How better to spend a glorious summer day than travelling back to the medieval times to the beautiful grounds of Herstmonceux Castle in East Sussex? We’d been to a couple of medieval festivals in Germany (see our post on the The Landshut Wedding) and wanted to discover England’s Medieval Festival this year over the August bank holiday weekend. This year is the 25th year the Festival has been running, and so when we were invited to visit for the Sunday, we were excited to do so. Getting there from central London We travelled by train for about 1 hour and 20 minutes from London Victoria to Polegate in East Sussex. From Polegate we took the dedicated shuttle bus to the Medieval Festival at Herstmonceux Castle. The shuttle bus ran every 30 minutes on Sunday and was £7.00 for an adult return ticket. This was by far the fastest […]
The Landshut Wedding – One of the Biggest Medieval Pageants in Europe
MsB and I have just returned from our trip to Bavaria, where we visited the phenomenal Landshut Wedding, one of the biggest medieval pageants of Europe. The event is held every four years since 1903 in the Lower Bavarian town of Landshut (55,000 residents), only 45 minutes by train or car from Bavaria’s capital, Munich. It attracts close to one million visitors. Several thousand locals dress up every day for three weeks and re-enact the wedding between Hedwig, the Polish King’s daughter, and George “the Rich”, the son of the Duke of Bavaria, in 1475 A.D. This wedding was so outrageously pompous it continued to be talked about for centuries. 10,000 guests jubilated, celebrated, danced, and feasted for a full four days back then. 320 cows, 1,500 sheep, 1,300 lambs, 500 calves, and no less than 40,000 chickens met their maker during this long weekend. The fact that the marriage […]