My First Experience at Canterbury Fayre

My experience at Canterbury Fayre, November 18-20, 1977

by Merewyn the Meke

I discovered the SCA in the fall of 1977. It was a wild and exciting time of discovery for me, as it is for most new participants. We had started a club up at SFU and we had a games night at the home of one of our members. Most of the people attending that party were from Lions Gate and they told us about the upcoming fair. Two weeks after our games night, a number of us climbed on the Hastings Express bus and ventured down to Cordova and Gore to help out at the fair.

Even at that time, that part of the city wasn’t exactly ritzy. There were run down hotels and lots of people down on their luck in that neighbourhood. They were mostly men who had been enslaved to alcohol, though, and it wasn’t quite the scary place that it has become in latter years. Still, here I was, relatively fresh from the wilds of Whonnock and taking a bus all the way from SFU to the ‘bad’ part of town. Even if I was with friends, it was pretty exciting stuff.

Of course, we chose to travel down there in our garb. Didn’t everyone run about dressed like that in 1977? I remember that I was wearing my new dress, a turquoise and gold thing that had had a previous life as a costume from the Caucasian Chalk Circle. It was sort of mediaeval, although the people who are heavily into authenticity now would certainly look askance at it. That was true of a lot of the garb that was around then, because people were mostly trying to put an outfit together.

When we arrived, the people at the church somehow realized who we were with and sent us down to help finish setting things up. I was introduced to Susan the Opaque, who was staffing the Welsh and tinker cake booth. She promptly began instructing me on how to make the cakes and put me to work. It was quite an experience trying to keep my long sleeves out of the flour, but I managed it. The cakes were extremely popular and it was difficult to keep enough made up to fill the demand. I think the tinkers cakes sold for $3.00 a dozen and the Welsh cakes were $3.50 a dozen. The Welsh cakes were more expensive because they had candied fruit in them, but they also sold fastest. The phrase ‘selling like hotcakes’ took on new meaning for me.

We took turns in the booth, so I wasn’t stuck there for the whole time. I got to wander about and check out the other things that were happening. The church liked us to do that because it added colour to the crowd at the event. At one point, a couple of the men from Lions Gate approached me and said, “Excuse me, but we were wondering if you would mind if we kidnapped you.”

They explained that they wanted to set up a circumstance that would give them an excuse to stage a fight to entertain the crowd. I agreed to let them kidnap me and they told me that they would just come and grab me when they were ready to do their thing. They left me to chat and wander for quite a long time. I was having a lovely talk with someone when I suddenly felt myself lifted off my feet and one of the men slung me over his shoulder, running toward the stage in the center of the courtyard. As I was placed up on his shoulder, the lady I was talking to smiled and waved. As requested I struggled and called for help, careful not to struggle so hard that he would drop me. Then I heard the other man shout out something like, “Unhand that damsel, thou villain!” I was carefully placed on my feet on one side of the stage and the fight was on! They called insults to one another while they fenced with foils. I looked suitably terrified on the sidelines until my rescuer vanquished the kidnapper, ending the skit.

At one point, Yulseth of Darkwood decided he wanted to buy some mead. Several of us agreed to accompany him to the liquor store because he had come up from Adiantum and didn’t know this part of the city. So then we trooped from St. James to a liquor store on Hastings street, where they had no mead, and on to another liquor store in Chinatown. Then we walked back. Of the group, I remember there was me in my pseudo-mediaeval turquoise and gold dress,—complete with train—Yulseth in his tunic and baggy pants, with braids and ribbons in his beard and beribboned braids down the front of his long hair, Bjorn of Havok and Bolverk of Momchilovich wearing bearskins and chain mail and an underage Melissa Kendal in Tudors. Have you ever heard of ‘Freaking the Mundanes?’ This was my first experience doing that, if you didn’t count riding on the bus in garb. I remember getting some awfully funny looks that day. I also remember being cold, because none of us had coats even though it was mid-November. Melissa and I were also wearing thin little Chinese shoes, which let the cold from the sidewalk seep up through the soles of our feet.

At one point during the weekend, there was also a young man in garb who looked at me and immediately came over to hug me and give me a kiss. I wasn’t used to that sort of attention at all! He doesn’t participate in the hobby anymore, but we’re still friends.

On the Saturday night, a bunch of us went out to the Mediaeval Inn for dinner after the fayre closed. I had never been to the place before, but it was a real hangout for Lions Gaters. It was an interesting experience, going with all these new people to a restaurant with a Mediaeval theme. I expect that the people working in the restaurant must have thought we were an experience, too. We were pretty excited and boisterous.