The Shire of Stonegate is the Pocatello / Southeast Idaho branch of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA). We meet on Mondays from 5-9pm at the ISU Student Union Building in Pocatello for fighting, crafts, classes, and socializing. Membership is not required to come join us and learn more about this amazing group and the Middle Ages we study.
The Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) is an international non-profit volunteer educational organization. The SCA is devoted to the research and re-creation of pre-seventeenth century skills, arts, combat, culture, and employing knowledge of history to enrich the lives of participants through events, demonstrations, and other educational presentations and activities.
We make costumes, build armor, engage in (mock) combat with rattan "swords" and steel rapiers, cook, dance, sing, and make all manner of things in leather, glass, metal, wood... the possibilities are endless!
On some weekends we get together with people from other groups across our "kingdom" (which consists of Utah, Idaho, Montana, and parts of Wyoming) for "events", where we hold tournaments in fighting, archery, thrown weapons... even sewing and cooking.
A few times a year, we will sojourn outside of our kingdom to larger "wars" -- gatherings of several hundred to several thousand people -- where it feels like a medieval city has sprung up.
In the Society, people will build a persona -- a character in pre-17th century history that that we research and try to emulate. We don't choose famous persons from history; instead we build a person that could have lived in the time and place we choose, and we try to equip that person with clothing and artificats they might have used. We give our personas appropriate names. We might try to act like our personas would, but usually we end up just being ourselves with different names.
We don't give ourselves titles, although we are all assumed to be minor nobility. Instead, titles are bestowed on us by the King and Queen for being a generally helpful person, or fighting with honor and prowess, or becoming a true artist and teaching in our chosen art form. Mostly, titles are just our way of recognize hard work and growth in the society, and are our way of saying "thank you".
Whether you've been looking all your life for us, or even if you are just curious, we invite you to come to one of our meetings to say hello and ask us all about it.