THE VIKINGS ARE COMING!

The Jorvik Viking Festival: A week-long celebration of everyone's favorite helmeted rape-and-pillage invaders. I find it somewhat ironic that what started out as a hostile invasion complete with raping, pillaging and lots and lots of destruction is now a major tourist draw. All that aside, if you're going to have a Viking festival in the UK, York's the place to do it. York was one of the areas that the Vikings settled into and there were a series of Viking kings of York for much of the 10th century. While these Scandinavian settlers (not just from Denmark- there were "Vikings" from all of the Scandinavian countries) seem to have adopted elements of native-British life, Christianity for example, they left behind a legacy of Scandinavian culture too.

York is filled with place names derived from Old Norse. A good example is any street ending in "-gate", Old Norse for "street": Spurriergate, Hungate, Micklegate, High Petergate, Low Petergate, etc. Same for the four "bars" or gates into the old city walls. Norse personal names also became common for descendents of both the Vikings and the English and this pattern persisted until the coming of the Normans brought "Christian" personal names (Thomas, John, Hugh, William, etc) into vogue. The Vikings also deserve credit for bringing currency to Yorkshire. Anglo-Saxons relied primarily on barter/trade, while the Vikings used gold bullion as a form of currency and later took the idea of minting coins from southern England and began minting their own coinage (which btw was both fancier and more elaborate than that produced in Wessex to the south.) So perhaps it is fitting that we celebrate the Vikings with loads of crafts people selling "Viking" wares. And don't worry, modern Vikings accept all major credit cards!

The annual Viking festival in February was perhaps especially celebratory this year because it marked the grand reopening of the Jorvik Viking Centre after a 4 month period of renovation. I haven't been to see what's changed, but it is supposed to be even better and more realistic than before, incorporating additional information from additional/newer archaeological reports from the Coppergate excavations. When you weren't standing in a reaaaaally long line to get into Jorvik, you could also enjoy a number of activities throughout the city. In Parliament Street, a tent hosted various demonstrations/shows geared towards the younger crowd, while in several locations merchants like the one pictured above sold Viking crafts, replica weapons and metal work, carved things, pins, fabrics... the list goes on. There were also walking tours and lectures and even a planetarium show about how the Vikings navigated by the stars.

York Minster joined the fun and hosted a Viking Music night, featuring this AMAZING harp player/singer, an all-female a capella group singing Scandinavian songs, a concert choir singing a mass (I'm not entirely sure how that fit in with the Viking theme, and I don't have the program to check which mass it was to see if there's a connection. Oh well.), and a reading of Egil's Saga, a later epic poem written (supposedly) about events taking place in York under Erik Bloodaxe, twice king of York and twice deposed. All of this was of course incorporated into the pageantry of the festival by having King Erik himself along with his royal entourage in the seats of honour.I feel like the Festival is probably more exciting if you're like 8-12, since most events are geared to a younger crowd. Maybe I'm just growing cynical in my old age, but I find craft projects and digging up pretend Viking artifacts slightly less exciting than some other events like...

 The festival culminated in the Viking troops marching off for battle from the Museum Gardens, through the city of York and down to a lake outside of town for a ceremonial boat burning.

There they are, all lined up to go. There's actually three loooong lines of warriors- it was actually really impressive to see.

And there go the oft-forgot women & children, lugging all the supplies of course. The men have more important pillaging to do.

These two fine warriors were kind enough to stop for pictures with some kiddies.

Later that night to close the festival, they set a Viking boat on fire and set it adrift on the lake. I hear it was kinda neat and also involved standing around REALLY COLD for hours before they did so, but I wasn't there. I particularly enjoyed walking home and seeing all these dressed up Vikings going in and out of all the B&B's along my street and standing in line to checkout at the grocery store surrounded by Vikings. It was an interesting week :)

The Battle of Stamford Bridge

I'm sure this is a surprise to absolutely no one, but I'm dreadfully behind in updating. Again. So here is the first part of a series of entries about Spring Term Field Trips to various fun and exciting places. Waaaay back in January I went with a group of CMSers to see Murton Park, Stamford Bridge, and the Hungate archaeological excavation.

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!)

Romans, Anglo-Saxons, and Vikings, oh my!

Ok, first of all, I must start this entry with perhaps the best things ever: Custard Creams. Now, you might be thinking, gee, those are just cookies. Whoop-di-doo. You would be wrong on two counts. 1) These are "biscuits." For a fun (read, frustrating) time, try to explain American southern-style biscuits to a Brit. Here biscuits are sandwich cookies. Something like a chocolate chip cookie would be considered a "cookie." 2) These are delicious. Biscuits are often eaten with tea, and this is really the best way to enjoy them. Yum. :D

Ok, now that I'm done gushing about the fact that I found custard creams in England, let us move on to what I've been up to the for the past few days. I went with a couple of my housemates to the Jorvik Viking Centre. Now, to get an idea of what this entailed, imagine the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney World if you've ever been on it. For those of you who haven't, they stick you on a moving boat thing and you ride through various scenes filled with moving animatronic pirates. Got that picture in your head? Now picture the pirates with matty blonde/red hair dressed as Vikings and positioned in a scene of York in the year 876. Now add the smells of excrement, livestock, fish, and ironworking. That's pretty much the Jorvik Viking Centre in a nutshell. Of course, they also have some more traditional museum-y type exhibits once you get off the ride. Now, while it was probably fairly authentic, I could have done without the man in the "privy" (read, hole surrounded by a chest-height fence) moaning and emitting foul odors. But maybe that's just me...

Moving on! Then we did the whole Minster kit and caboodle. A "Do Everything" Pass will allow you to wander around the minster proper and join a tour if you wish, visit the Museum/Crypt/Treasury located in the foundations of the Minster, and climb the 275 uneven stone steps up a tight spiral staircase to the top of the Tower. Of course, we found out on our way out that we could have gotten in for free with our U. of York cards. Oh well. Here's Constantine the Great (who was proclaimed Augustus at the site of York Minster) looking slightly less dignified than usual. Opposite him is a Roman column.

The column comes from directly under the Minster, which, incidentally, is the 5th incarnation of a minster church on the site. During the Roman period, the Roman fortress was located almost exactly where the Minster now stands (About a quarter of the Roman fortress is under the Minster's foundations). During repair work of the Minster foundations in the 60's, the Roman remains, including this column were discovered. Some of the original walls and some artifacts are now displayed in the Minster basement in the Museum. The column was re-erected on the Minster plaza. Good intentions, however, went awry. The column is actually standing upside down. Oops!

Anyway, back to adventures at the Minster, which is quickly becoming my favorite building ever. If you climbe 275 of these:

 you get to the top of the tower where you can see this! PS if the picture looks weird, its because I took it on the way down, not up :)

If you look just to the right of the tower on the left, you can just make out the ruins of St Mary's Abbey. I'm sparring you the close up photo I took in an attempt to not overwhelm this page with pictures.

You can also see these guys. Aren't they cute? :)

I'll put up a whole album of Minster pictures because I've got way too many to share here. Anyway, later that afternoon, we discovered the absolutely deliciousness of a strangely British (and apparently Canadian) food: fries (or chips here) covered with gravy and cheese. Sounds disgusting. I know. But so good. So good. Mmm.

Today, I went on one of the free walking tours of York offered by the York Association of Voluntary Guides. Our tour guide was a really cute older British lady. She took us around some of the Roman and Medieval sights, including the Museum Gardens. While I'd been in there, it was nice to hear some of the history not recorded on plaques or anything around the Gardens. For example, this is the Multiangular Tower, the most complete Roman tower standing. The city also placed several Roman caskets inside, which were discovered during the construction of a hotel elsewhere in the city. Here's a view from the outside that should show why it was named as it was.















We also saw an Anglo-Saxon tower built on top of older Roman walls, and took a walk along the medieval/Roman wall from Bootham Bar to Monk Bar.

Along the way, you get a nice view of the Treasurer's House, the Minster, and the Archbishop's House. From there we saw some of the city, including the oldest block of houses in the country. We ended up at the Shambles, the oldest medieval street preserved in the city. It was named because it used to be the butchers quarter, and the shops still have the meat hooks along the top of the shop windows. In Anglo-Saxon, "fleshammels" meant the street of the butchers. Today it and the surrounding area is fun to poke around, and has a hay market with fresh produce & cheap clothes to peruse.

Aside from poking around the city, I went to International Student Orientation yesterday. It was mostly a lot of pointless blathering by various people from various offices ("Hey, do you need to improve your English? Take our ESL classes!" "Plagarisim is bad!" etc.), but I did accomplish pretty much everything I will ever need to do on campus, so that was good. The school scanned my passport & visa so now the government won't come after me for coming into the country as a student and not showing up at school. I registered with the student health centre. I also got an introduction for banking privileges letter, took said letter to a booth set up by my chosen bank (the only one that DOESN'T charge between 5 and 10 pounds per month for the privilege of having a bank account) and opened up an account. I also got my very own University of York student card, so now I can start taking advantage of student specials. Woo!

Meanwhile, I've been brushing up on my Latin skills. Next week we have induction for the Centre for Medieval Studies and language placement tests, so I want to be able to remember SOMETHING about Latin :)

In US news, I'm completely upset that the Red Sox have gotten their butts handed to them by the Angels in games 1 & 2 of the ALDS. This is not acceptable. Dear Sox, please play better. Thank you.

I'll end this VERY long entry with a photo from that market I mentioned, must because I like it and I don't want to end with a rage about the Red Sox inability to hit a baseball.

P.S. Comments are totally welcome. Just sayin'. Especially if you spell like an American!