I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (17 page)

How many of us are familiar with the Battle of Towton, fought just south of York in 1461? I certainly wasn't, until the morning I accompanied my children's leftover Shreddies with an article that described how this single clash in the drawn-out Wars of the Roses accounted for more than one in a hundred of all Englishmen – at least 20,000 were killed, more than on the first day of the Somme, indeed more than have ever died in a single day in our nation's history. And as the writer went on to remind his readers, this was not 'industrial killing from a distance': 'Every Englishman who died at Towton was pierced by arrows, stabbed, bludgeoned or crushed by another Englishman.'

With dukedoms and principalities battling for supremacy, mid fifteenth-century Europe resembled some attritional game of Risk, with borders constantly redrawn, and war an ever-present threat. In almost every village in Europe, men of fighting age were expected to exist in a state of permanent military readiness, maintaining weapons and armour in combat-ready condition, and participating in regular training.

No one played this game with more ruthless panache than Philip III, Duke of Burgundy. His fluid empire, an extensive agglomeration of prosperous fiefdoms laid out along both sides of the largely notional border between the French kingdom and 'Germany', brought in such vast wealth that his court outshone any in Europe. When he went on tour – which was almost constantly, given that his ever-expanding realm lacked a fixed capital – he took with him a tent that was 'more a town than a pavilion', with wooden towers, crenellated walls and sufficient space in its many subsidiary canvas enclosures to sleep 3,000 courtiers and servants. And he partied hard: at one Burgundian bacchanal held on a boat on the Rhine, the guests danced with such reckless abandon that the deck gave way; 140 partygoers drowned in the subsequent capsize.

Much of Philip's success was down to skilful diplomacy – alliances, political marriages and so on – and some was down to simple wealth: in 1443, he bought Luxembourg. But the elephant at the bargaining table was his army, influenced in tactics and organisation by that of imperial Rome, and widely acknowledged as the most efficient fighting force of its time.

In 1467 Philip went off to that 3,000-man tent in the sky, and, as was often the way back then, with the main man gone everything swiftly went breastplates-up. His distinctly less canny son and heir, Charles, made so many enemies that he had to employ six people to taste his food, as well as having everything that passed his lips checked for poison by 'assay with a piece of unicorn horn'.

Impetuously eager to outdo Daddy, and perhaps figuring he'd better live up to the new tag he'd given himself, in 1476 Charles the Bold invaded the Swiss Confederation. After laying successful siege to the castle of Grandson, and dutifully stringing up every member of the surrendering garrison, he turned his 20,000 troops to face the Swiss reinforcements that now belatedly pitched up.

What followed ensured the battle's place in history: Grandson, grandmother of all cock-ups. Ordered to about-face and retire a certain distance to allow the Burgundian artillery a clear view of the enemy, Charles's front ranks somehow became so confused that when a scattering of Swiss troops appeared through a nearby forest they panicked, sparking off a disorientated, full-scale retreat. Having barely fired a shot or swung a pike, the astonished Swiss soon found themselves wandering through the abandoned Burgundian camp – the traditional mobile city with a perimeter of around 5km, now populated only by an estimated 2,000 'camp girls'. The Burgundians regrouped, but never won another battle. Less than a year after the Grandson debacle, Charles met his end at the battle of Nancy; the mighty empire built up by his father died with him.

A cautionary tale of arrogance, ineptitude and bloody comeuppance, and one that after my previous two historical adventures I had no desire to experience outside the pages of
The Golden Age of Burgundy
. Yet somehow here I was, setting off to enlist with the Company of Saynt George, a military unit in Burgundian service,
circa
1474. If I'd hoped that the Battle of Scoutcamp Wood was my war to end all wars, I'd hoped in vain.

The past is a foreign country, said L.P. Hartley. And this time he was right: fifteenth-century France, via Switzerland. I flew into Bern with Darwin Air, which prompted inner speculation on the 533 years of urban evolution I was soon to undo. Banking over the ominously snow-slathered peaks that girdled the Swiss capital, these wonderings intensified: even here, in the prosperous, technocratic heart of the planet's most modern and densely populous continent, the clustered hill villages and pine-dense valleys exuded an air of unhurried timelessness. Pick a square foot of Europe at random and the chances are man won't have done much to it in the last half millennium. Yet if I'd been plonked down in that square foot in 1474, dressed and equipped as I currently was, even the least significant of my possessions – forget the quartz watch and mobile phone, I'm talking about a single machine-stitched sock or even a sheet of lined notebook paper – would have dumbfounded the locals, then compelled them to burn me as a witch. For all I knew, so might the men I was on my way to meet.

As secretary of what I'd soon start calling the Company, Christian Folini was effective leader of a group whose reputation for hardcore medieval authenticity was familiar to re-enactors around the world. Even a cursory glance at the online details of the event he had kindly invited me to attend made it abundantly plain that I was about to enter the upper echelons of Hrothgar's Scale of Historical Accuracy.

Most prominently, I would be accommodated not in a campsite or some ersatz period reconstruction, but garrisoned in a starkly bona fide castle – Haut-Koenigsbourg, a many-towered medieval fortress stuck atop a ridge near Colmar in the Alsace. On the bus from Bern airport I'd re-acquainted myself with my downloaded précis of the castle's history: its twelfth-century origins, its strategic importance on the Burgundians' eastern periphery, and the subsequent centuries of crumbling abandonment ended by Kaiser Wilhelm, who celebrated Alsace's annexation into his empire by having Haut-Koenigsbourg lavishly restored to its medieval – and, um, 'German' – pomp.

Of more immediate concern was Christian's emailed introduction to the life I would shortly be leading within its brick-red sandstone walls. The 150-odd participants would sleep 'under the roof', which sounded cosy but probably wasn't: 'It can get quite cold,' he'd written, 'and we permit only a straw-bag and woollen blanket.'

One re-enactment season had ended; another had just begun. But only barely: Christian's final weather report – 'The snow inside the castle has almost gone' – despatched me off down Chiswick High Road in search of thermal protection. That I would be donning this furtively had been made plain by an illustrated article in the Company's newsletter,
Dragon
, detailing approved designs of hand-stitched linen underwear. 'Fig i: a common style of fifteenth-century underpants, based on several contemporary illustrations (Flemish Decameron
c
.1430–40, Ducal Palace, Dijon, etc.) . . . fig m: underpants with ties appear in some Swiss sources.' The best I could manage was fig z: shorts of boxer, inside out, labelling excised (Company of St Michael). These boys weren't so much the period fashion police as the inquisition.

I came home with long johns, two woollen vests and a pair of ankle-high cycling socks that I had proved to myself – and a curious bike-shop assistant – could be covertly worn under my Viking peasant shoes. I could only hope all this would do. Whatever a straw-bag was, I figured Darwin Air wouldn't welcome one into their hold, and the only un-patterned, natural-fabric blanket I'd been able to find was luridly Jackson Pollocked through many years service as a hapless decorator's dust-sheet.

With its wobbling pushbikes and trundling trams, Bern's pace of life could not be described as breathless. I sat on a bench outside the station for a last run-through of the 'useful phrases' printed out from an edition of
Dragon
, and felt uncomfortable squaring the uncouth contents with the well-presented lunchtime shoppers ambling benignly by. Was that headscarfed old dear really the direct descendant of a folysh bitchfox and a dyrty shitten knave? Could I picture some forebear of those satchel-backed, bespectacled schoolboys hoofing a doltish horson in the jewylls?

Pressing a buzzer marked C. FOLINI an hour later, I found such imaginings rather easier to entertain. I had by then experienced central Bern's overwhelmingly medieval ambience, the walk-through astronomical clocks, the codpiece-flaunting statues, the Gothic cathedral in whose cobbled shadow I now stood. A brief tour of the city museum had taught me that Bern meant 'bears', and that its unlikely status as Switzerland's capital dated back to the late Middle Ages, when Bern dominated a large swathe of the region as the largest city-state north of the Alps.

I also now knew that Bern's armies had been on the winning side at Grandson: the 500 years of peace that Harry Lime derided so flippantly in
The Third Man
dated only from the end of the wars that did for the Burgundian empire. For many decades before that time, and many more after, Swiss mercenaries were so highly esteemed that almost every court in Europe employed them as guards. The Pope, famously, still does. In re-enacting the fifteenth century, a resident of Bern was re-enacting not only his city's glorious zenith, but a time when the menfolk of Switzerland, however starkly implausible it seemed, were feared across the continent as Europe's hardest bastards.

Trim, slight and possessed of a blindingly toothy smile, the pony-tailed young man who welcomed me through the door was not an obvious incarnation of this past. Christian's apartment was the first re-enactor's home I had entered, and it did not disappoint. Up in the eaves of a venerable townhouse, it looked out across a dishevelled sea of gabled roofs from one side, and the cathedral's gargoyles from the other. Within its austere, almost monastic interior there was no sign of a television, and peeping through into the bedroom I noted that Christian and his quietly charming girlfriend Saara – a theology student who hoped to apply for the ministry – slept in single beds. The frisson of pious disapproval I detected while placing a bottle of red wine on the tiny dining table made me very glad I'd left my intended token of gratitude – a litre of single malt – back in my hotel up the road.

Over a simple repast of pasta, Christian cheerfully recalled his teenage LARPing ('A feudal-era shogun, surveying his desert kingdom from a youth-hostel window'), and how it had led him by stages towards the Company of St George.

I never quite grasped precisely how or why the group acquired its name, though it appeared connected to the Swiss-resident British expats who founded the Company back in the eighties (one, I later learned, was a fantasy artist who had helped design orcs for the
Lord of the Rings
films). Famously, though, George – very probably a third-century martyr, tortured and beheaded in Palestine – never set foot in England, and it's not at all clear how or why he bagged the national-saint job.

The re-enactment group that bore his name described itself as 'a small late-medieval fifteenth-century military company of castle garrison with its attendant craftsmen and their families'. Christian was at pains to emphasise the banality of this unit: 'We are in Burgundian service,' he told me, in flawless, lightly accented English, 'but under a very minor lord who pays us only moderately well.' He also eagerly cited the historical evidence that authenticated his group's very mixed nationalities – it's apparently common to find multilingual graffiti, including English, in places right across Europe where such companies were billeted.

More glumly, Christian related the political ructions that had riven the group in recent months. I'd read on the Company's website that his ascent through the ranks had begun with an 'extraordinary' article he'd composed for
Dragon
on 'luggage and transport'; it seemed that some of the original founders, now in their sixties, resented both Christian's sudden rise to prominence and what they saw as his overbearing authoritarianism. He sighed, then gave me another of those full-beam grins. 'So, anyway – let me see your equipment!'

My unshared titter of ribaldry died away, and I faced up to the moment I had been dreading since my first encounter with
Dragon
's online back issues, with their great treatises upon correct handsaw designs, and statements redolent of tireless, devotional toil: 'I have yet to find drawers in a table as early as the 1470s'; 'There is a tendency to leap to conclusions – an observation that applies especially to trestles'. The Viking shoes aside, all I'd dared bring along was a drawstring suede purse stolen from my daughters' handbag collection. The afternoon before leaving, I'd endeavoured to age this accessory by pulling it over my right foot and performing a sort of one-legged
Riverdance
on the patio. Witnessing this scene over his fence, then hearing my mumbled explanations, my neighbour Stephan, an experienced set designer, advised rubbing powder paint and cooking oil into the suede.

Christian gingerly examined the greasy aftermath of this procedure and smiled less brilliantly than was his wont. Then he went off to his equipment cupboard, and returned with a great many items: a pewter cup, a wooden bowl and spoon and a great long woollen cloak he'd fashioned from an East German army blanket. 'And here, to tie your clothes together.' He tossed me a ragged square of pigskin, then laid down a pair of scissors and an open tub of lard. Who knows in what idiotic fashion I'd have combined all these if he hadn't then shown me. When the last lace-length strip had been manually impregnated with congealed fat, I wiped my fingers on my stupid purse and shook Christian's hand. 'See you tomorrow morning, six forty-five,' he said.

'Sorry,' murmured Saara with a little smile. 'I know how difficult it is for you English to get up early.'

After a few fitful hours of sleep and an epic shower apparently intended to wash away many days of medieval filth in advance, I was sharing the back seat of Christian's small hired Peugeot with two baskets of beeswax candles, a bundle of grey blankets and some sort of entrenching tool. It was raining; I dozed. We stopped to pick up a jolly maiden named Kaja, and then at a stonemason's, from whose workshop Christian emerged with two buckets filled with cannonballs.