I’ve been busier that the blog would suggest. A weekend at Salute, TORM and the neighbouring Artisan and Re-enactors market. First time at Salute.
Highlights were Bad Squiddo’s massive and excellently stand and friendly in-house painter, seeing and buying a fraction of Empress’ range figures at last, some French Indochina paratroops, and Project Fear, a witty, Steve Bell-esque Brexit game. As well as the paras, it was a good day for keeping the business afloat – Perrys, Debris of War and Bad Squiddo figures and lots of reading material. A good haul. No photos as they are squirreled away for my and family “surprise” Christmas presents. And then the next day off to the two markets - a doublet on order and good to see Pretender to the Throne and Tudor Tailor.
I’ve also been working lots of side and half-completed projects. For Towton some buildings for Lead farm are progressing slowly, a TNH light tank for Operation Countenance 1941, and some skeletons for my nephew. More on some of these in later posts, hopefully.
But to break the dry spell, and to keep it on topic, I thought I should post a book recommendation, Blood and Roses by Helen Castor. I’ve read an abridged collection of the Paston Letters before, but Castor weaves the family story into the wider history of 15th Century. In doing so, she shows how the local, personal and national and even the petty and the strategic, clothes shopping, law and status are all intertwined. It brings the period to life because of the character, motives and even voices of the family, their friends and foes. It also emphasizes the arbitrary and personal nature of late medieval politics and life in England. It also referenced the Stonor Papers, a gentry family local to me. These are an excellent albeit smaller set of texts, which draw in other Bucks/Oxfordshire families too, helpful to another much stalled project I have in mind, a gazetteer of the two counties’ families in the WoRs.
