Medieval festivals proliferate and a true medieval market dies

There are more medieval festivals than you can shake a stick at, or maybe a pike, in today's Germany. In fact, there were so many in some regions that competing neighboring towns went rescheduled to alternate years to combat festival fatigue.

Add to this other folk themed events, such as highland games and Celtic festivals plus annual volunteer firefighter and other club fundraisers, and you have more than a fair choice of venues.

Yet, one traditional market with truly medieval roots is as good as dead, as folks from an adjacent town told us.

They were down to six stands, just clothing, and one kitchenware trailer, this year with just one day of activities, they explained.

The market used to be a two day event, packed, and with tremendous variety of activities  and vendors. The event was set in the middle of a huge forest meadow, shaded by ancient oak trees some two miles from the nearest inhabited place.
The location had been home to an ancient hermitage by the side of a Roman road, and a bird's eye view revealed that the spot was almost exactly in the center of a somewhat lumpy circle of nine or ten small towns and villages, a geographic advantage in times when there were no motor vehicles.
The exact date of the first market day is lost in time, but it certainly began when the most famous resident of the small hermitage was pronounced a saint and villagers gathered once a year in her honor.

Band stands with wooden dance floors set up each year and beer and wine tents for several thousand revelers were the entertainment backbone surrounded by hundreds of vendor stands and trailers, selling everything portable rural folks would need, as well as all the knickknacks nobody needed but everybody bought when motivated by a few pints.

There was also livestock - not portable but walkable. Rare early newsreel footage of the event shows busy livestock trading in one area, free food for the critters was right there under the canopy of the oaks and linden trees.

What caused the decline, we wondered, at a time when lifestyle events and an appetite for things traditional surged.

Mostly really bad management, explained the locals. The organizers were short sighted, got greedy, and it became a vicious cycle. The trade in cows, pigs, chickens and other livestock slowly petered out within a decade or so after World War II but it was not until consumer tastes and needs changed in later decades that the organizers failed to add new attractions.

It began when the town that owns the forest increased fees for stands and entertainment in a bid to plug holes in its budget when tax money got tight some time in the 1990s. Parallel to this, the town fathers decided to close all access roads for private motor vehicles and run shuttle buses instead.

Not only did they charge one Euro each way but they ran the buses from only two of the nine towns, with one trip every hour.

It was around that time that the organizing town started its very own medieval festivals within what was left of its own town walls. No one could explain to us why they had not added medieval themes to the old market event in the forest. Of course, the town walls were not movable but besides that, the stands and booths at the medieval festival would have felt as at home in the forest as in town.

As the medieval festival craze wore off, resulting a switch to one event every other year, the market out in the forest entered its death spiral.

We don't want a gloomy end to the post, so here is a photo of a medieval mobile daycare unit, as we called it in the presence of Germans - first, they looked shocked, then they grinned with us.

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