Murton Park is an interactive living history museum that is actually super cool. While it is primarily targeted towards young kids around 8-9 as a field trip destination, they also run a variety of special programs for families, tourists, whatever. We got a behind the scenes look at what they do and how they do it. The museum covers a pretty large area of ground and has a variety of "sets" including a 1/5 scale model of a Roman fortress (which also doubles as the American Wild West for Western role-playing groups. I had no idea there were Brits running around pretending to be American gun-slinging cowboys! Apparently they also try to imitate the accent and it gets pretty funny according to the head of the museum.), a Celtic village, a Viking/Saxon/Medieval village, a Tudor farmhouse, and World War II home front air raid shelters. School groups show up to immerse the kids in a time period for a day. They get costumes and perform typical activities from the time period.
We had an interesting discussion with the head of the project about their philosophy there. He said that they were very careful to never adopt the approach of "and now children, we've traveled back in time and are now in XYZ year." Instead, they don't pretend that they have entered a different time period, they just learn about what life might have been like by performing some of the same tasks- candle making, weaving, farming, military practice (for the Romans anyway!). "Now we're going to take care of these fields using the same methods the Anglo-Saxons might have used." He was quite interesting and made some funny comparisons with Americans. He says we've all been raised in a society that embraces make-believe much more than Europe in general and the UK in particular. Americans are apparently quite content to go to Disneyworld and accept that they're in a magical kingdom with giant mice that will take pictures with you. Brits on the other hand scoff at the man in the mouse suit. So while "look we've entered a different time period" works on Americans, it won't on Brits. Interesting, especially since that is EXACTLY what the Jorvik Viking Museum ride does. Or at least what it did. It just reopened for the Viking Festival (more on that in another entry) and I don't know exactly what all they changed, but it is supposed to be much more authentic now. And I know some of the people that recorded the Old Norse voices! Mostly because they live in my house and CMS has the closest supply of people that study Old Norse.
Anyway, the whole thing was really cool. I actually think it would be really really cool to set something similar up in the States, but it'd be quite an undertaking. Murton Park lucked out because they were able to kind of coalesce with the Yorkshire Museum of Farming which originally held all the land the museum is located on when the Museum of Farming was having financial difficulties. And the staff are geniuses with working with what they've got- all of the sets are built by staff members out of whatever they can find. They also have probably the coolest dress up closet EVER. Tons and tons of historical clothes and props and weapons and helmets and plates and just tons of fun stuff to play with. The CMS theatre group, the Lords of Misrule, have been known to rent/borrow some stuff from them and according to a girl in the group, they had a bunch of fun digging through the stuff for costumes and props.
Next up, we headed off for an adventure in Stamford Bridge. The town was the site of the slightly-less-well-known battle of 1066 in which the British under Harold Godwinson, king of England for something like 10 months, defeated Harald Hardarda of Norway, who was pressing a claim for the throne of England. Meanwhile, William of Normandy (who I'm going to go ahead and call the medieval Risk player par excellance) was landing with a large invasion force in the south of England and immediately hunkered down and fortified their position and built a couple of castles, waiting for Harold to come to him. So Harold wins at Stamford Bridge and has to immediately begin a 2 week march through the entire freaking country to go try to defeat yet another claimant for his throne. Harold is defeated at the Battle of Hastings and William the Conqueror claims the throne of England, ushering in all kinds of changes to the formerly rather insular country. And there is your terribly oversimplified account of 1066, the one date pretty much any English person can tell you about. I suppose the closest parallel in American culture would be December 7th, 1941, a day that will live in infamy and all that. Personally I think it is kind of amusing how deeply entrenched outrage about 1066 is in English culture, especially since the Normans were the FOURTH group of people from the continent to take over England over the course of the middle ages (Romans, Angles & Saxons, Vikings, Normans- and all of these groups ended up settling in England permanently, so the majority of modern Brits are going to have some ancestors that came over from Normandy at some point). I think it rankles in particular because the Normans came from land that is now in France. (The country wasn't entirely unified in this period. Normandy functioned essentially as its own little country with only nominal deference to the King of France.) I use parentheses a lot, don't I? Maybe now would be a good time for pictures.
Here is our intrepid leader attempting to not get us lost through the maze of suburban housing developments. (we ended up lost anyway.)
Stamford Bridge is now a sleepy little suburban town. The bridge for which this is all named has moved over the years, but there is still a Stamford Bridge, as well as plenty of Viking/battle themed shop and street names. This should probably have been our first clue that this was not going to be a quick and easy sight seeing stop.
Here's a rendition of the battle as illustrated by three 10-year-olds posted on the walls of public loos. I thought it was cute :)
You would think that a battle field would be marked, right? Not so much. After a bit of a detour through some neighborhoods and across some fields, we emerged upon the battlefield:
I particularly like the giant hedgerow that keeps you from seeing ANYTHING. Well, not that there's really much to see, its basically just a field. But I was there! Then we all headed back to town-this time only getting slightly lost- and grabbed a drink at the pub to warm up before heading back to King's Manor for lunch. After lunch, we got a tour of the excavation at Hungate, which at the time was snow-covered so we couldn't really see much. But some of their preliminary results are sounding pretty interesting- the area seems to have been used as essentially a waste dump for at least portions of the city for a long period of time.
And after THAT (this was a very long day...), we got to tour the various offices/departments at the York Archaeological Trust, including conservation, artifact identification, pottery, etc. The conservation work was pretty cool, especially since YAT takes on conservation jobs from other excavations as well as those done by YAT themselves so they get to see some interesting stuff. One of the projects they were working on was conserving and trying to identify some bones that might or might not be a medieval bishop who was supposed to be buried elsewhere. And then we all trudged home all the way across town and went to bed. (For reference, this trip took place the day after I got back to the UK and 2 days after a lot of people returned from abroad, so jetlag was not my friend that day!)
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