“The crown does call Ivo Blackhawk into the court.”
- Adalia VonderBerg, Golden Staff Herald
The words were not expected, let me just say that now.
But unlike every other time, they were not a complete shock. It was Friday of Ansteorra’s 40th year Celebration, my wife was the event steward, and as her event herald, we had both been hard at work since Wednesday morning setting things up, directing traffic, and in general getting ready for what was promising to be the largest event in the kingdom’s recent history. The effort wasn't small in the least, and the planning, which dated back 18 months, had expected the grand magnitude when the whole thing was little more than ink-marks on a page. Borrowing from four years at Gulf Wars, a decade and a half of event stewarding experience, and a decade as a director for a non-SCA convention in Oklahoma City, Their Ladyships Lillias, and her co-steward Liliana had laid out the framework for 40th with the express purpose of letting it be massive in every sense of the word.
Towards that end, I and my cadre of site heralds had gone to work making sure the half mile wide site was thoroughly cried three times a day, every day. By the time the Friday afternoon court was upon us, all of us were tired, but I was feeling it specifically in my back, and my voice-box. The walks were bad enough on me, I wasn’t as young, or as active as I used to be, or should be now, honestly. And my ambition to get information out to the masses had pushed the voices of all of my heralds to the near edge of our collective limits.
The afternoon court was still in daylight, the air was warm, but the breeze took the oppressive bite out of it that the warmer, muggier early afternoon had brought. And we were all glad not to be reliving Thursday’s oven-like treatment at the hands of the vengeful mistress that was mother nature this time of year.
My wife and I rose quickly from our chairs, and I was glad that I had remembered to pull on my awards mantle before sitting down to court. All of my medallion awards hung from it, and shared the space with a line of ceramic beads first assembled by my first heraldic client, and longtime friends of years prior. We were near the front of the court, to the Crown’s left, and just outside the “BFT”, a monster of a tent, easily large enough muster an SCA army of no small consequence.
We made our way up, across the out edge of the front of court, where we turned, faced the crown and knelt. My wife remained, and I approached, my head bowed.
In this moment, there was a quick mix of ceremony and pragmatism as I knelt before their majesties. The pillows meant for those to kneel on before each of the royal thrones were there, of course, each bright yellow with the arms of the the respective royals stitched across the large face. But I didn’t kneel on either of them. Instead, I dropped to one knee just short of both. The cautions, I noted, were clean, immaculate in fact. The knees of my pants, however, were not, thanks to kneeling down to to help someone pick something up earlier that afternoon. Tired though I may have been, I was not so fatigued as to bring dirt into the arms of my own kingdom.
Both of their majesties laughed and gave me a momentarily puzzled look. Queen Margaret saying “you don’t have to kneel in the dirt,” and King Vlad adding “You're allowed to use the pillows, Ivo.”
My mind latched onto the queens words for a moment, and recalled something. At gulf wars a number of years past, a man from another kingdom had noticed my Star of Merit, a yellow and black garter I wore around the top of my left elbow. He’s said to me, as part of our ongoing conversation, that perhaps I shouldn’t have worn it so often, or else the bright yellow would be covered in dirt and mud from all of my walking around as a herald.
For the briefest of moments then, I had considered that, and gave it more than just a passing thought. He had been correct, of course, the award was going to get the hell knocked out of it if I kept wearing it like I had been. But in that same moment, I clearly recalled every literal white scarf, every red centurion’s cloak, and and every dish soap splashed sable crane I had ever laid eyes on. Dirt was not a disrespect to this award, it was a tribute to the blood sweat and tears that had gone into the journey towards each of them.
All of that was at the forefront of my mind as I said back to the queen, “Someone once told me,” I replied in a quiet voice, “not to wear my awards while I was working, or else I would get them dirty. I told him that I got these awards by getting dirty in the first place.”
“Actually,” Queen Margaret said, looking suddenly thoughtful, “That is a good segue into why we called you up here.”
Months, or perhaps lifetimes, before my life was not the quiet ball of resolute confidence that it was that Friday afternoon. I had toyed with the idea of an intensive training session for new heralds for years by then, the concept shifting and changing this way and that, and evolving while I slowly watched as time and time again this or that local herald in the north of the kingdom departed their office in an untimely manor. Interspersed between these thankfully distance announcements was a slowly growing chorus of ever more untrained questions from both heralds and their deputies. for those who looked, it was clear that the average level of heraldic knowledge was, slowly, declining.
Now, I don’t want to make this sound like the whole of the north was poor at heraldry. In fact, little could be farther from the truth. Arguably some of the strongest heralds in each of the core fields call the northern region their home, and their work was known, and respected. But at the very same time, the local heralds in some groups were struggling with some of the more basic of jobs of the office of local herald. In fact, I’d watched one group change over its own herald for the 4th or 5th time in less than three years, this particular time due to a lapsed membership.
It was easy, at first, a decade ago, to look at such examples for what they actually were back then, isolated incidents that were quickly back-filled by a robust heraldic community. But the evidence of the past half decade did not offer the honest appraiser such an easy dismissal now. Numbers were down, skills levels were down, activity was down, and training was, to be blunt about it, falling apart.
If someone were to become a local herald in 2017, they would have, presumably, 6 months to get warranted. King's Round Table, held twice a year, was the usual go-to for such things, with our own Heraldic and Scribal Symposium being the second such choice each summer. The problem, however wasn’t that the class was hard. No, it wasn’t. The problem was… well, the class.
A good local herald (which I categorically am not, by the way) should be functional in armory, name, and voice heraldry, and absolutely must be proficient, not just adequate, in the local paperwork of the job. None of these subjects can be adequately taught in less than an hour, and if you want to do them any semblance of justice, I would say two hours of training. The math on that is an unforgiving sum of between 4 and 8 hours of training. And that assumes 100% retention, which as we all know is nearly impossible.
In 2017, our warranting class was functionally 45 minutes long.
The science of the situation only got worse from there. If you looked at the schedules for the Ansteorran Heraldic and Scribal Symposium, basic, local-officer type classes in these subjects were sparse, if available at all. In fact, Assuming one got their warrant within 6 months of the office itself, it could be another year before most, if not all of these classes were available in total. The end result was that a person with the time and resources to travel and attend events frequently 2 or 3 hundred mules away, still might not be sufficiently trained in their office after serving a year and a half of a 2 year warrant.
At first I had made polite notes about what I saw as the beginning of the trend. But three years later, my notes were outright complaints, made as plenary meetings and in social conversations. Some had quipped that it was my new soap-box topic, and others had said it was the hill I was willing to die on. Neither was wrong, but plenty were glad to offer hollow assurances, some that openly dismissed me, others I felt, were simply a more polite way of saying “What can we do?”
By Spring of 2019, the situation, at least as I saw it, was coming to a head. Two people I knew were openly admitting that they were simply place-holders in their group so that there was that officer. And more still were admitting that the people who were traditionally deputies, and long-time resources, were either too tired, moved away, or tied up with another role to help support, let alone teach newer members. The vaunted ranks of experienced heralds were demonstrably thin, and the stress was being felt by herald and client alike.
By March, I had resolved that whatever was to be done about this, if anything at all, would not come from the college. Even when I could get some measure of support for some idea, the inherent sluggishness of the college did not lend itself well to a new event with new ideas, and I was full of the latter in spades.
The first person I had sat down with and codified my ideas, such as they were, was my long-time friend and current northern regional herald, Annais de Montgomerie. Our shared sense of humor, adventure, and perpetual ‘thinking outside the box’ made such talk easy with her. The earliest iterations of my idea as I shared it with her was a ‘get together’, a roughly choreographed study session where old and new heralds could congregate. I had honestly thought such a thing could be pulled off in someones back yard at that point, complete with a quadruple order of pizza and a few cases of soda.
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| Annais De Montgomerie |
The first big realization of that March, for me, anyway, was that our training for heralds at this point was one step removed from oral tradition. So many of our classes were written around the teacher, and had handouts that meant next to nothing if you weren’t at the class first. Requests for instruction in armory, names, or administration would almost invariably result in someone saying ‘well, who knows that stuff?” It was maddening, not only because those people were often scarce, and usually busy to boot, but it meant we were at a point where a heart attack or a car accident could set back education and training by months.
And while you think that proclamation histrionic, this week alone I have seen notices for 3 society members who met with untimely end’s and one good friend who had the misfortune of being bit by a copperhead at an event. The latter is alive and quickly recovering, but such outcomes are not assured to any of us. Mortality is not the humorous quip it was when we were all twenty years younger.
If we were going to make a difference, we needed handouts that took the next step. These couldn't be print outs of the teacher’s bullet points. They had to be thorough, independent documents that in their own right conveyed the information completely and clearly.
While there might well be documents, or even volumes worth of information that could guide us through the process, neither Annais nor myself had, or had knowledge to any of it that spring. Neither of us were heraldic renaissance men (or woman in Annais’s case), and while we could fumble our way through most of the heraldic arts, there would be gaps that we just could not cover with any confidence. This admission between us, as well as the nebulousness of our own situation on the gathering itself was more or less our static position for most of march and though April. While the rest of the kingdom was returning from, and celebrating the events at Gulf Wars that year, we were quietly swapping ideas and thoughts over email, and instant messenger, circling the concept of some heraldic meeting that had not yet fully taken shape in our minds.
There was no ‘moment’ where we realized that this plan of ours, still largely undefined, was not going to fit inside someone’s home. Rather, at least for me, I gradually came to the realization that we needed more formal facilities. Logistically, we needed a room, power, water, restrooms, and as we were coming to the summer months, air conditioning. I looked around to several options, but really, there was only one place that survived each of our criteria and might, possibly be affordable.
Over a decade before, I had walked into the doors of Highland Park Methodist Church, seeking a new place to worship. In the intervening years, the church had seen three ministers, the first of which had prayed with me as I overcame a cancer diagnosis, and then the subsequent ugly work schedules that threw my life into chaos. I had come to step up as their head AV tech when the newly installed video system needed more technical skills than their own sound man was able to muster. To this day, the AV desk is staffed by my former deputy and still good friend. In return, the church had welcomed Mooeschadowe into its halls, hosting multiple King’s Round Tables, regular rapier practices, and both of the kingdom’s Heraldic and Scribal Symposiums that I had stewarded. Like neighbors that knew each other well enough to like one another, but were distant enough to not annoy the other, the local SCA and HPUMC had fallen into a healthy relationship of community these past few years.
It was the second week of April when I pulled up the church webpage and drafted a quick email requesting the use of the church on an open weekend, and a quote for it as well. I honestly wasn’t expecting this to pan out, even as I wrote the email. The church was honorable, and religious, but they also had their fair share of obligations, including the basic need to keep the lights on. Sure, every time we had used their facility in the past they had been most generous in their pricing, but at that moment, our budget, such as it was, amounted to whatever paper bills Annais and I had in our wallets.
What few overtures we had made to other groups had been met with respectful caution, or a lack of reply all together. Perhaps Wiesenfeuer was the most reserved, but not without outstandingly good reasons. For two years previously, the literal forces of nature itself had compelled them to cancel their own event, a financially bruising development for any group, let alone a barony. This year, they were quietly putting all of their efforts into making this event work for them, and not taking any chances in the process.
A week later, all of the excitement and juvenile energy of Annais’ and my little conspiracy were abruptly reframed by a single phone call. I was at work, and by chance on break when my phone rang and the screen read “HPUMC”. The conversation was short, and to the point. The church was mine if I wanted it, on the day I asked for, no questions asked.
And the cost would be $45.00.
The date I had reserved was June 17th, only 7 weeks away.
I had no sponsoring group, no money, no financial backing, no curriculum, and no teachers. Not to mention the fact that I had no tangible evidence as to how many people would even want to come.
But, through something between good fortune and a miracle, I had tackled the single largest obstacle standing in my way. The normally 3 or 4 hundred dollar rental fee for the church was now literaly only pennies on the dollar, Good sense, if nothing else, demanded I jump headlong after this and see it through.
The event, not even having a name yet, had just been given a date and a deadline.
We were committed committed.
This was going to happen.
His Lordship Ivo Blackhawk
Kingdom of Ansteorra
"Long Live the King!"
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