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These are to provide goals and direction for Guild costuming, and have been designed to give our group a distinctive and authentic appearance. New purchases must be made in accordance with Guild requirements, but older costume elements that don't meet these guidelines may be "grandfathered" if acceptable - so don't panic! Existing costume should gradually change to meet these new standards, depending on the guildmember's rank, finances, and interests.
We portray a late-Elizabethan or Early-Stuart era local militia or Trained Band from the Welsh Border/Cardiff area. Militia members would gather for training at the local "Artillery Garden", where they would practice swordplay, shooting muskets and cannon, and drilling with pikes. Trained Bands would sometimes go on manuevers and practice battles with other militia units.
In Elizabethan times, "artillery" meant anything that was shot through the air, including archery, muskets, and cannon. Cannon crewmen were called "Matross". Matross costume is similar to the Pike and Musket Ranks, with a basic soldier's sword and either boots or low shoes. Artillery was considered "Rocket Science", and matross crews were the serious techno-geeks of the period. Minimum equipment consits of a basic sword and maybe a pair of gauntlets. Improved equipment adds tools like sighting aids and cannon tools, plus muskets or firelocks to defend the cannon.
(From The Weapons Of Sixteenth Century Warfare At Sea - an excerpt from Gunpowder And Galleys:
Changing Technology And Mediterranean Warfare At Sea In The Sixteenth Century
By
John Francis Guilmartin Jr.,
Cambridge University Press.
)
"The sixteenth-century gunner was not, unlike his eighteenth- or nineteenth-century successors, a mere private soldier or able seaman who had been trained to perform certain mechanical movements under fire. Gunnery was still - like race-car driving before World War I or commercial flying in the 1920s - an uncertain business with a certain grimy glamor and a tangible aura of mystery about it. It was all very much "seat of the pants". Experience, basic intelligence, and a "feel" for the business paid off more surely than precision in following a rigid set of procedures. Sixteenth-century gunnery was an art, not a science; and attempting to evaluate it as if it were a science can lead to serious errors. Its finest practitioners were men of unusual ability and daring who were attracted to gunnery by the mystery of the esoteric knowledge involved, by the danger, and by the prestige."
ECWSA Black Powder Safety Rules - Modified for other groups , |
