Fake 44

Part of the floor of the Tiltyard café is covered with rather pallid, fake floor boards. A join between the sheets is to be found between the first and second planks from the right, clearly visible when the original snap is zoomed on this laptop. Click to enlarge and you can probably make out the line of sealant between the two sheets.

The Tiltyard itself dates back to the days when good king Henry liked to pretend to be a knight in armour, but was quite soon privatised as a market garden and some time after that taken back into the public domain as a café for tourists. The present building is, I believe, a bit more than a hundred years old and the actual floor might well be a cement mortar on hardcore, rather than wooden boards on beams, as is that of the ground floor of our own house, not that many years younger.

PS: people who jousted with the king were probably rather careful about it. I associate to the fact that, as it happens, a few years later, a French king died of wounds received in a joust, and despite his forgiving his opponent, the Count of Montgomery, on his deathbed, the count was executed some 15 years later by the king's vindictive widow - the same lady who organised the infamous massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day.

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