Duke Matthew Wychmere

Head of House Wychmere, the Hazel Rods, whose old standing lies in hedged country, minor waters, wood-edge settlement and survey custom; a collector of maps and patron of antiquarians, useful in boundary disputes and prey to forged charters.

Duke Matthew Wychmere heads House Wychmere, the Hazel Rods. The house’s old standing belongs to hedged country, minor waters, wood-edge settlement, survey custom, and the small boundary knowledge by which apparently peaceful districts remain peaceful. It is associated with the interpretation of surveys whose lines have outlived the men who set them, and Wychmere money appears behind antiquarian work, ride proposals and timber claims.

Matthew is a collector of local maps and an enthusiastic patron of antiquarians. That has made him genuinely useful in old-boundary disputes and vulnerable to every fraud involving a forged charter or a convenient ancestor. His agents are received seriously by the Wychwood woodmote, but they are not obeyed there: that court reads a Great House charter as evidence beside its own roll, not as an instruction. The house, when it is being sensible, sends people who know how to sit through a court in the open air.

Like other Great Houses, Wychmere rarely wants a remote manor for its own sake. It wants a resource or a route at the wood’s edge, and it has the patience and the specialists to wait for one. Its weakness is distance: a Wychmere factor may hire a mage and still fail for not knowing which widow keeps the key to the old boundary chest.

Companies meet the Hazel Rods over old lines: a boundary stone moved, a charter that has surfaced too conveniently, a survey that must be walked before a claim can be pressed. The duke pays well for a true map, and is learning, slowly, to pay better for proof that a false one is false.

In person

Slightly stooped, with a narrow scholarly face, wire spectacles and dark chestnut hair going grey, the duke is a clean-shaven man in his late fifties who looks more like an antiquarian than the head of a Great House. He dresses as a scholar-landowner, and his long fingers are usually stained with ink. Boundary maps, old charters, seals and measuring rods are the furniture of his rooms, and he is plainly more at ease with a survey than with a sword.