Three facts about Medieval Times. The show is set in medieval Spain and the cast is instructed to speak with English accents. The knights became TikTok heartthrobs during the pandemic. And in 2022, the stable hands at the Buena Park castle qualified for food stamps.

Alessandra Schade's Vanity Fair feature follows Erin Zapcic, a queen who reigned for 13 years, and Jake Bowman, a knight who fractured his lumbar spine when a horse kicked him in Dallas. Together they organized the California castle in the summer of 2022, out of a Starbucks across the street, in five days. The piece opens with Zapcic at midnight, leaning on a 2016 Mazda 3, looking at the concrete castle where she used to be royalty. She now works as a business administrator. She says there is a stupid little voice in her head telling her she is not queen anymore.

That is the whole story in one image. The job is an identity. The identity belongs to the company.

The company dates to a Mallorca barbecue restaurant in the 1960s, whose owner saw El Cid and added jousting. The first American castle opened near Orlando in 1983. There are now ten, drawing an estimated 2.5 million guests a year at $77.95 a head for a four course meal eaten without utensils while men in polyester tabards fight on horseback.

The labor story has four threads. Wages: stable hands started around $16.75 an hour, per an NLRB filing, in a county where the median household income was $116,289. Bodies: knights describe the work as a professional sport with no offseason, and the piece catalogs a fractured spine, a shattered leg with eight screws, a hematoma from a fall, and a stable hand who lost 35 pounds in 11 months. Horses: a 2019 lawsuit, a 2022 email to HR, and a since deleted video all allege that the Buena Park head trainer whipped horses to the point of welts. The trainer sued the knight who posted the video for defamation and says the lunging whip makes a loud pop and does not injure the animal. Locker room: several former queens describe harassment from the knights' department, one of whom filed suit in May 2026. The company denies wrongdoing in every court filing cited.

Then the union. New Jersey filed first, in June 2022. Buena Park followed and won its election in November by nine votes. The company hired a $3,200 a day consultant and sued its own union for using the words Medieval Times. The strike began February 11, 2023 and ran nine months. The company flew in performers from other castles. Patrons crossed the picket line daily. In April, several picketers were struck by a patron's car. By November the strikers returned without a contract, three were refused reinstatement, and the rest report being assigned to clean stalls and recite tongue twisters for months rather than perform. The union was decertified at both castles in early 2024. Zapcic's last show was February 13, 2024, her 13th anniversary with the company.

The fired herald deserves his own paragraph, because his case is the whole dispute in miniature. Lord Cedric reads the pre show announcements from a scroll, and the actors who play him ad lib. Witnesses testified that pop culture jokes were a daily feature, Game of Thrones included, and that Lucas was unusually good at them. In October 2022, five days before the company sued its union over the words Medieval Times, management told Lucas to drop a running bit that referenced Bruno from Encanto, on the grounds that it was "a copyright reference" that "does not fit the Medieval theme." He kept doing it. The final warning in December cites a 5:00 show in which he said the name and stopped short with "oh, we don't talk about him." In the comments box of his own write up Lucas wrote that this is not a copyright violation, "so you're completely wrong about that." He was fired five weeks later, the stated reason being that he was late for a shift.

The judge found the Disney joke was a pretext and the lateness was a pretext and the real reason was the union. So the company that invoked trademark law against its own employees, and lost, also invoked copyright law against a one liner, and lost that too. The show is set in medieval Spain and performed in English accents with frozen margaritas. Authenticity, as Zapcic says, is whatever suits them.

Strip the tabards and this is a story about work that people would do for free. Zapcic took a $7.50 an hour gift shop job because it was the only job she ever loved. Bowman says the job is fun as hell and that the company knows it. Everyone in the piece describes the castle as the best years of their lives. Several also describe it as the place that broke their bodies, paid them poverty wages in Orange County, and then, when they asked for a code of conduct, replaced them with knights flown in from Dallas.

A job people would do for free is a job an employer can underpay for a very long time. The fantasy does the retention work that a salary would otherwise have to do. When a knight in his twenties gets permanently injured, the fantasy ends and the marketable skills turn out to be jousting. Zapcic's line is the one to keep. You can look back on something as the best time in your life and recognize that it was extremely toxic.

I read this with an occupational hazard. Medicine runs on calling too. Residents, nurses, dialysis technicians, and anyone who has ever been told that the work is its own reward will recognize the mechanism, if not the costumes. The castle is a cleaner experiment because nobody pretends the knights are saving lives. The company just sells the feeling of being one.