Students and Dons and Cadets, oh my!

[Chris and Elisabeth Zakes]

At 07:53 PM 5/29/97 -0500, you wrote:

(massive snippage)

Burke wrote:
>The cadets to Dons came about after we couldn't get
>the SCA as a whole to make a light weapons peerage.  Tivar would remember
>the exact chronology better than I.  


Gather 'round the fire, children, Uncle Tivar is going to tell a story
(somebody wake Larkin up! <G>).

Back in the old days, when we were a principality, Sir Simonn of Amber won
our third coronet tourney. The morning after their investiture, he and
Princess Tessa took me aside and asked me to write up a proposal for an
award to honor the principality's rapier fighters. (I'd been kicking some
ideas around in the back of my head for a while, so the actual write-up
didn't take long.)

I took the idea for a white scarf from act IV of "Cyrano de Bergerac", the
title "Don" because nobody else seemed to be using it, and the rest
borrowed heavily from the requirements for knighthood. The proposed name
was the "Order of the Cavalier". The first White Scarf was given out on
March 10th, AS XIII (1979).

Cadets happened the following Fall. I hadn't really given any thought to
the matter, but there was this enthusiastic young fellow named Dominique,
who sat me down one evening at RenFair and said "we need to have official
students, and they should be called cadets, and they should wear red
scarves, and I want to be the first one, and..." and that's how we got cadets.

As part of the reorganization of our laws and awards after Ansteorra became
a kingdom, the order name was changed to the White Scarf (the College of
Arms had taken a rather dim view of using the term "Cavalier"), the charter
was rewritten, and it was upgraded from an AoA to a Grant-level award.

Although the initial order was modelled rather closely after knighthood,
there was never any serious attempt to get it made a peerage. I quickly
realized that the political structure of the SCA made peerage a rather
unlikely proposition (not to mention that it's historically inaccurate to
give knighthood/peerage for skill at rapier fighting) and decided to settle
for a respected second-class citizenship instead.


Some years later, when the White Scarf was well established in Ansteorra,
the Outlands wanted to know if they could have one, too. 

But that's another story...

	-Tivar Moondragon