That weekend was the previously mentioned Wienesfeuer Baronial, an event I had long intended to drive out for no mater my own situation. Over the years, I had built up a strong friendship with several of the group’s officers and long-standing members. My time, in fact, went back to the days when Wiesenfeuer and Namron, its neighbor to the south were decidedly not on speaking terms with each other, an animus that matriculated down to the individual players of the day in large part. Now, of course, those chilly relations had thawed years ago into a warm comradery, including joint artesian meetings and fighter practices. Residence of one group were frequently officers in the other, and visa versa, only to switch later on. The whole blender effect was chaotic, but added to a sense of adventure for those looking to take the plunge into leadership.
One such intrepid officer had stationed themself at gate for the event. Abigail Lyle was the baronial reeve, and in her mundane life was the owner and sole employee of “busy bee book keeping”. The industries mother of five had also seen to her own children’s schooling, giving the short, early period Irishwoman part of her characteristic endless ‘second wind’ when tackling both children and papers, usually at the same time. Her Husband, Dunnan, had taken up the baton today of watching the younger crop of their family while Abigail was monitoring the gate volunteers.
The whole family was close to me. Months before, when my schedule had necessitated my staying in the OKC area a few nights a week, they had thrown heir doors open and welcomed me in like I were one of their own. I still recall fondly that fist night as I arrived at their house at some time close to eleven in the evening and the four older children had emerged from their own beds just to greet me with smiles and warm hugs. The only input their mother had on the process was to say “Okay, you’ve said hello to Ivo. Now, back to bed. All of you.” Theirs was a home that never met a stranger, and never let anyone leave hungry.
That Saturday I had the chance to sit and talk with Abigail in more detail about the latest developments with the planned, but still unnamed event. At the time, we were steering towards an idea of intensive basic training, a ‘boot camp’ of sorts. Speaking informally, Abigail told me that she not only saw merit to my idea, but thought it was outright good. That being said, the barony, for the moment, wasn’t going to commit to one penny until their event was behind them and the books closed. So, there I had it, our most likely backer for this endeavor was waiting to see how successful this event was. I now had more interest than ever in making sure they were successful.
As it happened, baronial was successful, and robustly so. The final numbers were not something I concerned myself with, but you could almost read the grin on Abigale’s face as she messaged me with measure jubilation over the accomplishment. But the remarkable thing for me wasn't the success, but the aftermath it of. Little had a realized that not only did the baronial reeve believe in my idea, but she was willing to advocate for me at great measure. To hear my friends tell it, she had literally not even closed the books on Wiesenfeuer Baronial before she had the senescence on the phone talking about my proposal. Aldric de Kerr was also a longtime friend, and knew me well, most of the officer core could say the same, truth be told. Within a few days, not only had the matters of baronial been closed out, and papers turned over, but even before I was contacted, designs were in play to formally back my proposal. I had hastily drafted and delivered a event bid to Abigail via email, with enough information to satisfy the legal requirements, but enough vagueness to give Annais and I the wiggle room we needed as we codified the actives to come. By the time I was messaged, I believe it was the Wednesday immediately after Baronial, the signatures were already in place, the papers signed.
We had a backer and undersigner. The idea had just become a fully funded reality.
That Tuesday following was when Annais and I fully piece together the scope of our mission here. In 7 weeks, we would needed to get the event up on the kingdom calendar, and blast Facebook top to bottom across the whole of the northern region. HL Lilliana would be our feast steward, and we decided early that we would be serving lunch at the event in order to keep the lunch break short. The budget was $100 for up to 40 people.
And then, we came to the classes. There was no central repository for how to be a local herald, no guiding text, no class that was anything close to what I would call comprehensive.
We were starting from rock bottom, zero, blank-sheet-of-paper, nothing.
I pulled up a blank page in Google documents, adjusted the mic on my gaming headset, and said “Alright Annais, lets brainstorm and see what we can come up with. What are the core topics we should cover to make someone a good local herald?”
And that was how we started it. I had no idea what we would do with the list once we had it, at least not at that moment, but it was more than nothing. The list started off short, but grew, as I expect it to. We got to talk about the soap-box issues that had haunted the college for ages. One whole section was going to be about specially how to fill out the quarterly report, no sooner had we written that than we knew we needed a step-by-step walk through for the OP, and then one for the court report. There was a class on officer ethics, and a string of classes on voice heraldry.
By the time we were done that first online meeting, we had a respectable list, but now what to do with it.
At first, I was honestly ready to give up right there. The weight of what we were doing hit me like a blow to the chest. We were talking about topics that would have drowns both of us together. Maybe, (Maybe), master Etienne could pull something like this off, but not us, not even with our respectable bases. But at the same time, in the same moment, I considered the opportunity we had. There wasn’t any one person who could do this, but there didn’t need to be. We had it broken down by topic, by modules. We needed to look for the best in each topic and let them go at it with all their mission specific knowledge.
In the span of a heartbeat I had gone from the edge of giving up to a reinvigorated rallying cry of “I have a plan!” We worked our way down the list three times, coming up with people we wanted to ask, and then people to ask if they declined, and then again more names, just in case. We needed time to compile each part, to possibly edit, and then to prepare them for the class. We had 7 weeks that night, I knew we needed at least 2 on our end.
So, there it was, we were going to reinvent heraldic training from the ground up in just 5 weeks.
Looking back, it’s a miracle we weren't shoved into straight jackets and shipped off to an asylum just for thinking it.
For all the glory of my plan, reality proved no easy field upon which to wage my campaign. Almost none of my first choice contributors were able to help, and half of my second list were any more available. We burned through the first week alone with nothing by way of reply, and we halfway through the second week before we got half of our answers. But, there were interested parties. People quietly eager to step up and offer their help to my cause. Some were just glad to help on the principle of help itself, others shared my grim opinion of the state of our heraldic education just then. Others still, were quietly intrigued at the whole idea, and perhaps for no other reason signed on to my little venture.
Something that became self evident almost immediately in the process was how much information there was. If we expected the handout to be 30 pages, times 30 people, the printing cost alone could easily top $200 of my 300 budget. My ace in the hole for this was born of a passing comment from a meeting of protegees at coronation months before. Someone had suggested giving out thumb drives rather than papers. While its true, thumb drives were not cheep, if we purchased them in bulk, the return on investment would pay off.
But the important part of this was less the decision to use the thumb drives and more what I decided to do with them once the decision was made. Functionally, we made back our money the moment the handout crossed 20 pages each. But each drive was 4 gigs, and the documents were the smallest fraction of a percent of that. This is where we decided to just go all in.
Annais and I compiled a library of software, and documents from the four corners of the internet. I included a copy of Libreoffice, GIMP, and a O&A search program written by a SCA member. We looked for articles on every topic, and in some cases threw on some of our own older papers. I included the Ansteorran Herald’s handbook, and a copy of kingdom and society law. Within a week after selecting the thumb drives and ordering them, I had a master file on my computer desktop totaling over a gig’s worth of data.
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| From a post just days before the event. |
Concurrent to all of this, we were making the absolute most out of Facebook, and I was doing weekly updates with substance, information, and graphics. I used my freeware word processor to put together logos and slogan and advertisements, and I blasted all of them all over the Facebook event and the group pages for every group in the north. I hit up every friend, every associate, every prospective herald I could. I made an absolute pest of myself as I shoved this and that advertisement into every new feed I could manage.
As manic as this sounds, it was also desperate. The break-even for out event was 30 people. Any less, and the barony would east the cost. It wasn’t that they couldn’t shoulder the hit, but people who didn’t know we mere trusting those who did, if I let them down it wasn’t just my good name on the line.
At the same time, the class handout had taken on a life of its own. Annais and I had quickly decided that one of the criteria for the written material would be that it had to be able to stand on its own. Complete sentences, fully spelled out concepts, and pictures when needed. I don’t recall who called it a text book first, but once the word was used, that was it, we were writing a herald’s textbook. As much as the first week was burned on just getting people to respond, the second week started to yield results, and the third saw the bulk of the effort being to come in. By the middle of Week four, the master document was cresting 50 pages, and we still had modules out.
The decision to call it a textbook gave it the mental framework that I needed to properly organize the whole thing. The word ‘book’ invited trappings such as appendices, tables of contents, chapters, footnotes, and attributions. These, little known to those outside of my inner circle, were the trappings and things I loved to dabble in when I worked on my computer. The idea of pages with numbers, and footers, and images, and titles were things that I found exciting, and interesting. The mastery, no… the capture of so much information into one tome was to harness an almost immeasurable power as far as I was concerned, and I was glad to do it here. The whole process gave our work a newfound feel of being right and proper, of being official.
Perhaps, I would learn later, a little too official.
The whole project had started, honestly enough as one step up from a revel. The original plan had been to collect heralds and let heralds do what they do when they have an audience. While that plan had quickly grown past those loose and casual origins, I had never really adjusted my mindset on the whole thing while I was flooding Facebook feeds and email in-boxes with news of my grand plan.
The first words heard from official sources were sincere enough, and not hostile. I was making more noise about this than some inter-kingdom events had gotten in times past, so there were the inevitable questions of who in the College of Heralds was heading this. Not long after, once I had said that it was an unofficial event, not sanctioned by the college, the nudges starting coming in that perhaps I should reach out to the college for help.
I wrestled with my response to these first few inquiries. The fact of the mater was that, to be blunt about it, the college had had 39 years to come up with something like this, but rather had thrown their efforts into AH&SS instead. In itself, this was not a bad thing, but the culture of the symposium had long ago been established that the college provided the facilities and let the teachers come as they will. Again, not a bad thing, but it proved a lacking response in the face of ever increasing demands for fundamental training as they grew ever more apparent in my home in the north. The College’s willingness to relinquish all control of the agenda and curriculum for its own colegium event was a decision that had its pros and con’s, and I won’t call it good or bad. But here, for our purpose, it was a culture that I specifically didn’t need, or for that matter have time to deal with if it tried to entrench itself in my event.
No few comments were directed my way about the proximity of my event to the symposium, some publicly, some privately. In truth, we would he hosting it 14 days before AH&SS. I knew that the two shared little in common in reality, but that fact seemed to land on deaf ears with some of my naysayers. The reality of the situation, however, as well as the barrier that protected both me from the college, and the college from me should this project be a disaster, was its unofficial status. I was just me, doing my thing, up here, on my own, with some of my friends. I no more needed the college’s permission or blessing for this than I did to made a run to the privy.
Some time later, as the textbook was entering it near final stages, a message reached me that ‘the college’ looked forward to looking over the book before it was handed out.
As to what fraction of that was direct but direct mandate, and what was a sincere offer of help will probably be permanently lost to the shadows of antiquity. But the fact remained, that the signatory of that message was an officer of the college. My answer, whatever it was, would absolutely be heard by official ears. I replied, carefully, that, ‘just as soon as the event is over and we’d processed the feedback from the students back into the book, I’ll be glad to make a copy available to the college for feedback”.
While it is easy to imagine I was afraid of interference, the reality was I was afraid of dead weight. Any commitment, or even overture to let anyone review the work meant that we were adding days, maybe even weeks onto the process. Each new set of eyes meant a new set of edits to be applied, or upset emotions if I told someone ‘no’. It was gambling with time we didn’t have. The book was coming together fast, but there was still much to do. In reality, I didn't have any truly spare days, let alone weeks, and for all the college has done for this kingdom, and for all the praise it rightfully deserves, it had the editorial agility of a hippopotamus. I was not going to even consider letting myself, or the book, be pulled into a development hell.
While I have never considered myself any master of the world of politics, I am no amateur to it either. More to the point, I fully understand the power of words to do more with a few strokes of ink than a person could do with an hour's worth of talking.
The textbook title, so far, had been ‘the 2019 Ansteorran Local Herald’s Training and Resource Textbook’. While absolutely accurate, and considerably more down to earth than some ideas I had flirted with over the previous weeks or so, the title still left room in our College of Herald’s centered culture to be implicated as an official document. More to the point, there were still those who not only wanted it to be official, they wanted it to have the oversight that came of officialism.
Then, one night, I went into the mater file, and edited it. The crisp, black, Arial-fonted title was now broken with the word “unofficial” in a signature type font, and in red letters. For all purposes someone had just come in and scrawled it in magic marker on the cover. It was, in it own way, a editorial totem of protection, both from me, and for me, while also being a line of distinction between me and the college.
Rise or fall, success or failure, that one word would assure that all credit, or blame landed where it belonged, squarely on my own shoulders.
His Lordship Ivo Blackhawk
Kingdom of Ansteorra
"Long Live the King!"
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