“I will use the word to you because you are writing it down and it ought to be written. I will not use it at my own table. There is no reason for that. I could not defend it. I am sixty-three and I am not going to start.”
As the march tells it, by daylight
It came down the northern roads, the march says, in the years the world was ruined. The graves opened. The dead did not keep to their churchyards but travelled, and in numbers, along the northern roads. It was not a bad winter or a bad season. It was measured in years, and the one the march remembers it by is the Year of Open Graves.
The north held out longest, and the holding emptied it. Out in the north-western quarter the field walls still run under the heather, and there is a mill race, three farmhouses standing to the gable, and two churchyards whose stones are still standing. Somebody worked that ground once and buried in those yards. Here the telling divides. The priory says the trouble took the people and nobody was left to come back. The upland says the quarter was left on instruction. The four northern parishes have their own answer, and they keep it from Harrowgate.
Then it went quiet, and the march is careful to say so. It went a long time unseen before it was seen again, and that, the old people say, is why the bells are still rung through the winter and the churchyards still watched. They will give its name to an officer by daylight if he is writing it down. They will not give it after dark or at the table, and in the four northern parishes they will not give it at all.
What is known
The priory holds nothing written in the march itself from the ruin years, and what it has came afterwards, from outside. Within the record nothing of this kind has been reported in the march, and no incident, sighting or loss has come out of the north-western quarter. The priory’s book, begun long after those years, records nobody working it. Four positions are held on why it is empty: the priory’s, the upland’s, the fen’s, which is none, and the northern parishes’, which they do not share.
Through the winter quarter two of the four northern parishes ring every night. All four walk a bound facing the quarter, on a day of its own, and the drove swings four miles wide of its southern edge and loses a day by it. Elsewhere in the realm the thing survives only in the old accounts.