Looking for an authentic medieval experience

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After 20 months of lockdowns and shutdowns, shakedowns, takedowns and breakdowns (sorry, momentarily channeled Bob Seger there), the family and I decided to do something special to celebrate my birthday this year.

In an uncharacteristic burst of spontaneity, we packed up the car and headed east to Toronto – aka the Big Smoke – to partake in a delightful evening of knighting, jousting, feasting and frolicking at an establishment called Medieval Times.

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For those of you who haven’t heard of Medieval Times, it is basically dinner theatre set in 11^th -century England, with wenches serving food, lords and ladies babbling on in frankly absurd (and clearly fake) British accents, and a bunch of guys dressed up as knights riding horses and play-fighting with one another.

The six knights involved in this mock medieval tournament all sport different colours and each section of the audience is assigned a colour and a knight to cheer on.

Food comes without utensils and beverages are served in metallic-looking plastic cups that look like old timey mugs.

If you have money and want to upgrade, you can even purchase one of those drinking horns at one of the many conveniently placed souvenir shops and consume mead to your heart’s content.

All in all, it is a highly agreeable though not terribly inexpensive experience for families (none of my three kids, for possibly the first time in history, complained about being bored during the entire evening), for medieval history buffs and for people who want an interactive theatre experience where they can both eat and scream at the same time.

For sexist people, it is also probably the only place in the world where you can currently call your server a wench and live to see another day (to be fair, there were many male wenches too, though, like the women, none of them looked particularly stoked about being called a ‘wench’).

While our family had a tremendous time and the kids adored the whole experience in spite of our knight not being the ablest of warriors, it made me think about how absurd the whole thing would appear to a time-travelling denizen of 11^th Century England.

I imagine that a poor peasant who had found him or herself in 21^st Century Taranna would wonder why on (flat) Earth would his or her descendants 1,000 years later be glorifying what probably was an awful, grubby, bloody experience for most people involved, aside from royalty.

Non-royal folks in 11^th Century England lived a thoroughly miserable existence, with an average life expectancy of around 32 years if they were lucky enough to survive their first year of life (survival rate of one-year-olds was a ghastly 50 per cent).

Peasants rarely got the chance to eat fancy meat that was served up at Medieval Times (chicken) or anything remotely appetizing. They usually knocked back a soggy, unappetizing bowl of porridge every single day of their lives. They spent most of their days tirelessly working for their ‘masters’ for next to no pay before returning to their shoddy, poorly-built homes/shanties, which they shared with pigs and donkeys and horses and other livestock, who I’m guessing probably weren’t too concerned about the whole concept of hygiene.

For the sake of comparison, our yodeling, anti-social cat can be a pain to live with sometimes, but if I was given the choice of sharing my bedroom with her or a grubby, squalid pig, our mewling feline would win every time.

Anyway, we modern humans seem to have extracted all the ‘fun’ from the true medieval experience – left out the plague and pestilence, the famine and the violence, the sexism, the classism and the barbarism that existed back then – so that we can enjoy a sanitized version of what our ancestors lived through way back when.

For me, I think it might more of a fitting tribute to our long-suffering forebearers that we stage a more ‘realistic’ medieval experience, whereupon entering the restaurant diners were robbed and stripped of all worldly goods by armed knights, forced into nine hours of backbreaking work in some field somewhere before getting thrown a breadcrumb by some tyrannical, inbred nitwit ‘overlord’ and then getting to snuggle up with a donkey whilst trying to get a few hours of sleep.

It probably wouldn’t be terribly popular place (explains why I’m not a successful restaurateur, I suppose) but I believe it would give people a better understanding of what people had to go through in the past.
Humans being dumb humans of course, I have no doubt that in 100 or 1,000 years from now, our descendants will create an early 21^st Century/COVID-themed dinner theatre experience where diners will be given fancy-looking facemasks and actors will depict us fighting in a grocery store aisles over the last roll of toilet paper, while food is delivered to each table via people dressed as Uber drivers.

To borrow the immortal words of noted killjoy Karl Marx, history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce and finally as dinner theatre.