My Menu

Here is the great menu that the Golden Swan presented to us for our wedding. We wanted a buffet with a lot to chose from. The Danish people loves potatoes, but as the potato was unknown in Europe in the middle ages it can't be a part of the menu. I am a little excited to see the reaction of guests when I show them what's for dinner. :-)

A Medieval buffet with courses from the knight's table

Warm smoked salmon with herbs
Fresh cold smoked salmon with herbs
Cold smoked and cured herring in marinade
Cold smoked air dried ham.
Cold smoked air dried veal saussage

Cinnamon fried chicken
Fried gnaw bones with salsament
Duck in lady sauce
Lam in men's sauce
Roast smoked veil sausages with pickled red turnip
Coarse salad from the cabbadge garden
Cinnamon baked apple pie with rose cream
Cheese with grapes
Freshly baked coarse bread with strong mustard and butter

I am not certain if I translated it all properly but you will have to leave a comment and ask if you wonder about something.

The menu

First forgive me for long time it took me to write a new entry. My second end-of-the-semester examination is upon me and I have quite a lot of work until my vacation starts June the 7th.

Anyway: The food is a big part of the wedding day and thanks to both historians and experimental archaeology we have a pretty good knowledge of how the medieval family dined. I will find some recipes or cooking books you can buy if you want to read more or learn how to do it yourself.

The daily meal for the common man or peasant wasn't all that interesting. Soup, porridge and bread. Usually the farmsteads had a small garden where they grew cabbage, turnips and the like. If you were close to the sea fish was also a part of the diet and wild plants like berries and nuts would be gathered. The poor did eat meat too, but it was more precious than grain.

At a wedding or a party lots and lots of courses were served and when the guests couldn't eat any more they would barf to make room for more and eat on. That may seem like bad manners, but it wasn't considered so at the time.

A simple choice for the main course is roast piglet. It's a meal that looks very medieval and it tastes soo good :-) It will take a while to prepare but for the man who likes a good BBQ it's a dream.

The medieval kitchen wasn't as boring as one might think. You can make a lot of tasty dishes.
I will recommend you to check out Daniel Myers blog: http://medievalcookery.blogspot.com/ . He also has a website: http://www.medievalcookery.com/.

Have fun in the kitchen :)

Guestbook

It's always nice to be able to open the guest book years after the wedding and to read the warm well wishes of those who participated in your special day. There's plenty of possibilities to make the guest book fit the theme and give the guests an experience along the way.

An obvious idea is to make people write with a feather quill and ink. You can get a lot of different color feather pens if you have a color scheme to stick to.

As for the book, the leather bound journals look just right. You can get these books designed after you own wishes in several shops. The motifs on these books should of course be medieval, or you can get your names engraved in the leather.

 

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In the end I want to show you my guest book, which I bought at a museum store in Denmark. I haven't unwrapped it yet, but it is beautifully red and with a crouching lion on the cover.

You can also buy different shades of ink so you really can make the guest book fun and medieval-ish. :)

My invitation

I want to share the invitation I made for my wedding with you. I made the drawing from scratch and colored it too. Later I will print them on paper similar to what they used for the medieval manuscripts, which are also the inspiration for my design. As I have been drawing for many years it felt natural to do the invitations by hand, but there's a lot of fine alternatives on the internet if you don't feel like making it yourself. :)
Some of the white spaces are to be painted with gold, so they will look mere like the manuscripts made by the munks. But the gold can't be copied and printet very well so that will have to be applied each of the invitations.

A Shop: Medieval Collectibles

As I have written before I will add small reviews of shops were you can find medieval things for the wedding and MedievalCollectibles is absolutely worth mentioning.

Click on the Banner to get to their website

I haven't bought anything from there myself, but I have been tempted several times. They have a mix of medieval and renaissance so not everything you can buy will fit a medieval wedding. Furthermore some of the products have a touch of Fantasy/Pirate/Gothic to them, but as the medieval times is a period of myth and mystery too, it's not inappropriate. None the less this is an online store that has a nice variety of medieval products, which is why I want to mention them. Most categories are covered such as clothing, weapons, replica coins, jewelry, very cute costumes for kids, feastware and lots of other stuff.

You can buy a medieval life style if you are willing to pay for it, because of the good quality - especially the weapons and armor impressed me. People praise them for the fine craftsmanship. The prices have a big range too, so you can find something really expensive for the serious medieval collectors, and cheaper pieces (of for example clothing) for the amateur.

Knight in shining armor

The knight in shining armor is both a boyhood fantasy and a romantic woman's dream and therefore an obvious candidate to the groom's character.

 In medieval times you weren't born a knight, it was a title earned in battle. In Danish the word for knight is ridder - suggesting these warriors' means of transportation and their fighting technique. In the middle ages the strongest type of army was the cavalry, small armies on horseback. Infantry had become old fashion. The cavalry was heavily equipped and mostly consisted of nobles as they were the only ones who could afford the horses, armor and weapons. The men that answered when the king called for war did not have to pay taxes, an offer many wealthy men of the time chose to take.

Buying a full body armor is expensive but quite a few special shops offer to make them. The classic knight has a lot of steel plates to protect his body, some wore chain mails, but both of these were very expensive and the poorer soldiers wore a gambeson instead which was made of many many layers of fabric and quite effective too.

 

There's also the knights known from jousting tournaments and movies like: "A Knight's Tale". There are several groups who have specialized in reenactment of these tournaments that you can rent for the wedding and most medieval festivals have tournaments to entertain the visitors. These knights were dressed in the colors of their family and sometimes carried a token on their helmets like a bird or a crown. It was a dangerous sport, but the contests rallied a huge amount of spectators. Roger of Hoveden (1133 - 1189) described tournaments as "military exercises carried out, not in the spirit of hostility but solely for practice and the display of prowess".

Tournament book. Knight games held by Emperor
 Frederick III. Emperor Maximilian
 I and in the years 1489 to 1511

Some knights were organized in societies. One of the most famous is the Templar Knights who fought in the crusades in the Holy Land. They had a tabard over their armor so they were recognizable on the battlefield, a red cross on a white background. Many wars were fought during the middle ages and a lot of young men from all over Europe participated in the very bloody crusades. A famous character in these wars was the English king: Richard the Lion Heart also known from the numerous movies and stories of Robin Hood.

The knight is an excellent yet expensive option for the groom and it will look fantastic. Robert says that he probably will wear a tabard/surcoat like the tournament knights but with no chainmail or other armor underneath in blue and white like this: (without the helmet ant the chainmail)

So have fun becoming the knight in shinging armor:)

The bride's hair

The wedding day was one of the rare occasions when a woman could let down her hair. Often flowers would be braided into it or she wore a wreath of flowers to symbolise fertility and beauty. The bridal crown was an expensive alternative and after the wedding the bride's hair would be covered with a hat or veil.

Here are some examples of hair accesseories or hairdos

There are a couple of things one can do to look medieval:

1. The larger the forehead the more beautiful you were considered to be. Women plucked their hair and eyebrows to get the perfect look, that's why sometimes the woman look balled in the painting of the time. You can do with just combing your front hair back.

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2. braiding your hair will also add to the medieval vibe. There are some very artistic examples of braiding in the medieval times.

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3. A headband of fabric or metal will also make a nice contribution. If you want some inspiration, the character Eowyn from the Lord of the Rings has some beautiful ones. Hats and veils were very diverse in the medieval and you can really make some crazy types.



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So that was a lot of pictures with a lot of thoughts on how to do your hair on the big day. Personally I am probably going to go with the very natural loose hair and a golden band over my forehead.