Atlantia has recently seen a succession of Crowns all belonging to a single household, with three of the five couples achieving their duchy. We sat down with the original duchess of the household, Her Grace Emmeline Neuburg, OL, to ask her how the household has managed seven consecutive reigns.
The SCAllion: Your Grace, the Neubergs have had seven reigns in a row, and today the seventh steps down from the throne. Duncan and Rhiannon are both members of the household, correct?
Emmeline Neuburg: Yes, they are. Duncan was my late husband’s squire, and Rhiannon is my apprentice.
S: How does it feel to be at the end of a four year run of your household supporting royalty?
EN: I think it has been very helpful to everyone in the household to understand exactly what it means to sit on the thrones before they fight in Crown, because we’ve all been very involved from the beginning. I’m just sorry that Michael passed away last spring and didn’t get to see our plan through.
S: Your plan?
EN: Of course. In many ways, this has been a culmination of both his training methods and my A&S project into appropriate period performance-enhancing supplements.
S: Can you explain further?
EN: I’m a Laurel now, but when Michael and I were first getting serious about Crown Tournament, I hadn’t found where I wanted to focus my research. Now, being a Queen is disruptive to actually getting research done, but after the first time, I decided I wanted to look at the work of women herbalists and midwives. I found one “recipe for soldiers” that I thought looked interesting, and made a batch to enter at Pennsic A&S. Well, Michael, bless his heart, grabbed the wrong bottle just before the field battle. He came back in such a good mood and not at all tired!
S: So, the effect was to give him more energy?
EN: In so many ways. He’d fought in the front of every battle and said it was like he’d just finished warm ups. Of course, now I didn’t have an entry, but we’d found something worth knowing.
I kept refining the recipe, looking at other similar examples, and he used it before every Crown he fought in and won.
About 5 years ago, his former squires were starting to get really serious about Crown, so he stepped up the household practices and we talked about what it would look like to have a solid bloc of royalty with the same philosophy about reigning and the continuity we could bring. We had also never tried “Duke Juice” on anyone else!
S: This is when you brought the rest of the household in on your secret?
EN: it wasn’t really a secret, most people just didn’t believe it was a period recipe, or if it was, that it did anything! Getting the correct dosage such that someone gets the benefits but not the side effects has turned out to be a little trickier than we thought, but we experimented first at fighter practices, then events and war. It was at war when their ladies started coming to me too – it let them party half the night and still be up to go to 9am classes or volunteer all day.
At which point, the household got together and decided that we were going to see if we could put together a ruling bloc for long enough to effect real change in Atlantia.
S: What were your goals, then?
EN: Oh, making sure that most of the household got their peerages as soon as possible, and that we had fewer restrictions on the marshal orders. Some minor changes in law and policy- I can’t remember all of them now, we changed them over 3 years ago, and people have become accustomed to the new ways of doing things
S: I take it your entire household is on “Duke Juice”, then?
EN: Yes! At different dosages and concentrations, that’s a lot of what my research has been! I’ve refined the recipe, now it’s about the effects on a wider group! And, really, we wouldn’t have survived four years of always having someone on the thrones without something.
S: So, what’s in your Duke Juice?
EN: I mean, my research is entered in Kingdom A&S tomorrow, so I can tell you that it’s an alcohol extraction of arctic root, Siberian ginseng, hemp, valerian root, rose root, and willow bark. It helps with anxiety, pain, energy, and the ability to get things done! I am looking forward to seeing what the rest of the kingdom does with it!
S: Thank you, Your Grace, for speaking with us.
the SCAllion 