St. Fagans

The Tudor Group prides itself on focusing on ordinary life and day to day tasks.

St. Fagans is perfect for this sort of portrayal, we have had a working relationship with this site since 1999, visiting up to three times each year.

In recent years we have been working on the estate, fences (hurdling) for the fields next to the house.

As a part of this work we experimented with avoiding modernisms and making do in the period. This extended to the evenings in which we depended upon a handful of rushlights each evening and slept on straw mattresses with hempen sheets and blankets. It was February so the hard work kept us warm and tired us out enabling us to sleep early.

This experiment was not to live as they did. This is of course impossible; it was merely to understand some of problems they faced.

You learnt to see in the dark quickly; and to know who's chamber pot was whose - then you knew if it was empty !.