From the Recruiting Station: WA Ren Faire

Saturday I went to the local Ren Faire.

My perspective on Ren Faires has changed since I became a belly dancer and as I become more experienced in the SCA. I watched a trio of dancers (along with some other people from the troop who showed up) and found myself critiquing them for things like touching the ‘live’ edge of the dance sword, etc. I also considered their garb from a much more experienced eye – down to figuring out how they’d made their tops.

There were some entertaining acts (including a ‘Robin Hood’ show that used children recruited from the audience as actors/props), but most importantly I was recruited into a company of pike with sleeves of shot. It was admittedly a very short tour of duty, of course.

The demo group had a little over a dozen people including a sergeant, an ensign, two arquebusiers, and eight pike(wo)men. I include the feminine form because I think almost half of them were. They had some extra pikes (both adult and children’s sizes) which they loaned out, forming two ranks of novices behind the two ranks of veterans. They then taught us how to hold our pikes, march with our pikes, how to form a pike square (with only sixteen pikemen a very SMALL square), and the different angles to use for fighting infantry and cavalry. Finally they actually had us wheel about the center of the square (which is a LOT harder than it sounds for any formation, much less one holding ten foot pikes), and posed us to fight while the arquebusiers fired a volley (yeah, there were only two of them – they fired at the same time so it was a volley). As my SCA persona is an officer in a company of pike it was a doubly enjoyable experience. I’m seriously considering seeking them out for further persona development.

FYI, “sleeves of shot” is the period term for a company of infantry that had men with firearms, normally arquebuses, since very early on the gunmen were kept to the edges of the formation so as not to disturb the order of pikes. This was because the pikes were considered the real power of the formation. It was not until the end of the SCA period that the pike square was replaced by the more flexible rotating line formations that allowed the arquebus to become the dominant weapon.