< Back | Home

Two knights duel Saturday as part of the Hanlon-Lees Action Theater at the Texas Renaissance Festival. The theater group is the longest-running theatrical jousting company.

Becky Hurst, owner of the Legendary Candle Company, leads a demonstration in candle making.

A Texas Renaissance Festival actor roams the village streets Saturday at the Texas Renaissance Festival in Plantersville, Texas.

Ye olde times

The Texas Renaissance Festival focuses on entertainment with music, crafts, jousting, and suits of armor.

By: Jill Beathard

Posted: 10/27/08

Gypsies, fairies, knights and ladies have jumped out of the storybooks and come to life at the Texas Renaissance Festival. Aggies willing to take a drive to Plantersville, just off Highway 105, can experience life as it was five centuries ago.

As I walked through the arched entrances I was immediately greeted by music emitting from a gazebo. The Texas Brass, a brass instrument ensemble wearing Scottish tartans played as giant kings and queens, spinners at the loom, and women baring copious amounts of cleavage strolled through the dirt streets. One glance around and I knew I was not in Aggieland anymore.

Craftsmen, musicians, comedians, and cooks make a pretty penny every year at the Texas Renaissance Festival. The Gutenberg Press workers sell prints and demonstrate their craft. Demonstrator Dan McCullough first asked the crowd who Johann Gutenberg was.

"He was the inventor of the printing press," I chirped up. I was immediately corrected. "The Chinese had printing and the Koreans had movable type long before Gutenberg," McCullough said.

He explained that two people were required to operate a Gutenberg Press, and invited me to participate in a demonstration. The beater, McCullough, would beat ink on the type. The puller would place the paper in pins on the frisket, which was lowered over the type. They called this the coffin, which was slid under the platen, the large wooden block of the press.

"The puller would pull the handle, turning the screw, pressing the platen against the paper, pressing the paper against the type, transferring things from the type to the paper," McCullough said. "Did you get all of that?"

Pulling may sound easy, but I had to get some help to pull the lever over enough to really press the image on the paper. The Gutenberg Press has been printing at the Festival for about 30 years.

When patrons have the opportunity to purchase an array of crafts from candles and jewelry to animal skinned rugs, swords and authentic renaissance costumes vendors have to add a unique touch to their work to stand out.

Wondrous Works in Wood sell handmade mugs, drums and other carved creations. Shop owner Sherrie Phillips and her father use different types of wood to give their designs a variety of colors and patterns. They even have maroon works made from redheart wood.

"Even nature has Aggies' wood," Phillips said. "Nature really provides an incredible pallet of colors that there's no reason to stain them. I put a natural clear coat plastic on top of the wood so that it's safe to drink out of."

When I hear people talk about the Renaissance Festival they always mention eating a huge turkey leg. But oven roasted turkey legs are not the only tasty treat sold at the festival. Almost anything edible is served on a stick, including chocolate covered cheesecake and fried alligator.

Jousting never ceases to entertain. Rivalries between chivalrous knights, skilled fighting, heroic deaths and glorified victories are dramatized-and exaggerated-on the field before an audience as rowdy as Aggie fans at a University of Texas game.

While family friendly entertainment can be found throughout the festival some entertainers try to find ways of sparing the youngsters virgin ears. Iris and Rose, a comic duet, open their act with a song asking parents with small children to leave before they wind up providing sex education.

Each weekend has its own designated theme. In honor of the upcoming All Hallows' Eve, some performers dressed as ghosts, ghouls and witches.

As the chill of evening began to set in, the children that had been running and laughing at the festival were being replaced by tipsy patrons stumbling through the streets talking loudly and paying extra attention to the scandalously dressed women. I took this as my cue to exit the fading fairy tale and return to modern times.

General information
$21 at the gate
$18 at HEB, Woodforest National Bank, ClicknPrint Tickets or www.texrenfest.com
Campsites outside the grounds $10 per vehicle
Open 9 a.m. to dusk, Saturdays and Sundays through Nov. 30