this has happened either.
The question here is; Why? For whom do we fight? Ourselves or the public? Shouldn’t our leadership be more interested in running the battle properly rather than indulging in some private contest? Should we start advertising the re-enactment as "The Battle of Whatevergodforsakentownthisis, only we’ll be too busy enjoying ourselves to care whether what we do has any similarity to what actually happened", after all that would be more honest, wouldn’t it?
Yeovil was a case in point. What our sponsor wanted was something similar to the actual event. So, the plan was for the RA to retreat to the town, the KA to approach, both sides attack and fall back then the cavalry appear as RA horse and route the KA infantry. This would have represented roughly what happened at the historical battle. The KA leadership said no. They wanted THEIR cavalry to be on THEIR side. WHY?
We offered a compromise. Both sides have cavalry but, towards the end of the battle the KA horse would chase the RA horse off. Both would then reassemble as RA horse and finish off the KA foot, as historically the KA only broke when the horse appeared as they had none. Once again the KA leadership said no. Never mind what the public expected, never mind what the sponsor wanted, the boys from the KA heirarchy decided they didn’t want to co-operate. WHY?
Simple answer- it was THEIR cavalry so unless THEY got to play with it they were going to throw their collective teddy bears out of the pram. You’d expect better from children, let alone grown men.
Now, it would be easy to be petty here. It would be simple enough, next time we fight in a KA organised event which calls for us to route to simply march off the field in good order, like they did at Wallingford. Next time we turned up at an RIE like the superb one at Topsham where the KA had horse and we didn’t we could stamp our feet and demand cavalry too or we wouldn’t play. Problem is, we’d soon find the invitations drying up, and who wants that? Yet while such an attitude from us would be unacceptable everyone seems to accept it from the leadership, especially the KA leadership, with a shrug. I would humbly suggest that our RA leadership needs to decide what we are going to do about that sort of attitude and starts to deal with it quickly.
Next, we need to look at ourselves. What do we do at musters? How do we justify our presence? I imagine the average itinery for a weekend muster goes something along the lines of;
Friday evening- Arrive at site, errect tent, change into period clothing, find beer tent or other form of entertainment.
Saturday- Attend morning drill (or not, depending on hangover), visit traders, fight battle, find beer tent.
Sunday- As Saturday but take down tent and go home afterwards.
All very enjoyable but the public will only see you during drill and during the battle. What about the rest of the time? Do we owe it to the sponsor and the paying public who are heavily subsidising this hobby of ours to do more? Shouldn’t we be mingling with the crowds more while in costume and acting in character?
We did something along these lines at Yeovil. For a start, the beer tent was in the public area, so anyone going for a lunchtime pint was part of the attraction. When the horse decided to go for a beer and bring their riders with them they were surrounded by people, adults as well as children who wanted a closer look and wanted to ask questions. We sent a couple of patrols through the crowd, looking for a royalist spy, and they were followed by a group of admirers. I did a little recruiting sergeant act with a Blewe Auxiliaries drummer which was very well received. Various other members, though by no means all, from our brigade manned the living history area from time to time. Why don’t we do more of this? It might earn us a few more musters if we give greater value for money.
I’ve noticed at battles we seem very reluctant to take casualties. A musket block can fire a full volley at point blank range and we ignore it at worse or crouch down at best. At Wallingford a dozen guns, including the ones we captured, pounded a pike block which was totally unmoved by the experience. The public notices this. Why aren’t they being killed, they wonder? Surely, if this is a re-enactment, they should be going down in droves?
Part of this, of course, is due to the fact that we don’t know what’s going on. Who is going to topple over as a casualty early in the action if he or she is worried that the action will move elsewhere at our leadership’s whim, leaving the casualty unrecovered? A Royalist musketeer told, on the ECWS website, how he was "shot" at Yeovil, fell down near to the crowd, then found his unit had retired leaving him isolated for the rest of the battle. Fortunately he had already fired off all his powder so didn’t mind too much, but what if he hadn’t?
The answer to this? Scripts. Not completely rigid scripts where battalion A attacks the ridge between 2-35 and 2-42, taking 12 casualties from gunnery and five in the pike push before routing to the rear. That sort of script would rapidly break down and spoil everyone’s day as it would inevitably lead to someone "forgetting" to retreat. The the other side would retaliate with an unscheduled flank charge and we’d be back into wargaming. What I’d like to see us do is, at morning drill on day 1, go over the ground we’ll be fighting over with our opponents. If everyone in the brigade knew we’d be attacking this position, get driven off with casualties then counter-attack and take it before finally being routed by the KA horse then we’d all know when we could afford to be shot or stabbed without being left isolated by a sudden redeployment and without the script being too rigid. After all, if we all know we’re supposed to retreat and the pike sergeant decides he doesn’t want to he’ll look pretty stupid standing there by himself surrounded by casualties with the rest of us in headlong retreat.
Think about it and let me know what you think of this idea.