Kingdom of Osgoode 2012
Well, it’s July of another year and once again Graeme and I were able to travel to a mystical place (location) to enjoy the dancing, the sword fighting, the jousting and the many other things that were happening this weekend (July 6-8, 2012) at the Kingdom of Osgoode.
The King was there and was kind enough to inform me that some of his normal entourage were unfortunately detained and not yet present. Some mention was made of a dungeon but I cannot divulge more.
No horsin’ around though, the reason why many folks came to the Kingdom of Osgoode was to see the jousting. Some jousting there was, so just hitch your horse to the hitching post and settle into a nice comfortable spot and let the show begin.
If you happen to be one of the peasantry, you get to stand for the show but, if you are lucky and invited into the royal box, you get both a seat and a bit of shade!
Those who get the best view of the action, but also get to eat a bit of dust, just stand around in the infield waiting to do important things. They definitely don’t get to wear the armor :-).
 
A bit of friendly banter and some competitive horsemanship starts things off in the jousting arena to let the spectators chose sides and to let the horses and knights get warmed up a bit.
 
 
The first part of the competitive games requires the rider to retrieve some rings while the second test involves throwing the sharp end of a spear at a target on a bale of hay.
 
 
Let the jousting begin!
No one was unseated from their horse this session, but a certain t-shirt did leave the announcer speechless. Unlike Las Vegas, such t-shirts were not available in the Kingdom of Osgoode but, for a certain currency of the realm $$$, spectators were given the opportunity to ride one of the Knight’s (horses).
            
And what, you might wonder was the visiting king doing while all this jousting and chivalry was being displayed. Well, he was honing his skills and hanging out with the archery and trebujet folks and wondering how many more subjects might need to be put into stocks if someone didn’t soon volunteer to help him find his arrows!
 
It was a beautiful day for the locals to gather around the merchant tents to find out more about the crafts and to listen to the stories or even to buy a trinket or two.
 
Some folks got to watch the instruments while others such as Toft , the basket weaver, tried to measure me for a basket while discussing ‘toft and croft’ agriculture design. I decided to stick with my camera bag for a while longer and also turned down the offer of some pixie ears from another booth :-).
 
At the Blacksmith shop the heat was just being turned up even though no more heat was really needed. It was a sunny 30C with a nice breeze blowing!
 
Once again this year, the Celtic Sea provided an bit of afternoon music, jugglers juggled, magicians surprised, dancers danced and the pickle folks offered pickles :-).
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
As the dancing began in earnest, certain visitors turned away when they saw all of that shakin’ goin’ on.
 
 
She was last seen muttering how hot black could be and was looking for a place to escape all of that heathen activity and buy a nice cold mug of holy water :-).
Meanwhile in another area of the Kingdom, combatants were gearing up in equally hot metal garments to slash at each other with some heavy-looking swords.
 
I pronounce thee dead!
I think that that was my cue to leave, so thus ended another good day for me in the Kingdom of Osgoode. Others would need to get those shots that I missed. My ride was on its way.
 
View all of our Kingdom of Osgoode posts here.
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Ron: I am one of the Alimah belly dancers.
Those are the best pictures I have ever seen of the new 2012 Osgoode Medieval festival, especially the pictures of all the belly dancers.
Excellent pictures!
Cheers Kathy!
Always fun to have colourful outfits to photograph. Glad you enjoyed the 2012 post. I enjoyed watching the Alimah dancers, too!
Nice pictures. Too bad some of them are pretty tiny. I actually found myself and my children in your pictures so I guess we were there the same day. You also found some interesting people that I never saw. Thanks for sharing.
Jeff: Thanks for visiting the blog and thanks for your comments.
The crowd shots that I took by the jousting arena might some day be reposted as a composite panoramic image allowing viewing of greater individual detail but assembling and compiling that image might take me more time than I presently have. I have to watch bandwidth issues as well since composite panoramic files are usually quite large!
Have you thought about posting larger pictures on the cloud to view on your blog? Services like DropBox allow you to create a link to individual pictures so you can use IMG source tags in your blog and pull it directly from DropBox, using their bandwidth and not yours.
Your title picture is also very interesting but hard to see some of the detail in the smaller people. That could be another candidate for cloud storage if you want to make a higher res version available (to click on or something).
Well done Ron, excellentphotos of the jousting! Sorry I missed it this year.
Dick: Looked for you and didn’t see you. Now I know why 🙂 Thanks for your comments.
Outstanding photos, only wish I’d been playing my harp when you took those two photos of Joss, harp-guardian! I need some publicity shots for the website Phil Labossiere is going to set up for me, these would be fun to add; can I buy them from you somehow? Thanks,
Lady Brida, bard-harper
Brenda: everyone needs a personal bard-harp watcher:-). Glad I was able to catch her in the act! Was going to photograph some of the intricate detail of the instruments up close but lighting wasn’t optimal for that and I didn’t want to move the instruments without the owner being around. Great fear of what the watcher/keeper might do to me!!! 🙂 Re:images for your website – I’m certain we can work something out. Will contact you by e-mail when I get home. Thanks for your comments.