If you're like 95 percent of the population, you're probably a peasant, scratching out a living on the land with not much more than rye bread or cheese to nourish you.
If you're a tradesman, dinner prospects are a little better. In addition to rye bread and cheese, you might get some meat, too, in the form of roast pork.
Roast duck and freshwater fish, meanwhile, went to knights and barons, while kings enjoyed the best dining of all, at least by medieval standards: potted eels and roast lampreys were all the rage among the crown-wearing set.
What people ate and what people wore and how people worked and amused themselves during that long stretch of history rather vaguely referred to as the Middle Ages is the focus of "Once Upon a Time: Medieval Life: Knights, Castles and Common Folks," which opens next weekend at Lakeview Museum and presents a hands-on, family friendly approach to learning history, according to Ann Schmitt, Lakeview's associate director of education.
You can build a castle out of blocks and then knock it over with a miniature catapult, Schmitt said, during a special family catapult competition set for 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. June 30. You can ooh and ahh over the knight-mannequin with chain mail leggings, shirt and hood. If you're curious about how chain mail works, you can make some of your own. If you're artistically inclined, you can make rubbings of St. George and the Dragon. If you're theatrically inclined but underage, you can don a knight garment with a red cross in front, designed especially for children.
"Once Upon a Time" comes to Lakeview from the Bruce County Museum and Cultural Centre in Southampton, Ontario, which originated the show.
The interactive, participatory exhibit gives kids a history lesson that they can't get in a classroom, said Vicky Cooper, Bruce County Museum's collections registrar.
"For the schoolchildren, it gives them an idea and a comparison between medieval times and what we do today," Cooper said. "It gives hands-on activities for children to do. We have forwarded on to your museum some of the activities we had here. It's the type of exhibit that each individual venue can model what they choose to work with. We had our children here making construction paper helmets for the boys and little artificial garlands for the girls to wear while they were here. The exhibit also contains a set of costumes for an average class. So each child can put on a medieval garment with a hat and learn what it was like then."
The time wasn't too long ago when the Middle Ages received little respect: The era stretching from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance was seen as an interruption in Western civilization, when ignorance and superstition ran amok.
To be sure, there was lots of both. But that time period in many ways also laid the foundations of modern culture, said Katy Hardy, Lakeview's special events coordinator, who also is pursuing graduate studies in medieval history at the University of Wisconsin. The church and the monasteries, for example, preserved learning and supported universities. And a rising merchant and tradesman class in the cities eventually would break up the feudal order and help usher in the modern world.
Upon arriving, a visitor to the show will draw a card with a name, status and occupation. As patrons work their way through the exhibit, they will learn the likely fates of their medieval selves - how they probably would have had to live had they been born during the Middle Ages.
Since most people back then were peasants and most of them didn't live much past the age of 50, many museum visitors might be thankful for living in the 21st century after all.
(Gary Panetta - PJStar.com - 20 May 2007)
