In the middle of last year, I went to the Winterfest Medieval Faire over at Parramatta, and then I found out about the St Ives Medieval Faire, and boy oh boy it was so amazing! Seriously, Winterfest was so plebeian compared to this monster of a fair!
At Winterfest, they had some really exciting stuff, but this St Ives Medieval Faire had all that AND MORE.
The entire grounds were like triple the size of Winterfest's, and they would have multiple events happening at the same time; it was so big that I really wished I could have gone both days so that I could have looked at every single thing.
Anyway, since I wrote this a bit after the actual event, this blog will mainly be a picture blog with not so much narrative and detail.
So at the beginning of the fair they have the grand parade, where all the re-enactors come out in the groups, and they even have a king and queen overseeing it all!
(which just means he's super inexperienced)
One really really cool thing they had that Winterfest didn't was a trebuchet demonstration.
They also had some really cool combat displays. We couldn't see all of them, but we saw the Kingdom of Heaven combat where they did like a knockout/round-robin thing, and then after that just did a huge melee. It was so funny; the re-enactors will fully dramatise their deaths and literally collapse straight onto the floor when someone hits them on the head. It was a load of fun and I wish we could have seen more of this.
After the combat, there was a bit of time to kill so we walked further up the field (away from the main area) and sat down waiting for the pike and musket display. To our surprise, the pike and musket group started marching right towards us and even stopped right in front of me to do a test display! It was so cool I was literally like less than 5 metres away from them when they fired their muskets; it was such a shock to the system because it was, firstly, super loud and, secondly, very unexpected.
They even had a Medieval Tavern, with a huge roast as well (but unfortunately we couldn't eat any of that pig; I think they sold it all pretty quickly (or maybe they just ate it themselves)).
They had archery demonstrations as well:
They also had a larger area of stalls and re-enactment villages. They split the area up by time period, so you could see how different time periods had different ways of cooking, playing music, accessorising, living, etc. It was pretty cool.
This one group even did a musical demonstration for us:
How crazy do they look; they look like they will make soft noises but they actually make pretty loud, cartoonish-like sounds!
There was a heap of fun stuff around the fair:
Then, lastly, they had the great joust. It was a lot better to watch at this fair because there were actual seats and you could get a pretty good view of the entire jousting area, which was also really big. They also did a mounted melee as a warm up before the joust, which was a continuation from the previous day (we went on Sunday and they do the joust on both days of the fair).
Well that is pretty much it. As I said, I wasn't able to look at every single thing (they had way more combat displays, they had market demonstrations on how people lived in the Medieval period, such as their fashion, make up, eating, etc.), but I'm super keen on returning for perhaps both days some time!
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