Saturday, 8th July 2017

For breakfast, we walked down to the pub, the Gupshill Manor, adjacent to the campsite, and had full Englishes plus as much tea and coffee as you like, and they were very good breakfasts.

We caught the bus into town from a bus stop a short distance from the pub - we'd walked ourselves stiff the previous day.

We looked round the town, not really shopping, but looking at interesting stuff in shop windows - there are a good number of second-hand shops and second-hand bookshops in Tewkesbury. Saw several signs outside buildings saying 'This used to be a pub' - sad, really, but I guess that's what follows mainly from the smoking ban and the drink-driving penalties - not to mention 'austerity'!

There were a few 're-enactors' around the town, including one group of medieval citizens who seemed to be prisoners under armed escort.

Sigil banners were hanging from many buildings in the town.

Following the signs to the festival site, we passed the beautiful Tewkesbury Abbey and an adjacent open-air market.

At the festival site there are two fields on opposite sides of the road: the festival site, with tents selling goods - mainly items relevant to the theme of the festival - and tents selling food and drink; and opposite that field, the battle site with a large fenced off area for the entertainments.

We walked around the festival site, checking out the stuff on sale: leather goods, wooden swords, medieval armour and weapons, tee-shirts, jewellery and clothing, ornaments, soaps, beeswax, etc; all in all, a good variety and most of it relevant to the event. There were ferret races and 'stroke the ferret for £2' stalls (fish oil is put on the ferret's belly, so he spends his time licking that whilst you cuddle him).

Our young Florence had a henna tattoo of a feather drawn on her arm. After further ambling round the site, we eventually arrived at the large beer tent where we sat outside on the grass to drink and watch our fellow festival goers to-ing and fro-ing in the throng.

Afterwards, we made our way to the battlefield where there was first a display of falconry - a major sport in medieval times and something of a status symbol. Ownership of the larger birds was restricted to the upper classes. Royalty and rich landowners kept hunting within their forests to themselves. Peasants were limited to the common lands and, if they broke the laws of hunting, they were penalized severely. Death was not an uncommon punishment for those found hunting in the royal forests without permission.

Falconry display over, the troops started to file onto the field and mass in their respective positions ready for battle. As they came on, we were told over the loudspeaker that those wearing blue were from Anjou, supporting the queen, a French lady, Margaret of Anjou (Henry VI's wife), and that they were 'real French people'. They were fighting on the Lancastrian side.

Gunpowder was in use in the battle; one of its earliest uses in Britain, and the scene in the field was peppered with bangs and smoke clouds.

We were sat on the right-hand side of the field, where the Yorkist troops lined up - but this was not a good position to watch from because these troops blocked our view of the action. I moved round to the centre of the field where the view of the action was better, though I had to stand on tiptoe and hold the camera high above the heads of the spectators.

After the battle, there was a display by Italian flag wavers though, as with the falconry show, the field was really too big for us to be able to see much detail from the sides.

We made our way back to the campsite - 'tramped' our way back, more like, because, from all the walking we'd done in the hot sun, we were pretty much worn out; though this was, perhaps, more to do with our unfitness than with the actual distances walked.