Clarissa Dixon-Wright

Trish Dawson, one of our cooks and expert on many aspects of our period cookery sent this in and we would like to share it with you -

‘I have been reading Clarissa's latest book Rifling Through My Drawers which has been written as a month by month account with many diverts from the storylines, as you will remember the Retinue filmed for her programme and good fun it was too she is a lovely lady with a fund of stories and a lively sense of humour. Under February, the month of the filming she talks about filming on Hannah Glasse who wrote an 18th century book The Art of Cookery, then goes on to The Forme of Cury Richard the second's cookbook, and saying she was keen to cook in the kitchen at Gainsborough Old Hall. This is what she says "The Hall has a re-enactment team attached to it: Lord de Burgh's men. When I heard we were going to be using them for the filming my heart sank, because I'm not really in favour of re-enactments in historical television programmes; the ones we had in the Hannah Glasse programme, done by actors, were seedily dreadful to my mind, even though that programme was short-listed for the Glenfiddich Award. However I was wrong because Lord de Burgh's men and women were absolutely magnificent; they cooked, they did all sorts of things. Their costumes were not the rubbish that you sometimes see, made up of unlikely stuff, but were perfectly sewn using original materials"; Quite an accolade!!

There is also something for Gordon (Retinue archery Serjeant) she goes on to say” There was one scene that sadly didn't get shown of me being taught to use a bow and arrow, which took me right back to my childhood when I learned to shoot a bow and arrow and got keen on archery. The archer I was shooting with was charming and fascinated by all the different types of arrow heads that were used for specific purposes, such as armour piercing, plate armour piercing, fire arrows, and anything else you could think of. I'm something of a believer in reincarnation, although not terribly seriously, and I asked him why he had this enthusiasm for archery. He said 'I don't know, maybe I was there before, maybe at Agincourt’. And this struck me as a delightful reason for his passion"