I’m about to head off for a weekend of medieval mahem in North Canterbury. Fortunately this year Canterbury Faire doesn’t conflct with KiwiFoo/Baacamp as it did the last two years! Unfortunately I’ve been so flat out with work that I’m only going to get to go to the last 3 days worth of it anyway. Still, better than I managed last time. One day I hope to have a bit more free time for the SCA, but it may be a while. It used to be my full time hobby. This is a pretty neat video they shot at CF two years ago. Some quite good fighty bits at the end, I like the way they fit the footage to the soundtrack.

There are about 250 or so people expected this year at Canterbury Faire. In the US they have much larger events. Here’s a clip from one of their major wars:

SCA Combat is a bit of a weird sport. It runs on an honour system, whereby when you get hit you have to figure out whether the blow was good enough to kill you or take a limb out of comission. In practice this leads to a lot of talk around “calibration”. In an ideal everyone would “take blows” more or less the same, in practice some folks need a bit more convincing before they’ll fall over. Egregious “rhinohiding” will get you a stern talking to from the Chivalry. The only significant rank in SCA Combat is “Knight”, who are the folks who have shown sufficient Honour and Prowess to be asked to join the Chivalry. I’m hopeful some time in the future I’ll spend enough time practicing that I might get up to Knighthood level. It’s certainly good exercise, so that’s one good reason to do more of it – tho I’ll need to upgrade my armour a bit I feel, based on the bruise I got last week.

If you think you might be interested in the SCA, it’s a worldwide (tho mostly US based) association, there’s probably a group near you, and they’re always welcoming to new people who want to get out and have fun in a medieval type fashion.