As I have previously hinted, (or in fact stated) I spent this past weekend at the Tewkesbury Medieval Festival. This is the largest Free Medieval festival in europe apparently and it certainly is massive. It involves a reenactment of the Battle of Tewkesbury from the War of the Roses and a very large medieval (and medieval-ish) market and lots of entertainment!
Mythago are invited every year to dance there as part of the official entertainment. We generally do one official stand where we tell a story and one or two other stands with one off dances.
It is generally an awesome weekend, a large proportion of the side comes along to it and we camp in a large sort of huddle and make it into a very sociable event! Look here we are camping…I am there in the background and one of our number is even in medieval dress! This happens a lot at this festival…there are more medieval clothes than any other!
We ended up doing 3 stands on the Saturday, and 2 stands on the sunday…
at least that is what everyone else did…
what I did was do two stands on Saturday, including every single dance in stand 2 (the story) and gave myself heat stroke which lead me to go to bed with a fever (literally) and shiver for 45 mins with blue hands and then sleep for 12 hours…
There is a lesson somewhere about dancing in black in the beating sun…
That was a little bit of a shock to the system I can tell you, I thought I was drinking enough and I wasn’t aware of feeling too bad…until I was!
Luckily I had danced the main event of the day which was our one official stand where we danced the story 🙂
It was the Kings Men Story, I have told you about it before, it is the story of the Rollright stones in Oxfordshire, in which a warband led by a king is tricked by a witch and everyone is turned to stone
We are not the only crazy people out and about in weather inappropriate kit either, there are a lot of people dressed as knights…in the full kit with wool and padded under garments and basically big tin cans over the top!
There was a lot of it about…they reenacted the battle both days, it was very impressive!
ON the sunday, I was feeling right as rain and full of metaphorical beans 🙂
I actually felt better than I did at any point on Saturday…maybe I just needed a good 12 hour sleep (albeit a weird and warm one)
We did 2 stands, the first was a series of one off dances done basically just for the fun of it 🙂
The second was, again, the story of the Kings Men. We decided that a large percentage of the audience would be different so it was ok to do that same story, and they definitely seemed appreciative!
It really was an awesome weekend, with good friends and excellent dancing…
even with sunstroke and 2 infected insect bites…it was still an awesome weekend 😀
for those of you who like to know these things…the dances I did were:
Triskelle (x2)
Avebury Ring (x2)
Foulmouth cat
Spank the Monkey
Fanny Frail (x3)
Our Henry (x2)
Star of the County Down (x2)
Maiden Castle (x2)
Witch Hunt (x2)
Standing Stones (x2)
Broomstick (x2)
Project Warrior Goddess 
Heat stroke is scary stuff. I’m so glad to hear you recovered so quickly.
During my week at the Biggest Loser Resort I allowed myself to get dehydrated during one of the hikes and it gave me flu-like symptoms for 24 hours. It’s amazing how quickly heat stroke or dehydration can sneak up on you – where you go from feeling fine to feeling like death in what seems like an instant.
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It is terrifying isn’t it! I was literally putting my kit on for the last dance stand when I started shaking and shivering and my hands went blue despite the rest if me being hot! I was quite surprised to wake up feeling fine on Sunday!!
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Thank goodness you knew better to stop and just lay down rather than try to dance some more!
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I thought I was going to until my friend asked me if I was ok…and I just said no and started crying because my skin hurt! I was really strange I didn’t know until that point that I wasn’t well!
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Yep! That’s the scary part, how sudden the onset is. I’m so glad you caught it in time before things got more serious.
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Me too! It is very scary!
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Sounds like an awesome weekend (except for the heatstroke) I might see about coming down to the next one, I have a War of the Roses obsession at the moment! Glad that you recovered quickly, heatstroke sounds like scary stuff
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thank you 🙂
I had a horrible feeling at one point that I wouldn’t be ok to dance on the sunday either…but thankfully I was ok! It was quite scary!
you should come it is awesome, sadly not to be repeated until next year, but we will be there (I assume…we haven’t been invited yet but we always are…)
😀
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It sounds horrible, I’m glad you were ok to dance on the Sunday. Sleep is always a good answer 🙂
I’m adding it to my calendar already, it sounds like loads of fun, and it’s not too far for me 🙂
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yeay! it really is lots of fun! 🙂
and you can see the crazy dancing first hand 🙂 I will have to make sure you know which one is me so I can say hi 😀
I still haven’t managed to see the battle reenactment (saturday I was feeling ropy and sunday it clashed with our dance set), but it sounds impressive from the noises coming from the battle field!
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Sounds like a good plan to me, I definitely want to see the crazy dancing! 🙂
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woohoo 😀
a year is too far away!! move down south and be done with it :-p
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