The History Re-enactment Workshop, Tudor and Stuart Specialists, is a registered educational charity, which aims to promote historical knowledge by means of re-enactment of daily life and particular occurences in suitable settings, to the highest possible standards of contemporary accuracy. hrw, h.r.w., h r w, history reenactment workshop, history re-enactment workshop, history, domestic life, period, england, britain, 16c, 17c, 16th century, 17th century, historic homes, historic houses, museum, museums, living history, costume, clothes, sixteenth, seventeenth, 1535, 1536, 1537, 1538,1539,1545, 1560, 1561, 1562, 1563, 1564, 1565, 1566, 1567, 1568, 1569, 1570, 1571, 1572, 1573, 1574, 1575, 1576, 1577, 1578, 1579, 1580, 1581, 1582, 1583, 1584, 1585, 1586, 1587, 1588, 1589, 1590, 1591, 1592, 1593, 1594, 1595, 1596, 1597, 1598, 1599, 1600, 1601, 1602, 1603, 1660, 1661, 1662, 1663, 1664, 1665, 1666, 1667, 1668, 1669, 1670, 1671, 1672, 1673, 1674, 1675, 1676, 1677, 1678, 1679, 1680, 1681, 1682, 1683, 1684, 1685, 1686, 1687, 1688, 1689, 1690, 1691, 1692, 1693, 1694, 1695, 1696, 1697, 1698, 1699, 1700, 1701, 1702, 1703, 1704, 1705, 1706, oakwell hall, blakesley hall, weald and downland, weald & downland, muchelney abbey, bolsover castle, tilbury fort, gainsborough old hall, queens house, queen's house, mary rose, plymouth, clarke hall, wimbourne minster, elizabethan, tudor, james i, james ii, charles i, charles ii, william and mary, william & mary, william of orange, henry viii, stuart, stewart. Create a scene similar to a Vermeer genre painting. Take your own photograph. Now called The Scene. From houses into homes is an article that first appeared in a "Social History in Museums", The Journal of the Social history Curators Group. Volume 19 (1992), giving an insight into the Workshop's outlook, written by one of the founding members. The version here is a later "rewrite." This article is referenced as part of the Workshop's constitution, and was included in the application to the Charity Commission. We are a group of enthusiasts and professionals who provide historical interpretations for museums. We specialise in two periods, the late-sixteenth and late-seventeenth centuries. Formed well over ten years ago by a group of people with a background of battle re-enactments, we were all far more attracted by civilian re-enactments. Since then the membership background has become far more divergent so we now have members with purely 'civilian' experience. The main thrust of our re-enactments (apart from them nearly always being in a period house or building rather than a field) is that we do first-person interpretation. The people we represent talk and act as much like people of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries as we can (with a few provisos). We also strive to represent ordinary working days in these households rather than a sequence of high dramas, although there may well be a theme we've been asked to deal with such as trade, or marriages. In these circumstances we will seek to explore how the theme affects different levels of society. We have a wide variety of items in style appropriate to both the late-sixteenth and late-seventeenth centuries. Depending on the size and number of rooms, we can equip a kitchen, pantry, bedroom, and parlour, as well as providing a large number of tools for outdoors work such as wheelbarrows, rakes, billhooks etc. In addition we have a great deal of personal items; books, combs, shaving gear, letters, toys, etc. all of which help to provide extra atmosphere. These items are all modern reproductions, many being specially commissioned. As we continue research over the years it has sometimes been necessary to replace items with those that are more accurate, and we constantly strive to maintain as high a standard as possible. New Event at Harrow Museum. Celebrating their 500th year of the tithe barn and the restoration of the oldest part of the house. Clothing not costume - we wear copies of period clothing, done as accurately as possible. This means that because of cost and availability we have little in the way of hand-woven cloth, but we do have home-spun knitted garments (garters etc.), and the materials used in the rest of our clothes are wool, linen, leather, and for those rich enough to justify it, silk. Clothes are hand-stitched using techniques copied from originals. There is a good reason for including the word "workshop" in our title. Every year we have a series of learning sessions where we have visiting teachers/lecturers so that we can find out more about the technology and methods of the past, e.g. ploughing, tailoring, hurdle making, but also how we can better get this information across to the public with acting, language and trust workshops. I did mention that there are some provisos in how we perform as people from the past. The main compromise is in the use of language. We did experiment in use of proper pronunciation and sentence structure, but found several drawbacks. Apart from being difficult and therefore open to lapses which can detract from the performance, we found this tended to create too much of a barrier between ourselves and the visiting public. If the visitors cannot understand what we say it negates the whole point of presenting a re-enactment. We therefore use modern pronunciation, and a 'watered-down' sentence structure - trying to keep enough of the period style to make it recognisably different without making it impenetrable.The History Re-enactment Workshop (HRW) is a registered charity (number 1040799).Live Interpretation is becoming increasingly familiar to the museum profession and visitor alike. In the past five years the technique has ceased to be solely identified with the so-called 'Living History' of jousting and civil war battle re-enactors who seek to entertain themselves and occasionally the public and has become the province of certain social historians and museum educationalists whose aim is to make history more accessible. In the United States and Canada sites using Live Interpretation have a long and successful history of co-existence with formal museums, whilst many in Britain still regard the approach as questionable. Consequently when members of the profession have sought to use the technique they have met with at best suspicion and at worst hostility. I would therefore make the point that although there may appear to be superficial similarity between the battle re-enactor and the museum or gallery interpreter in period clothing, this is illusory. Their respective approaches, aims and objectives are totally different. Live interpretation is a technique which aims to place the historical objects in their functional context against the background of the human environment.Among the earliest examples of the use of this technique in Britain was Wigan Pier where Peter Lewis employed a small team of actors who used a mixture of scripts and improvisation to role play a variety of characters in settings appropriate to the year 1900. Here "heritage with a difference" as it was called offered performers who were trained to record authentically the sight, sense, smell and feel of the past'.(1) This idea was also taken up by the Museum of the Moving Image where actors functioning as costumed guides were stationed in appropriate galleries and adopted an historical persona. Here the plan was to use performers to look at the social and political background to the moving images.(2)The approach at the Blist Hill site of Ironbridge museum was rather different as the decision was made not to employ actors, but to train a team of full-time and volunteer demonstrators in a variety of craft and performance skills and allow them to deal with visitors without the use of role play. An approach sometimes called third person interpretation. There are of course many other sites currently experimenting with Live Interpretation as a seasonal or, more rarely, full time method. Most of these experiments rely upon the use of actors as an extension of Theatre-in-Education or, like Ironbridge, are based on craft demonstrations.Because of their approach these projects do not make use of the full potential of Live Interpretation and have been limited to specific aspects of the method rather than the full recreation of a past environment. Sadly we do not yet have a site such as Plimoth Plantation in the United States where the goal is to recreate a true and complete portrait of life in the Plimoth Colony in the year 1628. The staff has painstakingly researched every detail of clothing, speech, work habits, house construction, furnishings, diet, livestock, family life, and any other manifestations of life that the visitors to the plantation may encounter. Interpreters bring these details to life and give them a physical and social context by acting out roles of actual Plimoth settlers. (3)One British group which has however made use of the North American model of first person interpretation in a domestic environment, whilst also attempting to deal with many of the criticisms levelled at live interpretation is History Re-enactment Workshop (HRW). Established five years ago by a mixture of museum professionals, teachers and enthusiastic amateurs who shared a common interest in the use of live interpretation, the group specialises in domestic recreations from the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The group does not work full-time or at a single location, but instead stages events at a variety of suitable sites in England and Wales. To date these have included Tretower Court in Wales for Cadw, Gainsborough Old Hall, Blakesley Hall for Birmingham Museum Service and Oakwell Hall for Kirklees Museums. Churchill at Blenheim Palace. Farm at Avoncroft.