Today we set off to Leeds to meet Hannah and Caroline, the girls we helped out when they could not access any money in Ljubljana in Slovenia. We had been in correspondence with Hannah, who had to come back early from her travels because she was not well. It was pretty amazing that they lived so close to Barnsley and our arrangement had been that, when we were visiting Rohan, we would get together and they could pay back the money we lent them.
But first we were following everyone’s advice to go the Royal Armouries, another free museum. Having spent absolute hours of relative boredom in an arms museum on a previous trip to the UK while my three male companions examined all the arms from every century in detail – room after room of items with their names and dates beside them – I was a little sceptical that this outing would take up the whole morning. How wrong I was. The Royal Armoury is the most interesting place for people of all ages, set out in ways that encourage you to think about the life of the people who were involved in the wars and what they were fighting over, but also in ways that helped you to understand the technical developments in arms. In addition to that, there is a program of ‘shows’ including monologues in costume, falconry, jousting and riding and fighting skills from different eras.
We started in the ‘War Gallery’ – and didn’t get very far because, just after the display explaining the need for arms so as to protect and extend your territory as your group expanded, and showing the vulnerability and capacity of a naked man and briefly the jumps in arms since then, I watched a video about early smelting for improved spear tips. It set the tone for understanding that every development in life in general led to changes in arms and sometimes the need for improving defence or offence led to inventions that fed down into other aspects of daily life.
Suddenly it was time for us to rush past other exhibits to the performance gallery, where we watched a most moving portrayal of the informal Christmas Day Truce of 1914. The monologue was devised entirely from excerpts of original letters. The actor was outstanding and it was impossible to take my eyes off him, since he was so absolutely into the part and built the emotion so well. The story itself of how the British troops heard the Germans singing carols and then saw them leaving their trenches unarmed and walking towards them, of the British amazement and then equal courage in going unarmed to join them, and of the exchange of cigarettes and the playing of sandbag football, is well known. One part that really touched me was that a German officer gave a British soldier a photo and some papers to take to a British wife, telling him that, as the man died in his arms, he had held the wife’s photo before him so that his last glimpse would be of her, and asking the British soldier to return the items to her. Another was that the British were replaced in only a matter of a week or so, and the soldier wonders about it, about the fact that the new soldiers will have no understanding of what happened on Christmas day and of how the ‘enemy’ are likeable friendly young people just like themselves. I wondered if news of what happened reached Headquarters and the Generals probably rightly surmised that it would be difficult for those soldiers to kill those Germans without question.
Later we saw an equally well presented ‘D Day’ landing piece, in which the loss and horror of war was fully depicted, even at the moment of victory. The last actor we watched played Joan of Arc in a full set of armour. She must truly have been convinced of her role as the instrument of God to have gone through with her life in which she was constantly in danger, to a large degree despised and unappreciated, and largely only taken on by the king because all else was failing and there is nothing like a little bit of the supernatural to reinvigorate a cause. Joan was wearing a very plain set of German armour. 
After her performance she explained that it took ages to put on and she needed someone to help her. Armour needed to be custom made, with the right dimensions being essential for movement, although it was possible to buy armour ‘off the hook’, or to mix and match pieces in the way that we can buy bikini tops and bottoms now. Knights would purchase their armour from wherever it suited them, and there was no national pride in wearing pieces made in your own country if you preferred a suit with patterns on it or one with a wider skirt. Another source of armour was in taking it from dead opponents, one that definitely led to a variety of armour being worn in the same army.We saw a weird helmet made for Henry VIII with twisty ram’s horns and spectacles, and it originally would have had a body suit to go with it, but only a drawing remains to show what that was like. You could pick up bits of armour, try on gauntlet gloves and consider their safety features, handle swords and discuss their specific uses and marvel at how anyone fully armed could actually move and see enough to be useful in a battle. Of course horses also wore armour and once down, it would have been very difficult for them to right themselves with all the weight they were carrying. Later we were to see elephant armour, worn by an African elephant in a battle scene.
We paid for a special display in the jousting yard to see the falconer in action. The sport of kings, at one stage a hierarchy of birds was developed, matching the hierarchy of king, lords, gentry and commoners and restricting bird handlers to using the birds appropriate to their station in life. Falconry is the art of training birds of prey to hunt for you, originally to provide food and later for sport. The falconer we saw was a jolly fellow who obviously loved his trade and his birds, explaining their needs, their habits and the individual personalities of his birds. There are some issues in displays when local magpies are a bit cheeky and his falcon forgets his job and pursues them. All soft toys and teddies had to be put out of sight so that the birds would not think that they were prey. The eagle owl was big and spectacular, but the falconer described him as being ‘like a bungalow’ (with nothing up top) and difficult to train. At the end you could pat a ferret or watch a falcon devour baby mice.
We couldn’t believe it when it was time to go and meet the girls – the time had flown and we didn’t want to leave the museum; there was so much more to see. We decided to return after lunch. We enjoyed catching up with Hannah and Caroline, who will shortly start their university careers, and it was great to sit down and have a proper lunch as a break in our museum visit. We were dismayed half way back to the museum to realise suddenly that we had forgotten to take a photo of the meeting with Hannah and Caroline.We raced back through the gentle drizzle to the museum, past the impressive round Corn Museum, past a hard to believe solicitors sign, along the banks of the River Aire and round to the very unusual Royal Armoury entrance. Our last hour and a half just zoomed by and we were beset by the feeling that if we stopped to read everything, then fantastic items would have eluded us completely. There is a whole section on eastern arms and battles, with ornate armour and vast decorative shoulder protection.
Siege warfare was described as being a costly and time consuming task, with the sides resorting to taunts and sledging, as well as throwing the heads of the enemy over the wall to demoralise the soldiers and the bodies of diseased animals were lobbed in as well – in the hope of spreading pestilence.The displays brought us up to the modern era with police and armed forces of today being represented. Statistics on the carrying of weapons in England and of the preponderance of knives as being the weapon of choice in violent crimes were accompanied by an enormous display of the knives that were handed in during the knife amnesty. This section included interviews with the family members of two people killed in knife incidents, in which they relate the social background, lives and activities of the victims.
Finally we flew through the most amazing display of the weapons and armour created for the characters in the Lord of the Rings trilogy of films. The costume designers had researched the applications and types of real armour and then used their imaginations to adapt it in colour and form to suit the different characters in the stories. We found it fascinating as an exercise in bringing fantasy to life but for anyone familiar with the characters and the films, it would have been magic.We were hounded out by the turning off of lights and the countdown announcements to the museum’s closure, feeling that we needed another couple of hours. We would highly recommend this museum, with a whole day or more needed to enjoy it.
Our luck with the rain had run out but our umbrellas allowed us to check out the beautiful market building on the way back to the station. Inside most of the traders had closed early with only a couple of perennials, like a newsagent and a flower stall, which might make a sale during rush hour, still being open.
The Black Prince, 1330–1376, Prince of Wales, the hero of Crecy-Poitiers, the ‘flower of England’s cavalry’ and the upholder of the rights of the people in the parliament, rides regally above the square which receives its light from lamps held aloft by numerous scantily clad ladies representing morning and evening. Grand buildings face the square, with statues of leading men of Leeds recognised in front of them. A ground fountain, with random spurts of water had tempted a young boy beyond common sense and he was now being told by his grandfather that he was ‘a right git’ and that they wouldn’t let him on the buses, soaked through as he was.
These long boats ply the waters of England´s rivers and canals. The centre and north in particular have an extensive network of canals, originally used for moving coal and other materials prior to the introduction of railways. The idea of spending a few weeks or months quietly putt putting along the English canals is very tempting.
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