“I will not give it a name because the name I would give it is the one my grandmother used and I have been told from a pulpit that the word is improper. So I say what is in the reeds. Every man in this parish knows exactly what I mean. The vicar knows too, and writes down something else.”
As the reed men of the wet country tell it
At the north end of Lantern Mere the cutting was let go. The fen tells that much plainly and goes no further, because nobody there puts the custom and the carrs together aloud. Within ten years the bounty men were bringing heads out of the north carrs to the bailiff at Mereton, and seven of his eleven payments in nine years came from there.
The reed men tell of a boat that went from a staithe and was found back at it afterwards. They tell of three times when something in the carrs made a noise the witnesses would swear was speech, and of how the priory wrote each one down without a word of its own. And they tell what the reed-master said at the sessions of the Holm in 4619. She would not give it a name, she said, because the name she would give was her grandmother’s, and she had been told from a pulpit that the word was improper. So she said what is in the reeds. Every man in the parish knew exactly what she meant, and the vicar knew too, and wrote down something else.
The fen has never agreed on a name and has never needed one. It keeps its reed cut, lights its staithes, and does not go into the carrs after dark.
What is known
Hobbard is the bounty trade’s word, spelt four ways in the march’s five books. The reed men say fen trolls, the priory rolls wild things, Harrowgate market ditch-things or the hand-kind, and the oldest fen word is not said to strangers. They are man-shaped, strong and slow, and young are seen. They keep to the carr edges and reed cuts, and a settlement can usually turn them, but they use what they find and act together. The harder Church houses hold that no rite reaches them and that consecrated ground is closed to them; the Harrowgate priory writes a word chosen to settle nothing; the fen holds them a fen creature.
A holm that leaves its reed cut forfeits it to its neighbours. The Crown pays two shillings a head. The Mereton book’s twelve man-shaped entries are the nearest thing in the march to physical evidence. Away from the wet country they are not reported.