MOST PEOPLE TEACH HISTORY BY TALKING ABOUT IT. ONE WOMAN DOES SO BY LIVING IT.
by Mitchell Eubank
To the untrained eye, Jessica Clothier is a modern-day equivalent of Jayne Mansfield or Marilyn Monroe: She is the picture of what boys now in their forties, fifties, and sixties dubbed the ideal woman. Clothier stands at five-foot-two while looking at her guests with baby blues, as her sun-blonde hair waves in the breeze like fields of wheat. Her fleece is of fine ivory, with no need for makeup to cover any conceivable flaws, and the dresses she wears were hand-made in Delaware for months.
Jessica explains how she puts on her current outfit like so: “Basically, you [first] put on a shift, which is … a nightgown – a white, linen, long-sleeved dress that you wear – and then, [on] top of the shift, you put on [a] petticoat, which is like a skirt. [On] top of the skirt, you put [on] an overcoat, which is open in the front so you can see your petticoat through the overcoat. Your overcoat laces up the front, and … underneath … the laces, you put [on] a stomacher. [After this], you have to put your hair up and … wear a coif, which is … a white cap that goes over your hair, because you can’t have your hair showing. Then, you have stockings that are usually about knee-high, and [you complete the costume with] black leather shoes.” As it happens, there is a perfectly logical reason for Jessica’s dress-up routine to be this way.
At least one day a month, she can be found in character as part of the British nobility of half-a-millennium ago, while showing tourists around an estate called Agecroft Hall, which is based in Windsor Farms, Richmond. The Tudor manor house was first located in Lancashire, England, but was dismantled and moved to the United States in the 1920s.
It’s a surprising job for a 27-year-old woman who also works as a first-grade teacher. But her work as a “living history interpreter” lets her pursue her passion for a period she never got to live in.
“[The troupe and I] focus on the Tudor-Stuart period [of the British Renaissance], which is 1485 to 1660,” Clothier said. “As a living history group, we usually portray 1631, [as that] is the year that we have the most information about the [Dauntesey] family [we represent in our shows].”
The Tudor-Stuart reign was Jessica’s personal favorite era to study throughout her formative years. She even received a minor in Renaissance and Medieval Studies when she graduated from college in 2007. As for the reason she first got into the subject, it all stems from the love she had of King Henry VIII and at least one of his six wives.
“[The mother of one of my childhood friends] was an English teacher, and she … was the one who … introduced me to Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn,” Jessica said of when she first found out about this part of world history. “[She] told me about this king who had six wives, and so I [became curious]. I [had] just started reading … historical fiction, and it got me really interested in that time period – how people lived, and how they dressed, and … what the customs were – [to the point that] my interests kind of branched out as I read more.”
Clothier and her fellow impersonators often rewrite the lives of one of the owners of the estate, the Dauntesey family. To figure out the storylines, the reenactors in their group meetings each month decide on a theme. From there, they start deciding on characters they will play based on the Dauntesey family tree. The personal accounts of these characters can only provide Jessica and her fellow players so much information about the people they will play. Beyond the facts, they use some creative license. How do they come up with their characters’ traits?
According to Clothier, the impersonators receive a questionnaire, which they have to fill out as their characters. The questionnaire reads like the character creation screen in a role-playing game: Each character has specific religions, jobs, residences, period-specific political beliefs, and other wants, needs, and basic facts attributed to them. The same rules apply for every member of the group so their characters are developed that much more. It’s during this process, for instance, that Katherine Dauntesey, the character Jessica plays, gets portrayed as flirtatious and boy-crazy, among other things.
“My character, Katherine, was … actually born in 1632, but I portray her as being born in 1613 because otherwise I’d be way too young,” Clothier confessed. “We [also] don’t have … any record that she was ever married or anything like that. We know that she had an older sister named Anna, [who] married a man named John Hall … but we don’t know [anything] about Katherine [herself] besides the year she was born. We just kind of have to guess from there.”
Jessica IRL. (Photo provided by Jessica Clothier)
Those are not the only ways a reenactment group can keep their continuity going between shows. Between the initial meeting and group rehearsals inside the manor, everyone in the troupe does individual research about the theme of the next tour, and how they can make their character fit in that particular context. For example, Clothier attended a week-long class on the Tudor and Stuart homes at Oxford University, so she could provide more information to tourists upon her return stateside. Some of the players learned to speak in a northern English, near-Scottish brogue that reflects the land Agecroft was first built on.
One of the most recent tours the troupe has done ties back to Halloween. Clothier, who was playing Katherine, told a story that mixes Jack and the Beanstalk with Hansel and Gretel, as two girls found shelter from a giant in Agecroft Hall. In that tour, every troupe member went to one of the rooms in the house as they told a popular folk tale from the era. The room Katherine was in, for example, was the study, which was often referred to as the “curiosity cabinet” at the time. Wealthy people such as the Daunteseys would fill these cabinets with rare trinkets and oddities collected from around the world.
In some occasions, interpreters portray multiple characters. Another example from earlier this year was when the troupe held witch trials, with the tourists doubling as the jury. In each trial, the impersonators played different people with their own testimonies, which were then used as evidence against the accused. Now and again, however, there is at least one juror who wants modern evidence to solve what would now be a 385-year-old mystery.
As Jessie pointed out, “A lot of times, people that come into the witch trial want to look at the evidence from a 21st century mindset. They want to say, ‘Well, of course, she wasn’t doing magic, because magic isn’t real,’ and ‘Of course, she wasn’t flying, because you can’t fly on a broomstick!’ So, a lot of the jurors that come from the audience … want to … give the verdict based on 21st century logic.”
There’s just one flaw these culture-clashing judges have a tendency to overlook: “[Several] jury members have a hard time putting themselves into the mindset of someone living in the 16th or 17th century, [because] back then, magic was [considered] a very real thing. When you look at it from their perspective, it’s very easy to go from a ‘not guilty’ to ‘guilty’ verdict based on their belief system and their way of life.”
Jessica has taken part in these reenactments four times now – twice as a witness, and twice as the defendant. In those latter cases, she found out how to earn the sympathy of the jury to avoid receiving a death sentence. After her first round as the defendant resulted in every single jury finding her guilty of witchcraft, to the point of cheering for the announcement that she would be burned at the stake or hanged, one of her co-workers applied make-up on her face to resemble a bruise for her second round of attempts. The intended goal was for the jury to think that the alleged witch was actually an abuse victim. Surprisingly, it worked, as far more jurors ended up sympathizing with Jessica, and gave her more “not guilty” verdicts the second time around.
Unlike staged shows, reenactments do not have scripts. Everything the Daunteseys say and do is, for the most part, ad-libbed and improvised, with no memorization of any kind. It takes some visitors time to get used to the idea of reenactment. Yes, just like people who fail to understand the “musical” part of “musical theatre,” there are people who are also unable to comprehend how people at or near their age are acting like people from many a generation before their time. It takes a while for people watching a musical to know the songs are there to advance the plot as effectively as traditional dialogue does, the same way it takes a while for tourists to see that the characters before them are supposed to be their ancestors.
The exterior of Agecroft Hall. (Photo provided by Jessica Clothier)
While Jessica’s day job involves teaching children, her work at Agecroft Hall gives her a chance to reach out to adults about history. But she believes it’s as much entertainment as it is teaching. And for her, it’s a form of escape from real, ordinary life.
The reenactments are funded in large part by an endowment connected to the mansion that T.C. Williams, the owner who moved it from England, funded himself. Williams had an idea to turn Agecroft into a museum once he died, as well as the part in Williams’ own will that allows the troupe to run it as such, as a private, non-profit organization. Williams’ endowment helps pay for the props and kits, or costumes, each member of the group uses in their monthly performances.
Thankfully, that paycheck will not be split with anyone who takes their history for granted, as Jessica concluded: “As far as hecklers [are concerned], we’ve never actually had any of those. Most people that come to our events know what it’s going to be. They want to see it. That’s why they came and paid for the event.” History may be written by the winners, but there are always more sides to every story. Both Jessica Clothier and her troupe show that until all of us are ready, willing, and able to see history sans redactions, the lessons to learn from it all remain incomplete.