Blight is corruption: ground that stops keeping faith with itself, and living things cursed in mind or in body. It rarely comes as spectacle. It comes as sour milk, a thin bell and a lane the dogs refuse, long before anyone can prove why.
“Wher lampe, belle, water, grave, and sesoun cesse to answere in her acustomed ordre, lat no man clepe the place sound oonly for that his walles yet stonde.”
What blight is
Blight is the name sensible people give a district that is going wrong in its terms of life. The ground still stands, the walls still stand, but land, water, grave and season stop answering in their accustomed order, and what lives on that ground starts to go wrong with it. Corruption is the same thing seen in a single body: a beast or a person the blight has reached.
Nobody agrees on one cause, and there is rarely only one. Failed burial, a lapsed pact, an angry spirit, infernal taint, the waste of old works and the poisoned store all end under the one word. That is why blight is so feared: it ends with a whole district asking whether it can still call itself governable.
The first alterations
Wrongness is noticed before it is explained. A bell sounds dull where it always rang clear. Candles fail in one house. River mud smells sweet. Water tastes of metal or old flowers. A field stays green while the stock go thin on it, fruit swells without sweetness, crows all turn one way, and children stop mentioning a place they used to name happily. A shrine keeps receiving offerings but no longer settles the road. None of this proves a single cause. Together, it raises the older suspicion that a place is not merely suffering hardship but ceasing to keep faith with itself.
The curse in the living
Blight does not stop at soil and water. It reaches what lives on the ground, beasts and people alike, and what it does to them the country calls a curse. Some curses blight the mind: a dog that no longer knows its master, a herd that turns on the herdsman, a creature that was tame and is now feral in a way no wild animal is. Others blight the body: scale where there should be skin, an extra eye, a second mouth, an impossible limb. All of them blight the soul.
In beasts the curse can breed true. The wild country keeps corruption-bred lines that no longer behave like animals at all, and companies are hired against them as they are against wolves, at a higher rate. In people it is the harder matter. A person judged to carry the curse is called Afflicted, whether the sign is a mark on the body or a power nobody taught, and the realm answers with fear: Oxford bars them, parishes refuse them lodging, and villages strip and search them. Physicians blame bad water or inheritance, spirit-workers old pressure of place, arcanists exposure, and priests the stain of sin. Each explanation can be wrong in one case and necessary in another.
Years, not weeks
Popular tales compress it into a week. In truth it takes months, and more often years. There are small irregularities nobody connects, then a long unhappiness in which several people keep private tallies and each is afraid to speak first, then a few weeks in which the district admits aloud that something is wrong, and only then a response. The delay is not stupidity. The first person to say it has made a claim about the parish that cannot be withdrawn, and has started something the parish cannot afford. Usually, besides, the milk is souring because the dairy is dirty.
Wards fail in the same quiet way. The mark stays sound and visible, but the household stops believing in it. Sleep goes, animals will not settle indoors, and families quarrel. One wardwright says he is fetched to marriages more often than to hauntings, and that the two are often the same call.
Nether Studley, 4609 to 4613
In one ordinary midland parish a northern field carried thin stock, the incumbent’s dog would not pass one gate, and a child disliked the top lane. Three women kept tallies without knowing of each other. A ward failed and was remade for two shillings. In March 4612 the parish admitted the trouble within eleven days, and a proctor found in a single day that field, gate and lane lay on an old boundary unwalked since 4604. The family that had led the walk for four generations had lost its last man, and the walk had simply never been held again.
Beating the bounds did not answer, nor did a Concord-style arrangement. A suppressing order at the archdeaconry’s expense ended it over three nights. Nether Studley now walks its boundary every year, with a turnout the rural dean calls excessive.
Who answers, and who pays
A parish consults its elders, then its priest, then a sexton or shrine-keeper, then the reeve or magistrate, and only later sends for broader force. In poor places the chain often breaks after the second step. A wardwright costs a few shillings, and a full suppressing order eight to fifteen pounds, met by an archdeaconry, a manor or a subscription. Those are the smallest costs. The larger ones are ground out of use, stock sold badly, the young who leave, and the discount neighbours put on a parish known to have had the orders in. A poor parish with no patron may stay in the long unhappiness for good.
For a company
Evidence reaches a company old and much discussed. By Hob Larkin’s test, a story that arrives in one shape has been told and one that arrives in eleven has been seen. The real work is finding what was dropped, because a parish that learns which obligation lapsed can take it up again. The places where nothing was ever found are more common. They are not hostile, only careful to the point of exhaustion: strangers watched rather than challenged, questions about the past answered accurately and briefly. The hamlet at the head of the Mere Wold vale was never resettled at all.