Villagers

Village Point of Contact

OKRF Villager Peer Group

Special Thank you to Keli Stevens for making the villager page wonderful. You will be missed greatly..MB

Welcome back to the 2017 OKRF season! Whether you're new to the village, or were born and raised here over the last 20 years, this page is all about village life in Europe during the renaissance period.
Check out the links below for educational information to advance your character.
See a list of current villager characters.
Look at past year photos of academies and festivals.
It's fun, it's free. Use it, abuse it.

Villager life: resistance is futile!

Who Are the Village People?

Josh Bell - Leonardo Davinci
Deborah Billingsley - Alice
Brittany Bland - Liza Lovegood
Malinda Boston - Marcail Muir
Ty Brooks - Orik Thatcher
David Brown - William Shakespeare
Robert Byrne - Viggo
Dalton Ensminger - Kiball Rossguard
Jennifer Gowen - Larsony
Demi Gray - Clover
David Hall - Tybalt Smugsman
Cassie Hamilton - Angel Howler
Jennifer Harper - Isabelle Hardwick
Devon Henderson - Dulce
Michael Henson - William 'Doc' Harvey
Joel Higgs - Bhalter Toshach
Lydia King - Maggie 'Magpie' Partridge
Lindzy Lee
Ryan Mccarthy - Euripedes
Kristen Meinhart
Duwayne Mills -
Elizabeth Mooney - Cecily Fairpoint
Rainna Okapal - Dominique
Bruce Sasaki - Jenga
Miranda Shae -
Jacob Stepp - Jean Cire de Bougie
Janna White - Hope
Alexander Wynne-Jones - Mordecai Grim

Our Cousins, the Townkeepers

Villagers and Townkeepers are two separate peer groups. This is only due to the Townkeeper role as a "function" during festival. They provide services to patrons during the festival day, such as gift shop clerk, pub server, ticket taker, etc. This means they have tasks they must have time to prep/practice/learn.
Aside from this, there is really no difference between the groups. Everyone is involved in creating characters and interactive play. We consider the combined groups to be a "mega group" and often work together during academies. We all live and work in Castleton (at least during the festival), and would have shared histories and stories, hopes and fears. Villagers and Townkeepers would know each other on a daily basis.

Castleton Culture

When To Use "Wench"
Traditionally, “wench” in the medieval and renaissance period just meant “young woman of lower class means engaged in some type of job to sustain herself.”   It was frequently accompanied with a job type, for example, tavern wench or scullery wench. It was a general term for denoting a woman who was not a Lady.
In Castleton, this term is mostly used to depict the Ladies of the Scarlet Pillow.   They are referred to as “the wenches.”   If you, as a villager, are speaking to or about another female villager, it is better to refer to them as “maid”, “maiden,” even “woman” rather than a wench. It can be confusing to patrons, who absolutely know and understand the recreational meaning of a “wench” in Castleton.
And “wench” is the only term we use for our ladies.   You know what I mean.

Call Backs from Ages Past
Call backs are a way for us to team build to become a more cohesive unit, and to identify us as a sub unit of the cast. Here's a list of past call backs:
> It's fun to play at the O - K - R - F
> Our house . . . in the middle of our street
> Resistance is futile
> We live here . . . get off our lawn
> We built this city . . . we built this city on rocks and stone

Here's some suggestions for this year:
* we aim to misbehave
* what do you want to do today Villagers? Same thing we do every day . . . try to take over the world

Some Insightful Sites

Europe In the Age of Reformation

Life In 16th Century England

Elizabethan Occupations

Daily Life in Elizabethan Era

Group Participation

One thing we've been looking at over the last few years is making the festival day more, well, "festive." After looking at options, we've narrowed down to two things: one an old idea, and one a new idea.
An old idea we've been trying to get off the ground is Games on the Green. The Villagers can learn some interactive period games to play in a sort of unofficial festival activity --maybe Skittles, Bocce, or Quoits. Our original thought was to play these at the Maypole when there's no dance scheduled, but this field has become a stage unto itself. Now we think these can be taught by any villager and played with patrons in various parts of the village.

The new idea is to hold a dressing the gate "ceremony" each morning with visiting children (or adults). This would involve having both pre-made decorations we can set up easily and take down every evening, and some make-it-on-the-spot things we can show others how to do prior to gate ceremony - items the patrons could keep a tokens of the festival. We'd get donations for these as much as possible.
This idea would, however, require some coordination of storage for the decorations and scheduled responsibility of preparing items in the mornings.

More details to come later!

Speak Like a Renaissance Toddler!

It's true that, during the renaissance, most children had better vocabularies than we do now, and even us peasants and lower class spoke with some degree of flourish.
Besides some increasing your Elizabethan vocabulary, you can add some patterns to your speech to . . . well . . . cheat.

Try these 3 things:
1- When speaking a negative, add "not" after the positive form of the word, as in "he knows not of what he speaks" or "I like it not well."
2- Couple "most" with adjectives, especially adjectives that already mean the best, for example, "a most joyous occasion I have yet to see", or "oh, most excellent well, sir!"
3- When speaking in past tense using a word with 'ed on the end, emphasize the -ed as a separate syllable. "He is a learn-ed man."

VILLAGER STORIES
“This Is What It Sounds Like When Doves Cry”
This is a debacle instigated by Violet Gardener, who was only trying to do something nice for Morty, but whose ulterior motive is to get Shakespeare to attend and recite a eulogy because she wants desperately to get his attention. She felt really badly for Morty because he’d been complaining that business was bad lately . . . you might say it was completely dead at the moment. Violet thought having a body to bury would cheer him up, but where to find a body? She is discussing this with Eris one day when Eris, ever the mischief-maker, decides she can benefit from this. Her father is negotiating her hand to Burt Baker, who actually thinks he’s just making a cake for Eris’ wedding. He doesn’t realize he is supposed to be the groom. At Eris’ suggestion, Violet decides to coax Burt away by recruiting Arno to take him hunting for doves to put on the wedding cake. “Twill be most elegant!” (Burt and Arno hear “doves to put IN the cake”). Once Burt is away, they can pretend he died and create a body. But how to do it? Violet remembers seeing Burt’s clothes hanging out to dry on the laundry line and goes to see Sophie and Rayne. Sophie is bewildered when she can no longer find them and starts mumbling about stocking thieves and Crook twins, but Rayne is instantly furious. She knows Patches was sneaking about early and suspects she stole Burt’s clothes along with a lot of other laundry. Violet, Eris, Sophie, and Rayne find Patches and, yes, the laundry also. Rayne and Sophie say they won’t press charges if all the laundry is returned so they can go ahead with their plan. Curious, Patches agrees, and they all go find Eleanor so she can sew up the pant legs and arm holes of Burt’s clothes so they can stuff them with the other laundry, thus creating an effective body. “What about the head?” Sophie asks. Rayne says Morty is too pretty to realize there’s no head, so they continue. Led by Violet, a very convincingly sadden group heads to Morty’s home to show him the body. He is elated – now he can prep the burial ground. All the girls start preparing for the “funeral” and notify everyone else in the village that it will be later that day. They even manage to get a missive to Shakespeare with the request to attend. Meanwhile, Burt and Arno have returned from their hunt with the slain doves, which Burt promptly cooks into the cake as he so thought requested. As everyone gathers around the maypole, Arno comes by Burt and informs him that there is a “party” going on at the maypole. Burt thinks this must be the wedding and he hurries there with the cake in his cart. Just as Shakespeare is delivering the final lines of his very poetic eulogy, Burt shows up. “Sorry I’m late.” Everyone is stunned to silence – except Violet, Eris, Sophie, Rayne, Patches, and Eleanor – who all erupt in giggles. Morty is convinced he’s a ghost; Dubh is ecstatic, telling him that he can still marry his daughter now. “Marry her? I thought I was only making a cake for her wedding!” Several people are side tracked by the mention of cake, and Violet is consoling Shakespeare who thinks he’s now wasted a master piece on a live man. Meanwhile, Sophie tells everyone that we might as well enjoy the gathering and have cake. Violet asks where the doves are and Burt says “in the cake, like you asked.” Again, stunned silence. Dubh cuffs Burt up the side of the head, calling him all kinds of ignorant for cooking doves into a cake and says he would not have such an idiot marry his daughter. Eris lets out a shout of pure glee. She’s off the hook; Violet make Morty happy (briefly) and got Shakespeare to notice her; Sophie and Rayne found their laundry, and all is right with the world again.

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