A regional king will be coming to Rocky View County (RVC) to indulge his people in a feast designed to celebrate the annual coming of spring.
On January 20, the Barony of Montengarde will host an annual event called the “Twelfth Night,” a festival style gathering akin to a Medieval Fair. The Twelfth Night event will be hosted at the Delacour Community Hall just west of Calgary, and will be the home of a large feast prepared by the regional king– which is advertised to include fresh baked honey butter and garlic butter bread, roast fowl, salted pork, and baked apple crumble topped with molasses.
According to the schedule posted on the Barony of Montengarde events website, festivities will also include a combat tournament where participants will use era appropriate rapier swords to clash with one another until a champion is crowned, and a day-long arts and sciences tournament. Merchants will sell timely wares and an additional armoured tournament will be going on throughout the day.
The Barony of Montengarde, located in the Kingdom of Avacal, is a historical reenactment group based in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and eastern British Columbia, where members study and take part in a variety of activities, like archery, equestrian activities, metalwork, woodworking, and calligraphy. The group states on its website that, “if it was done in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, odds are you’ll find someone in the Society of Creative Anachronism interested in recreating it.”
The Society of Creative Anachronism (SCA) is an international non-profit volunteer educational organization that is devoted to the research and re-creation of pre-seventeenth century skills, art, and culture to “enrich the lives of participants through events and educational presentations and activities.”
The structuring of SCA is rather straightforward: SCA’s “known world”, which includes Canada, the United States, Europe, Australia, and parts of Africa and Asia are divided into 20 kingdoms that cover a large geographic area. Smaller still are the bodies that belong to each region, called baronies. Baronies, like the Barony of Montengarde, need to consist of at least 25 members with a select group of members serving in official officer roles, and must have a name and device registered with the College of Arms.
The Kingdom of Avacal contains the baronies of Borealis (Edmonton), Myrgan Wood (Saskatoon), and Montengarde. Smaller regions with less populations are called shires and they can be found in places like Red Deer, Cold Lake, Cranbrook, Lethbridge, and Moose Jaw, among many others.
Per the SCA website, there are over 30,000 paying members of SCA kingdoms across the globe, with the total number of participants being around 60,000 people. People from all walks of life join the SCA, “students, teachers, historians, doctors, nurses, and chefs” are all professions that count themselves among the SCA members ranks. On their website, the SCA claims that “many find it relaxing to spend their leisure time using simpler technologies in a less modern setting.”
The Barony of Montengarde hosts events like the Twelfth Night around the same time every year. Traditionally, it’s a festival that marks the onset of the winter solstice, the point in December when days get longer, signifying the coming arrival of spring.
The event is supposed to last all day and non-members can attend, although they can’t compete in arts and science tournament or be crowned Rapier champion.
