Here we are in the historic town of Newark for the third Pikes and Plunder
festival and with over 300 re-enactors, things are bound to go off with a bang!
The Pike's and Plunder is our annual civil war festival and we do it every
year and it's just an opportunity for us to show what life was really like during
the Civil War. Newark has such amazing built-heritage, we're here at the Sconce
which is one of the best earthwork- defenses that survives from the Civil
War and we've got the Castle so we've got lots of events happening around the
time so it's just to showcase what it was actually like to be here during the
Civil War. Okay so you have here musket balls is that? Yes yes these are musket
balls that would have been retrieved from from various different parts of the body
arm, leg, abdomen, shoulder, back, neck. Horrific injuries I'm guessing and how
would you deal with this as a barber surgeon's wife? If it was very deep within
a leg you'd put a tourniquet on the top of the leg and make sure the femoral
artery wasn't bleeding out and then you'd ferret it around with a knife until
you'd found it, dig it out with the with the forceps and make sure that the wound
was clean and you've got all any fabric out any wool, or any linen that been
dragged in when the ball went through their clothing, because that would fester
and it would cause sepsis septicemia and they'd die of infection.
We produce historical events & tours for various clients, our involvement here
came about when we were contacted directly by the New York Civil War
Centre and are now part of the set up managing the event on behalf of that
body. England has such a rich history, in schools nowadays you don't actually
study British history and we've got such a fantastic one going back thousands and
thousands of years and it's a shame we don't shout about it.
You open and expose
the priming pan. I have some fine gunpowder in there it should fill the pan with
they close it this is called casting off then blowing off loose coals, this is to
make sure there's no loose gunpowder that may accidentally go off, you cast
about your musket, this this little bottle here's got one charge for one
shot, so you pour that down the barrel, you'll get your put a musket ball in at
this point (which obviously I'm not doing today) a bit of wadding, this stops the
musket ball rolling out, especially if you're firing downhill, you'll withdraw
the scouring stick (they didn't call them ram-rods yet) then you make sure
everything is nice and tight and compressed in the barrel and it's now
ready for firing, so I can hand this over to you. Let's do it.
Now we'll put the match in for you, just lower it a little bit yeah alright we'll
test this.
Right okay so - open the pan and you squeeze the trigger slowly. There you go!
Wow that's fantastic and how accurate would
a weapon like this have been? You're talking mainly at shorter ranges, so
you're getting down to like a few hundred yards and closer which is
probably what would have happened, you getting ranks and files of men firing at
ranks and files of men, so you know that the closer you get the worse it's going
to get, so few hundred yards tops really. You're going to hit someone? You're
going to hit someone, if even even if you clip them on the side their head or the
ankle, they'll fall over because it's it's a lump of lead.
I'm wearing my civilian costume basically and other than the the bit of armour, the gorget
around my throat and the scarf and the heavier sword, I'm just as in civilian
costume, but those those differences actually denotes that I'm fighting for
one side or the other. Judging by this colour I'm guessing you're a royalist?
That's correct yes. How can you tell that? What are the differences in colour then?
What would the parliamentarians have worn? Parliamentarians tended to wear blue, orange,
tawnys and greens and yellows, depending on who was in charge of the
the actual army at the time.
The National Civil War centres role is to really explain to people why, why
it was such a key event in Britain's history; lots of things that happened
during the Civil War, fundamental things to us some things like representation,
constitutional monarchy, they all have their basis here, even the whole idea of
one-man, one-vote kind of comes back to this and so this event really sparks
that off for people and we hope that they come to the center then to find out
more.
You have two printers working together one has the clean job and
dealing with the paper and one has the dirty job, the inky
job, putting the ink on. So what's the next stage then of this what are we
doing now? The next stage, he's gonna come pretty much where you are so he's gonna
look over here. I'll lift up this is called the frisket, which is like
there's like a little mask so you don't get ink where you don't want it and he's
fastening it on with some pins fold it back down and now it's my turn.
This is, these are called ink balls and I've put some of the very thick, black
sticky ink onto them to distribute it evenly and then I'm going to put it onto
the the wood cuts ready for printing. So by the end of a day they would be
expected to get thousands? They, these two this 250 sheet marker was called a token
and they were paid by the token, so they were very very motivated to get the
printing done. I'm now going to pull this in to one of my first marker, this
another name for this press was the two pull press, because you push it in half
way, take a pull, and then you go on to the next half and then we see how we've
done. That's perfect. But these were really meant to be sold in the
marketplace for a penny, so if they're a little bit rough we're not going to
worry too much. Wow and this is the product of our work
today thank you so much Vicki and Al for your time.
I'm very proud.
I've had a wonderful day here at the Pikes and Plunder event, learning about
all things civil war. But now it's time for me to go off and enjoy the splendid
beauty of this wonderful medieval castle.