Parades, Pageants & Pleasant Pastimes
Tea ReservationHave Tea with the Queen.
The Guild of St. Cuthbert is a group of villagers who gather together to parade through the streets of Port Deptford as well as presenting pageants that celebrate the season. They are known for their midday feast where many of the Port Deptford notables are found dining in their Guild yard. Phoebe, the Merry Widow of Port Deptford always has food upon her table and a story to share with the locals.
Founded in the Fall of 1974, by Don Studebaker a.k.a. Jon Declese as a performing group of the Renaissance Pleasure Faires in Northern and Southern California. Our job is to provide people for the Faires’ main parades and major in-house stage shows as well as performing pageants to entertain the visitors. The Northern group was originally St. Cuthbert’s Guild and the Southern group was St. Audrey’s Guild. “Don Jon” was the original Guildmaster of the group and created the structure which we still use today. The second Guildmaster was Rosanne Reynolds, who succeeded “Don Jon” after a faire or two. Sue Honor took over at the Southern Faire of 1978 and has been Guildmaster ever since.
We are still essentially doing the same job today as when we started. We have added an environmental area to give visitors to the Faires an idea of what life was like during the first Elizabeth’s reign. A lunchtime feast is our specialty, with handicrafts, dancing and singing keeping things entertaining throughout the day. We have products for purchase at our Leather and Fiber Arts booths and you can have Tea With The Queen.
* A special thanks to Sydney Martin, Gar Travis, Joe Foley and Tim M. Workman for their generous picture donations. Please visit their websites by clicking on their names.
08/24/2022