Somehow, two years have passed since the last Médiévales (medieval festival) at Les Arcs-sur-Argens, our neighbouring village. Sensibly, for an event that requires such an enormous amount of preparation and takes over the whole town centre, they only do it every two years. But it’s so spectacular and interesting (we spread it over three whole blogs in 2017) that even though we’ve seen it twice before it still merits a visit. Below we simply put a few of the photos we took this year.
What is quite interesting is the number of young people who seem to get involved in it. Whether it’s the influence of Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones or even conventional history teaching, there seems to be no shortage of youngish folk willing to dress up in either ancient elegance (gowns, veils, wimples) or medieval punk (rags and scraps of distressed leather) and wander round with swords and spears, pennants and potions or sit around quaffing mead amid tabors and lutes and crude saws and lathes.
This fascination may of course be not so due to the lure of the past but to a disillusionment with the present. Life, it seems, may have been nasty, brutish and short then, but from a certain perspective it still seems more attractive.
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