What does this say about the Chivalry?

A discussion started the other day in a friend’s LiveJournal about the … lack of transparency involved in elevation to the Peerages, particularly to the Order of the Laurel (in large part because the friend who started the discussion is herself a Laurel).  I’m still attempting to work through my thoughts on the matter…  it’s been a REALLY interesting discussion.  My slightly more coherent thoughts are behind the jump.

Of course one question that has come up is what  ”Peer-like Qualities” are, anyway.  There are a couple of bullet points in Corpora that seem to be where the umbrella category of “PLQs” comes from.*  From the description of “General Requirements”, we get:

• They shall have set an example of courteous and noble behavior suitable to a peer of the realm.
• They shall have demonstrated support for the aims and ideals of the Society by being as authentic in dress, equipment and behavior as is within their power.
• They shall have practiced hospitality according to their means and as appropriate to the circumstances.

From the list of duties of the members of the Order of the Laurel, there is additionally “To set an example of courtesy and chivalrous conduct”.  (This duty is included for the Chivalry and the Pelicans, too.)

That’s all well and good, but what does it really mean?  Does it boil down to, “Don’t be a jerk”, or is non-jerkitude not enough?  I pointed out in the LiveJournal discussion that, let’s face it, the SCA has more than its share of folks who are lacking in social graces.  How do we reconcile that lack of social graces with PLQs?  Where is the line between not knowing you’re being a jerk and just being intentionally mean?  Naturally there have been lots of examples brought up of folks who have already been elevated acting in ways that most reasonable people would agree is not acceptable from anyone, much less a person who is supposed to be a Paragon.  ( I will come back to this idea of paragon-ness later.)

But that’s just the “Peer-like Qualities”.  Naturally to be elevated you also have to have attained a certain level of skill in a particular area.

The candidate must have attained the standard of excellence in skill and/or knowledge equal to that of his or her prospective peers in some area of the Arts or Sciences. The candidate must have applied this skill and/or knowledge for the instruction of members and service to the kingdom to an extent above and beyond that normally expected of members of the Society.

Clearly, the “standard of skill and/or knowledge equal to that of his or her prospective peers” has risen over the years as the collected knowledge of the Society (and the world at large) has increased & improved.  40 years ago there wasn’t nearly the amount of information about extant garments (just to focus on my area of interest), medieval tailoring technique, etc., that there is now.  But this is still very vague.  ”You have to be as good as the rest of the Laurels” is what it basically boils down to.  But, to a greater or lesser extent, that “as good as” is being judged by the people to whom you are being compared.  Yes, the Order advises the Crown and the Crown can then do whatever it pleases with that advice.  But, again, this is a place where the process is very opaque to an outsider.

From what I’ve observed over the course of almost fourteen years and three kingdoms, the combination of the unclear standards upon which a candidate is judged and the squishiness of what exactly “PLQs” entail leads people to feel that they are navigating shark-infested waters with no guideposts.  People know that the process is arbitrary; they know that if they want the recognition they have to do good work, teach, and have PLQs, but beyond that it’s also very, very opaque.  People feel like they have to walk on eggshells for fear of accidentally pissing off the wrong person and then getting locked out of the “in crowd” for ever and ever amen.  Yes, it is unlikely that one angry member of the Order could completely black-ball a candidate.  However, and this is a big however, the new person, or the person who is easily cowed, may not realize that!  Because so much of the talk around the process is about the perceived arbitrariness of the decisions and the vague standards, we get a self-perpetuating cycle.

Adding to the intimidation factor, there is this idea that Laurels are Paragons, that they are somehow all-knowing.  I can’t count the number of times a person has said to me, “I know you’re not supposed to question the Laurels, but…” And every time my response is, “Why the hell not? If you have evidence that supports what you’re saying, why CAN’T you question them?”  I had the opportunity to ask the person who most recently talked to me about the “you’re not supposed to question…” issue and learned that she had come to that belief because when she entered a garment in an A&S competition, she got the following comment on her scoring sheet (I am, of course, paraphrasing):

“As a Laurel, I know that this is not the way you do that one particular thing.”

And it was unsigned.  Was it a case of oversight on the part of an overworked judge?  Probably.  Was it a case of someone being too big for their britches?  Also a possibility.  But the recipient of this comment, who is by no means a) shy or b) a newbie to the Society still drew the conclusion that Laurel = do not question.  These are the stories that get around, not the ones where a Laurel takes an entrant under their wing, or gives positive, constructive criticism, or says, “Here’s how to get in touch with me if you want to talk more”.  And no matter how much I say “That’s nonsense – if you have research to back it up go out there and use it, and show it, and maybe you will sway them or maybe they will sway you, and maybe you will each learn something and make a new friend”, I sometimes feel like I’m one voice shouting against the wind.

So what can we do about it?  Where does the responsibility lie?  I understand that Dame Alys Katherine is offering a series of  classes entitled “De-mystifying the Peerage” at Pennsic this year, which is awesome – yet another thing I will miss about not being there.  But there is a lot that everyone in the A&S community can do to change the perceptions.  We can try to emphasize the positive, especially to those who are frightened of the process.  We can try to de-mystify things.  And we can call people on their bad behavior, both in and out of Order meetings.

*There is a pdf version of Corpora available for anybody who cares.  The relevant section is VIII-A (and it starts on page 20 in the June 2009 revision of corpora).

Alianor de Ravenglas.  Device.  Argent, a bend azure between two ravens, a chief sable.

and

Matatias filius Lie Blunde.  Device.  Argent, a Hebrew letter “resh” and a chief sable.

This is clear of the device of Arthur of the Fen, Argent, a fleam sable and in dexter three gouttes de sang one and two, reblazoned elsewhere in this letter. There is a CD for the addition of the chief and a CD for the removal of the three gouttes, which are large enough in this case to be considered secondaries.
There were some commenters who called for this submission to be returned because the character is not drawn as an actual resh symbol, since the ascender is not perfectly vertical. Some research turns up a 13th century Ashkenazic Haggadah (at http://www.library.yale.edu/judaica/exhibits/haggadah/image16.html), which has non-horizontal ascenders for all the characters, other medieval Haggadah which have curved ascenders, and an immediately post-period “Venice” Haggadah (http://www.library.yale.edu/judaica/images/Venice/HVeniceTPage.jpg) has the resh characters very nearly matching this submission. They are definitely not lameds, which also appear in the text. Since the character is an abstract symbol, which we do not grant difference between, and it is close enough to period depictions of the character, it is registerable.
Please inform the submitter that they may wish to draw a more vertical ascender on the character in future depictions.

M is sure to grump about the commentary on his, but hey – they both passed, hooray!

I seem to have a huge pile of projects all in the works at once right now… not that I mind, it’s just a little crazy.

I’m sending an A&S display item to Crown even though we’re not going.  That will be Matatias’ brown riding tunic – I had to do some mending on it last night because the topstitching on the neckline had broken in one place, but it’s repaired & washed.  I need to check/update the docs for it, though.

I’m also working on Caleb’s rapier armor.  It’s going to be my usual 2-layer undergarment with a fashion layer overgarment.  He has chosen brown with black bands for the fashion layer and white for the undergarments.  His hosen will be black as well.  I cut a bunch of bias bands for the trim last night.  When we get to the point that I’m going to drape his hosen pattern, I think I’m going to turn it into a workshop – Alicia wants to see how I do them and at that point we might as well just have a bunch of people over.  It’s not like I don’t have the handouts for it!

Finally, I’m working on Catlin’s riding tunic.  I’m repeating the seaming technique I used on the first riding tunic, only without whip-stitching the fashion and lining fabrics together first.  So far I have done about 6″ of seam on one set of gores.  I couldn’t find my wax last night so it wasn’t going as fast as I would have liked.  My GOAL is to have that done by Pennsic so it can be displayed and then delivered to her there.

ETA:  Heh, I forgot that I also have a tunic of His Majesty’s to do some work on.  Thank goodness for my handy to-do list, eh?

When you are consistently puncturing your finger with the eye end of the needle, it is time to stop sewing.

That said, the mauve gown now has a front gore & seam and I’ve attached both halves of the back gore and am in the process of sewing the back seam.  Or I was until my finger skin decided to be too weak to stand up to the blunt end of the needle.

As in the past 2 years, we are having a cavalcade of houseguests making their way from Points East to Pennsic.  This year is the Most Houseguests Ever – we will have 3 folks here tomorrow night, 2 more Saturday night, 3 a week from Friday, and… I think 4 on Saturday the 9th.  Oh, and did I mention that I will be making a quick trip to OK to drop of Shoshanna at Camp Grammy during that time, too?  The life of transplanted easterners who live 10 minutes off the NYS Thruway and 3 hours from Currie Road. And are suckers.

I’ve got most most of the body panels for the mauve gown basted together (lining & fashion layers).  Still have to work out what I’m going to do with the gores – I definitely need to cut more of them, and I won’t have enough damask to line ANY of the gores in it.  I had been planning to use an IL019 linen for the remaining lining, but now I’m thinking I’m going to use a white fustian I have lying around because it’s closer in weight to the damask.  But I’ll jump off that bridge… sometime next week, I guess, since I want to at least have all the pieces cut out before we go to war, if not basted.  (Basted would be the ideal but … I have a three-and-a-half-year-old to entertain and packing to do for us and her as well as houseguests and a dissertation that I’m theoretically working on.)

If you’re looking for me at Pennsic, I’ll be there War Week; we’re camping with the Barony of Bergental, and I’ll be at the A&S exhibition pretty much all day… I’ll probably leave to go watch rapier champs.  Can’t miss that.

So many of us say that one reason we play in the SCA is for those magic moments, the ones when you’re transported to another time, another place.  Whether you call this “The Dream” or something else, it’s a wonderful reminder of why we do what we do.  I remember my first “magic moment”; it was at my very first camping event, Schützenfest.  It was May of 1999 (I know because Matatias and I had gotten engaged just a couple of weeks before).  Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, I had to get up to go to the loo.  There were still some folks up singing and drumming, and I had to walk across a field shrouded in fog to get to the privy.

I had another magic moment this afternoon, sitting in a nylon camp chair on my back porch.  Nope, I don’t even have to be at an event to be transported.  I was whiling away Shoshanna’s rest time working on my mauve gown in the warm out of doors and I held the sleeve i was working on in my hand, studying some stitches I had just put in, and for a split second it was like I was sitting there holding an historical artifact in my hand.  I can’t say that I’ve ever seen a medieval garment that looked just like what I’ve done, but there was a quality about it that said “I am Not Modern” that was just wonderful.

The plan for textile guild this month was for Irene to talk about patterning garments out of Patterns of Fashion and for me to talk about making late 12th – early 14th century clothes. When we asked for head counts it looked like there were going to be a bunch of people for her and just one or two for me… The reality was just the opposite! Through a combination of weather, family stuff, and other things, we ended up with somewhere between three and five people kneeling in the middle of my dining room (because we have no dining room furniture) paging through the entire Maciejowski Bible and pointing out stuff that we thought was cool or interesting. So much fun… I also chatted with Edith a bit about “what next” – she’s been making her tunics using an accurate cut and is about to make the switch into natural fibers, so we also talked about headwear and footwear as making a big difference in presentation.

The textile guild of the Barony of the Rhydderich Hael inherited several huge boxes of fabric and sewing equipment from THL Caitlin Dierdre, who lost her fight with breast cancer late last year. Last night at guild meeting we did a preliminary sorting through the boxes and found yards and yards and yards of fabric – enough to supply us as we endeavor to flesh out the baronial gold key, to set up a textile guild sewing box, and the seeds of a textile guild library.

Our plan for next month is to get a better idea of what’s in there – inventory, burn test, etc., and then decide what’s going to be used for loaner garb and what’s going to be used for other purposes. In the meantime, there’s a hell of a lot of fabric in my sewing room. ;^)