I am queuing outside a portable toilet behind a Viking and a Roman legionary. The air is thick with the fatty smell of spit-roasts from a nearby Norman encampment. Over the sound system, an excited narrator gives a real-time, blow-by-blow account of the action unfolding on a grassy arena, where a division of British light infantry is facing a French line at the battle of Salamanca - originally fought in 1812. Acrid gunpowder smoke wafts over a crowd of wet onlookers. A woman in a heavy velvet dress stumbles out of the toilet, soaked hem held aloft, grumbling that Portaloos were clearly not designed for 15th-century ladies.
Such inevitable anachronisms are the bread and butter of historical re-enactors - and nowhere are they more conspicuous than at the Festival of History, Britain’s annual jamboree. This year’s event, held over a soggy mid-August weekend on the grounds of a Northamptonshire stately home, gathered almost 1,000 re-enactors and attracted 17,000 visitors, illustrating a rising interest in an activity once considered the domain of enthusiastic anoraks.
Known as “living history”, “public history” or “historical interpretation”, the re-enactment of historical periods, events and characters has become one of Britain’s favourite pastimes. “There are indications that it may be the fastest growing hobby in the country,” declares Rachel Evans, editor of Skirmish, a magazine for re-enactors.
It is hardly a new phenomenon. Ancient Roman emperors were fond of restaging battles of antiquity, often as an excuse for gladiatorial contests. Religious customs have traditionally placed re-enactment at their centre - passion plays are the restaging of Christian history’s climactic episode. In all of southern Europe some variation of the Moors-versus-Christians clash is ritually acted out.
Britain’s Victorians were famously fond of medieval pageantry. The romantic cult of the Middle Ages fostered an abundance of mock-tourneys and other displays of chivalric skills that remain hugely popular today. The most common type of historical interpretation is performed in the name of national pride.
Yet the history of re-enactment as a hobby is more recent. In the US it took off in the 1960s, mostly as a result of centennial celebrations of the American civil war. It has since exploded into a national pursuit and multimillion-dollar industry. In 1998, as many as 25,000 living historians gathered to restage the battle of Gettysburg - the largest re-enactment ever.
In Britain, the first modern re-enactment society, the Sealed Knot, was formed in 1968 to replay aspects of the English civil war. The same year, enthusiasts of the American civil war formed the Southern Skirmish Association. In 1971, Napoleonic era re-enactors formed the Sabre Society. Some of its members seceded in 1976 and constituted the Napoleonic Association.
Today there are approximately 700 different living history groups in Britain, representing anything from the Saxon era to the Vietnam war. Their specificity is extraordinary and their attention to detail staggering.
”Pretty much all periods have been covered,” says Evans, “although there are new groups being created all the time, whenever there’s an anniversary.”
”Those societies can run from one person through to several thousand,” explains Howard Giles, a re-enactor since the early 1970s, who estimates that there are at least 20,000 active members of the re-enactment community. Most re-enactors “do” various periods of history. Giles himself was one of 10 founding members of the Napoleonic Association, but is drawn to the spectacle that the re-enactment of other periods allows for. When we first meet at the Festival of History, he is playing the part of a drummer with the Fairfax Battalia, one of many groups within the English Civil War Society.
In 1984, Giles became English Heritage’s first head of special events, a post he kept for 16 years. “My remit was to make castles interesting. I was given carte blanche to bring the historical sites to life. I introduced what I suppose was the first co-ordinated living history programme to Britain. It went from three events in 1985 to more than a thousand in the millennium year.” He has since founded EventPlan, Britain’s biggest company specialising in re-enactments for living history displays, film, television, schools, museums and heritage sites. EventPlan was behind the 2001 re-staging of the “Battle of Orgreave”, an infamous clash between striking Yorkshire miners and police in June 1984. “It had a cathartic effect on people. Many - particularly miners - came up to us with tears in their eyes saying they hadn’t been able to talk about it for many years, but the re-enactment had broken the spell.”
The interest aroused by EventPlan’s Battle of Orgreave, comparable to that aroused by artist Rod Dickinson’s interpretations of Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments, is indicative of the emergence of re-enactment as performance art. But what explains the growing interest in re-enactment when it is not intended to mark a date on the religious or civic calendars, when it is carried out by amateurs with no lofty artistic purpose? What makes people forsake other weekend pleasures to dress up in period costumes and defy the elements?
”I can’t speak for other periods,” says Peter Johnson, a sewer engineer wearing the lorica segmentata or segmented plate armour of a Roman soldier at the time of Hadrian. He is a member of Britain’s leading Roman re-enactment group, the Ermine Street Guard, and calls himself Gaius Marcelus. “I don’t understand why someone would want to re-enact the second world war. It’s too close. But Romans are different from anything you see today. I admire their organisation and discipline. When you’re marching with 50 or 60 soldiers you get a right buzz out of it. To be a Roman soldier, part of a legion all marching in step - you feel the might of imperial Rome. You’re in a little fantasy world.”
Escapism certainly explains part of living history’s appeal. And, as I learn from a stall advertising 18th-century re-enactment workshops, talking about 21st- century affairs when “in character” is considered a serious breach of etiquette.
At a festival marking the 800th anniversary of the signing of Huntingdon’s charter, I find a group of archers and camp followers from the Oxford Household, part of the War of the Roses Federation, representing aspects of 15th-century life. Annie Thompson has been a re-enactor for 30 years. Her daughter Isabel, now 15, did her first event when she was five weeks old. “It’s good fun,” Isabel tells me. “Much better than sitting in a classroom doing history lessons.”
Bess Richardson has also been doing it for 30 years. “We all entered around the same time,” she confesses, “because back then it was a good way of meeting men. In fact, we ended up marrying each other.” Her husband, Paul, who has been a re-enactor for 25 years, enjoys the social aspect of it. “It’s the friendliness. Re-enactors are very friendly with each other. It’s like a big family.”
”Re-enacting is not just about dressing up,” says Skirmish’s Rachel Evans, who was born into a family of re-enactors, and who is dressed in the costume of a Napoleonic corporal in the 85th Infantry Line Regiment (she apologises for not wearing the right shoes - these are her American civil war shoes - or the right trousers, which are still soaked after the previous day’s downpour). “The majority of us are serious historians, trying to portray history as accurately as possible. People really push authenticity, and become experts in their own fields.”
Professional historians are uncomfortable with such claims. Writing in The Observer, Tristram Hunt, author of Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City, asked: “While we can all enjoy the costumes and revel in the wonders of the past, is it really history?” The emergence of “reality history”, he contended, in which participants in a reality TV format “experience” life in a 1900s house or a first world war trench, has put a damper on an analytical understanding of history. “With its easy invitation to empathy, reality history failed to invite more searching questions about the underlying structure of the past.”
A similar concern is raised by Jan Ruger, a lecturer at London’s Birkbeck College and author of a forthcoming book on the ceremonial cult of the British and German navies. There is currently a “memory boom”, he points out, a revival of interest in history accompanied by a glut of historical reconstructions on film and television. “It seems quite harmless, but when people rely on that sort of recreation for their historical knowledge, the line between sources and interpretations gets blurred. Similarly, while re-enactors obsess over details regarding their costumes or their weaponry, they tend to be simplistic in their understanding of events. I wouldn’t call it dumbing down, but I would say that the past is being dealt with uncritically.”
Most re-enactors, says Giles, are simply “encouraging people to learn about history at a time when the government is frankly not bothered”. He is confident that re-enactment spurs people’s interest in history and thrives because of it. “The only thing threatening it is government legislation that might accidentally sweep up re-enactments and throw them into the bin by mistake.”
The threat to the community he refers to is a proposed violent crime reduction bill that would ban the sale, manufacture or import of all replica or deactivated weapons. Re-enactors trying to upgrade their collections of firearms, or to acquire new period weapons, would be criminals. If passed, the law would also put out of business the specialist armourers and providers that living historians depend on. “October 13th is D-Day for re-enactment,” Giles says, referring to the date when the standing committee will begin discussing the bill. “All that stands between the beginning of the destruction of the depiction of history in this country is a few MPs.”
Whatever the outcome of the bill’s passage through parliament, it is unlikely to dampen hobbyists’ enthusiasm for an activity that combines voyeurism and exhibitionism, allowing its practitioners to wallow in nostalgia and historical pride. Re-enactment satisfies the hunger for ritual, theatre and social interaction. It is tribal. It is anthropological as much as it is escapist. It even indulges the British penchant for braving bad weather.
It is certainly blowing hard by the time the Festival of History unwinds. Medieval knights and Model Army infantrymen mingle with second world war GIs and members of Scott’s Antarctic expedition in the beer tent. Nearby, I come across a moustachioed officer of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, one of Lord Kitchener’s first world war volunteer brigades. He is dismantling a flapping tent which, he explains, would have been a clearing station for the wounded. He took up re-enacting six years ago, after retiring from work as college lecturer. “My grandparents fought in the first world war, so to me this is a way of understanding that generation’s sacrifice.” How, I ask, does he explain living history’s popularity? “I think it’s endemic to people living on an island. The British are quite taken with their history. We are a traditional island race. We like to know how people lived.”
Skirmish Magazine: www.skirmishmagazine.co.uk
EventPlan: www.eventplan.co.uk