WELCOME TO YE MEDIEVAL SWAPMEET

On my way to a swapmeet the other day I perchanced to fall in to a medieval daydream. We all do that sometimes don't we? You know, when you try to imagine what it would be like living in the Middle Ages; the road becomes a track and the car becomes a horse and cart? All right, suit yourself then.

Maybe it was the olde worlde country lanes around Devizes (the only town in Britain that rhymes with 'surprises') which set off this train of thought. I was on the road to Berming Ham, some hundred leagues hence, to peddle my wares at the huge market which takes place in a natural amphitheatre known as the En-Oy-Say.

It's a strong bet that a medieval swapmeet would be a crude affair, with most of the 'toys' adapted from naturally occurring products like wood and stone. A decent table would have lots of nicely rounded pebbles and thick knurled sticks with smooth bits. Six pebbles in a bag would be a game. Six straight sticks could be the genesis of a sport.

The origins of swapmeets may be lost in the mists of time, but I like to imagine a spin-off from the market culture, where certain traders would seek out wooden toys to captivate the children. The main problem with the Middle Ages is that not a lot has survived to tell us anything about them. There are few known relics of any medieval swapmeets, apart from an early fair report by Jack Tempest.

Knowing that small boys instinctively turn any object into a weapon, some would throw the pebbles at the others while the rest would attack them with sticks. From this we can conclude that the first toy was a pointed stick and didn't last long enough to become collectable.

The received wisdom about life in the Middle Ages was that it was hard, brutish and short, or maybe that just referred to the dentist. It was even claimed that parents didn't form emotional attachments with their children, seeing them more as economic providers or producers for the household. In other words, the opposite of what we have today.

Now all this has been turned on its head, and who was responsible for that? Collectors! At least, I think they're collectors, the guys with the metal detectors. They prefer to be known as treasure hunters, although I call them 'detector collectors'. Whatever, they must have a lot of patience. Can you imagine having to take a beeping walking stick and a shovel with you every time you go out? Then thinking you might have found a hoard of gold coins, only for it to turn out to be a pile of scrap Dinky Toys?

But it's not all pain. Last year a bunch of them unearthed a quantity of 13th century toys from the mud at the edge of the River Thames. These included tiny cannons and guns, metal figurines and miniature household objects like stools and jugs. Which just goes to prove that the Britains toy company has been around much longer than was previously thought.

What's interesting about these early toys is how they reflect the real world. Miniature weapons and cooking utensils suggest that these were the artifacts which fascinated medieval children. The toys were mainly made from pewter, and the reason they survived rather than corroding is apparently due to the thick, foul-smelling Thames mud, which is low in oxygen and prevents organic decay. That reminds me, maybe I should get some for Mrs Pete.

The discovery of these medieval toys has transformed the perceptions of childhood during the Middle Ages. We thought that kids were put out to work in the fields as soon as they were old enough to carry a sack, but it may have been more civilized than that. Of course, there are still cultures that just don't do toys, even today. But if we believe that toys are a sign of an advanced society, collecting old toys at swapmeets must be an even higher form of civilisation.

Fast forward to the present and where have we got with toys? The miniatures are perfect, plastic is ubiquitous, and there are so many produced that they may never become collectable. As modern toys are so sophisticated, particularly anything with batteries or digital components, what will they tell historians about our society? Possibly that our children had so many toys that they didn't have time to play with all of them. What it won't tell them is that our favourite toy was a pointed stick.

http://www.swapmeetpete.com/