Alabaster & Who?
Alabaster & Clarke Wine Tours does not exit, Arblaster & Clarke Wine Tours however does! and was founded in 1986 by Lynette Arblaster & Tim Clarke. We are Arblaster and Clarke Wine Tours, not Alabaster and Clarke Wine Tours or even Alabaster & Clark Wine Tours as sometimes stated incorrectly. Alabaster and Clarke Wine Tours has even been used as our name in travel and wine articles!
Arblaster
Arblaster is the name which people often ask us about. It is old English for a "Crossbowman". As the English did not use many crossbows in Medieval times it is a pretty rare name.
Interestingly there were 80 Arblasters at the battle of Againcourt, along with the 8000 or so Archers. The Archers are credited with winning the battle against a French army, some 4 or 5 times the size consisting of heavily armoured knights and mercenary crossbowmen (Arbaleteriers).
Revisionist historians have downgraded the effect of the massed longbow fire and put more emphasis on the heavy ground and row of sharpened stakes which broke the charge of the French knights, then proposing that the archers secondary armaments, (such as hammers and chisels), actually did the damage.
As for the Arblasters, they would normally have been defending the baggage train, which seems to have been undefended because it was captured by a couple of French Knights and some peasants. (Unless the Arblasters didn't do their job properly! Unthinkable!). Perhaps they were in the front line, or perhaps they were looking after the prisoners, many of whom were killed during the crisis of the battle after the loss of the baggage train.
It's all in Shakespere's Henry V. - I'm sure that Pistol was an Arblaster really.
Alabaster & Clarke
Clarke is usually a Scottish or Irish name, and in our case it is Irish. It is believed to be associated with village clerks, though there are associations with the O'Cleary Clan in Ireland and the Camerons and Clan Chattan in Scotland. Tim Clarke is 1/4 Irish (the Clarke bit) and Lynette Arblaster 1/2 Irish, all the rest being English!
Clark is the Scottish spelling of the name. - If your partner's name is Arblaster you get used to being a Clark. It is an advance on being called "Monsieur Arblaster" as Tim sometimes gets called in France.
Presumably there are people called Alabaster, and presumably their ancestors were alabaster carvers. Thus the medieval Alabaster and Clarke would have been Irish alabaster carvers who could read and write! This may explain why they don't exist.
Anyway enough about Alabaster and Clarke Wine Tours and Alabaster and Clark, Alabaster & Clark, Arblaster and Clark, and Arblaster & Clark too!
