- The Shires and the Quiet Country
- The Market Towns
- Villages, Vestries, and the Order of a Small Place
- Wool, Storage, and the Long Arithmetic
- What the County Says of the City
- Fairs, Feast Days, Local Champions, and County Fame
“Ther ben but two questiouns in this shire and thei ben asked every yeer: hath the clippe come in, and wil the hay laste. Al other maters may wayte upon thise two, and comunly doon.”
The Shires and the Quiet Country
The county is four countries rather than one, as its own people describe it. Each of the four has its use. The vale, the low ground along the Sarr above the city, is the richest land and the earliest enclosed, the estate country once and the engine country now. The Wold is the chalk upland north and west, and carries the drove roads, the pits, and the thinnest population of the four. The Downs run south and east, open sheep country with villages lying in the folds and hollows of it. And along the tributaries lie the water meadows, which are the hay ground, small in extent and out of all proportion to their extent in value.
The Fain, largest of the Sarr’s tributaries in the county, matters because it makes a strip of heavy fertile ground on the inner rim east of the city, and because that ground is worked more like an estate account than a countryside. Great green-coal engines plough, drain, reap and thresh there, the machines hired or owned by the charter companies whose chapters sit in Sarrum and by the larger houses besides. A man riding the Fain in season may see three hundred acres turned by iron in a day, with one engineer and six labourers doing the work that would take a parish a week. The grain, roots and fodder from those flats are among the hidden reasons the city is fed as long as it is.
One sight every roadman knows is Horseman’s Tower, the ruin on a rocky hill above the lower farmland, prominent for miles and avoided at any nearer distance. The county story says it was once the house of a pious knight who was possessed, slew his wife and children within it, and hanged himself from the stair beam before dawn. The tower is a shell now, split and fallen, yet blood orchids grow among its stones and nowhere else in the county; and because country tradition holds that those flowers answer the presence of demons, no villager will cut them and no sensible drover shelters there. A company sent to ask questions on the rim will be told of Horseman’s Tower whether it asks or not.
At the opposite margin lie the Bone Marshes, untamed ground the county would rather go around than through. They are a low, wet, noxious body of reed, black water and sour mist beyond the last managed drains, never fully reclaimed and never entered without cause. Travellers on the rim roads see lights moving in the fog there on still evenings, yellow or blue by report, and sometimes hear drumming from inside the marsh after dark, slow and regular as though carried over water from a place that ought not to hold any settlement. The county explains the lights by gas, the drumming by poachers, and does not go in to prove either answer.
Population runs thin by valley standards, and runs unevenly. A Downs village of two hundred may have four miles of open ground between it and its neighbour; the Wold holds hamlets of thirty; the four market towns hold between eleven hundred and four thousand each; and the whole county outside Sarrum town amounts to perhaps sixty thousand souls, spread over ground that would hold three times as many in the valleys.
Distance orders the quiet country, and people navigate it by features rather than by mileage. Nine Barrows Ridge carries the western drove high enough to be seen from three parishes; White Flint Hill is the chalk rise above the Fain farms; Rook Combe cuts south from the Wold and holds water only in hard winters; Long Sheep Down is open enough that a rider may be visible on it for an hour. A parish may still be eight miles across, and the constable, incumbent and nearest surgeon may lie in three different directions.
Water gives the lower country its finer map. Redwater runs rust-coloured after rain from the iron ground and joins the Fain above the estate ring. Lark Bourne is a winter stream on the Wold shoulder, dry by May in ordinary years and watched closely now that other bournes have failed. Mere Rill drains the upper edge of the flash country into the Sarr. Shepherd’s Brook is little more than a ditch in summer, but its flooded meadows are among the best hay acres in the county. Fain Bridge carries the eastern road over the tributary beside the Four Ewes, an isolated inn that lives on factors, engineers and drovers. Black Willow Bridge lies farther down toward the marsh road; Redwater Ford remains preferred by stock in low water because the bridge above it is narrow.
The empty miles are therefore named even when they are thinly inhabited. Long Acre Farm stands alone between Fain Bridge and White Flint Hill, with enough engine-worked ground to look like a company estate and no village around it. Cresswell Fold is a sheep holding under Nine Barrows Ridge and the last reliable water before the higher drove. The Pilgrim’s Ash, an inn at the split for Wetherslade and Barrow Combe, is used as a message point because every carrier knows it. A traveller may ride four hours and pass nine houses, but he will cross ground whose names are known precisely by people who rarely write them down. The county’s reputation for silence comes from that combination: sparse settlement, complete local memory, and the certainty that a stranger described at one crossing will be known at the next.
One date it has of its own. The Wold has never let go of it. The pursuits and feuds of the later 4200s, Stone Oast, the Grey Weir tolls, and the long ridge-road hunting the country still calls the Pursuit without saying whose, settled how the Wold is used and by whom, and settled it without a court, a house, or a single line of statute. A man who runs onto the Wold today is dealt with by usages four centuries old, made in fear by people who were running from one another. That is also why the Water Court sits where it does, and why the drovers supply two of its four judges: the roads and the water were settled in the same quarrel.
The Market Towns
“Wetherslade for the fleece, Barrow Combe for the beast, Mereford Cross for the wagon, Coldwell for the store. A man who knows those four knows where everything in this county has been and where it is going.”
Wetherslade stands second among the towns of the county and first among its markets: some four thousand people on the western Downs, built around a wool market held on the same ground since before the reclamation of Aerth. It has a covered market hall, four inns of standing, a grammar school endowed in 4508, a fine church, and a regard for itself that Sarrum finds comic. For a fortnight each October the great fleece fair fills it to three times its size. The prices set there govern the county.
Barrow combe sits in its hollow on the Wold’s southern edge where four drove roads meet, holds about two thousand people, and exists for beasts. Its market is stock rather than wool; its principal building is the drover court; its inns are drovers’ inns, rougher than Wetherslade would tolerate. Of all the county’s markets it is the oldest continuously held, and the Rolle of the Drove kept there runs back to 4155. Mereford cross, the carriage town, is eleven hundred people at the junction of the eastern carriage road and the north road; it exists to feed and stable and mend and forward, and it holds the waystations, the wheelwrights, the farriers, two large inns and the county’s biggest concentration of carriers. Coldwell, the storage town and the least visited, keeps fifteen hundred people about the largest concentration of bonded granaries and fodder stores outside the city, sited where the chalk gives cold, dry cellarage. It is dull and prosperous. After Sarrum itself it is the one place in the county of most consequence, since what Coldwell holds is what stands between the belt and hunger in March.
All four are governed alike, and the pattern is the county’s basic unit of self-rule. Each has a market council of twelve to twenty burgesses, elected by the ratepayers and presided over by a warden or a mayor. Each holds its market by charter and takes the tolls. Each appoints its own ward constables, keeps its own lock-up, and maintains its own streets and, where they exist, its drains. Their liberties are old and jealously defended; hence no house bailiff has authority inside a chartered town.
None of the four is a small Sarrum. None wishes to be. Each is older than the city by three centuries; each holds its market by a charter granted before there was anything at the wharf worth granting one to; each keeps a court the county recognises. What they do is not make but gather: the clip, the beasts, the grain and the news of a district, for onward sale to a place they regard as a regrettable necessity.
Their relation to Sarrum is commercial dependence with social contempt, the two held at once and without embarrassment. Every one of the four sends its produce to the city weekly and would be in ruin inside a year without it. Every one keeps a chapter presence, a proper church, a grammar school and a bench, four institutions more than Sarrum has, and mentions it. A company that works the towns should expect to be judged on manners in a way the city never troubles to judge anybody.
Villages, Vestries, and the Order of a Small Place
“Twelve men on a vestry and eight of them related. I have served on ours nine years and could tell you before the meeting how every question will go. That is not corruption. That is a village.”
Below the towns lie some ninety villages and hamlets, running from four hundred people down to thirty. Little Wether, Ewesbourne, Shepcote and Netherby are the ones a traveller is likeliest to meet, with Cranmoor, Hoggett Green and Tupp’s End behind them. The smaller are chapelries rather than parishes, and share an incumbent with a neighbour, who visits on alternate Sundays.
The vestry is the unit of government in this county, and the institution of which Sarrum has no equivalent. Eleven of them there are, each meeting monthly in a church, each composed of the householders who pay the rate, each with authority over the poor, the roads within the parish, the church fabric and the bounds. The offices are the valleys’, incumbent, churchwardens, overseers, constable; yet the character differs in two ways that matter. The holdings are larger, so that the substantial householders are fewer and their dominance the more complete; and the families are older, so that a vestry is commonly a handful of households bound by blood and marriage who have been settling the same questions for generations. They keep books. They keep them well, and have kept them four hundred years, which makes them the best muniments in the belt outside the Collegium.
The distinctive office is the fold reeve, and the valleys have no such thing. Sheep country requires the management of common grazing, the order of folding, the moving of flocks between the down and the enclosed ground, and the settlement of disputes about all three, and the fold reeve is the man for all of it: elected annually by the commoners, unpaid, keeper of the fold book, and holder of powers over the common that no other village officer possesses. In many Downs villages he matters more from day to day than the constable does.
The hiring fairs are the other fixture, and are where a village meets the world. Held twice a year at each of the four market towns, they hire the servants in husbandry, young men and women engaged by the year, living in their employers’ households, moving on or staying at the fair. It puts the county’s young people in front of one another once a year, so that a very large proportion of Sarrum marriages begin at a hiring fair.
What the villages lack is anything to do. The valleys have the tithe economy, the road traffic and the constant business of a densely settled country; Sarrum’s villages have sheep, a market eight miles off, silence, and winter. Winter, more than anything the city offers, is the honest reason so many of the young are lost to it. The vestries know it. They can do nothing about it.
What a vestry does about poverty is the sharpest and gravest contrast with the city, and neither side comes out of it cleanly. A parish relieves its own, from the rate, as an obligation, which is more than Sarrum offers anybody; yet it also removes those who are not its own, promptly and without much ceremony, to the parish where they belong. The people who cannot be placed go to the city, which asks nothing.
Wool, Storage, and the Long Arithmetic
“Anybody can keep hay till Christmas. The art is keeping it till March, and the art is not in the keeping. It is in knowing in September how much you will need, and being right, and being right when everybody around you was wrong.”
The wool year begins at shearing in June and ends when the last of the clip is sold, and between those two points the whole county is engaged in it. Shearing gangs move from holding to holding; the clip is rolled, wrapped and carted to Wetherslade or direct to the city; the grading is done by the Weavers’ officers, and the grade determines the price absolutely, so that a holding whose clip grades badly two years running is a holding in trouble.
Everything else the county does is arranged around the arithmetic of the long store. A clip comes off in June. It is graded, sold and paid for over the four months following, and the money must then last until the next June, through the dark half of the year, in which the beasts must be fed lest they starve and nothing whatever is earned. A holding is therefore always spending money it received nine months ago against costs it will not recover for another three, and the Bank Council exists, in all its parts, because of that gap.
Storage is what makes the gap survivable, and it is more finely worked than a visitor expects. A clip may be sold at the grading, sold forward before it is off the beast, or stored in a staple house and sold when the price suits. The third is the profitable choice, and it requires the holder to be able to wait, which is to say to have money, which is to say to be a large holding or to have a bank behind him. The county is divided, therefore, not by acreage but by patience. A holding that can store sells at the top of the market perhaps two years in three; a holding that cannot sells at the grading in June with everybody else, when by definition the price has fallen furthest. Sperrin’s notes record the differential at between a seventh and a fifth over a decade, compounding, which is why the ring has been bought up by people who already had money.
The storage houses are not a loose custom but a formal institution, governed with the drover courts, and they are bonded. Grain and fodder enter under a warrant, are held at the owner’s risk and the house’s liability, and are released against a note that circulates as money in the county. A Coldwell note is as good as coin from Wetherslade to Cambridge, and better than coin in a hard, cold winter; and the discounting of storage notes is a substantial part of the Bank Council’s ordinary business.
In storage lies the county’s one intellectual specialism, and the one thing it is genuinely proud of. The question is not how to keep fodder but how much will be needed, which requires an estimate of the winter made in September on evidence that is mostly indirect. Sarrum men make this estimate every year, argue about it without ceasing, and are right more often than any comparable body in Britannia. The weakness of the whole is that it hangs on that estimate entirely: a county that has reckoned short buys in fear, at panic prices, from Kent and the west; a county that has reckoned long has money tied up in fodder that will rot. Both have happened within living memory. The bad reckoning of 4587 cost the county more than any single event since the Water Days, and is spoken of in the storage houses in the tone other places keep for a battle.
For an outsider, this is where Sarrum’s peculiar temperament comes from, and it goes to the bone. Oxford’s authority is sanctified and Cambridge’s is examined; Sarrum’s is simply that it has been right about the winter for four hundred years. That is cold ground to stand on, cold in a way neither of the others is, and it makes a cold people. They know perfectly well how they are regarded. They have concluded that being right is sufficient.
What the County Says of the City
“They ask me at Wetherslade whether I have been down to Sarrum lately, in the tone a man uses about an illness in the family. And their fleeces go there, and their sons go there, and their notes are discounted there, and they know it.”
Beyond the estate ring and the last industrial roads, respectable county people speak of Sarrum with something stronger than disapproval. The good folk of Wetherslade, Barrow Combe, Coldwell and the smaller parishes commonly treat a city birth as a stain: Sarrum people are dirty, godless, loose in family, familiar with drink and gangs, careless of burial, and too used to the Afflicted to know what ought to trouble them. A maid from the city may be refused household service because she is thought unclean in habit; a Sarrum labourer may be watched around daughters and stores; a child with the city accent can be called rubble before anybody knows where he actually slept. Much of the contempt is sharpened by the belief that a very large part of Sarrum is Afflicted, which is true enough to feed every uglier version of the story. The county is clean, churched, orderly and thinly peopled, and it uses those facts as moral evidence. Nobody in Wetherslade would willingly live under Sarrum’s smoke. Almost everybody in Wetherslade has a cousin, son, debtor, customer or former servant there, and sends goods into the city every week. Dependence has never made the contempt smaller. It has made it more elaborate.
The account is consistent, is repeated in four market towns and eleven vestries in much the same words, and has four parts. That the city takes and does not return, the young lost to it and very few coming back. That the city’s halls set the grades and therefore the prices, and the county has a vote in neither. That the city’s filth runs downstream through country with no remedy, since the Sarr below the town waters the eastern Downs and the Chalk Wold Water Court has no jurisdiction over a river fouled lawfully by a licensed trade. And that its people are godless, which the county says with more sorrow than malice, and which is a fact of how the place was made rather than a choice anybody made.
Every element of it can be dated to an event in the county’s own history, which is the useful thing to notice. The wood grievance is the charcoal iron that Sarrum worked for a century and a half before it burned coal, and the two petitions of 4381 A.C. and 4402 are in Sperrin’s notes in full. The walls are 4489. The gates being shut is 4543. The young are the ploughing engines from 4560 and the line from 4574. Nothing in the county’s view of the city is recent, and nothing in it was invented.
The city’s view in return is at once briefer and less troubled. The county is slow, sanctimonious and comfortable, complains without ceasing about a trade it depends on absolutely, and would be a good deal poorer without the halls. Sarrum men point out that the county’s wool would be worth a third less unsealed, which is true; county men reply that the seal is theirs by right and has been captured, which is arguable. Between the two stands the wool trade itself, with a foot in each and satisfying nobody: the Staplers buy in the county and sell in the city, their members live in Wetherslade, their hall is in Fleecegate, and their permanent quarrel with the Weavers is, seen from the Downs, the county’s quarrel with the city conducted by proxy. Josiah Thane, a Wetherslade man and a Stapler, has spent thirty years being distrusted in both places.
What the county never says, and what makes the whole position more interesting than a grievance, is that it wants the city to stop. Every holding inside the ring depends on Sarrum’s appetite. The market towns exist to supply it. The pit villages are peopled by county families. A vestry that has spent an hour on what the city has taken will spend the next arranging what it will send in on Tuesday, and both conversations are held in earnest.
The city, for its part, is wholly in the dark about all this, and that is the part a company can use. The reverse holds just as true. A Sarrum man believes the county to be a field with sheep in it and eleven thousand people who resent him for no reason he can name. He does not know about the wood, has never heard of the Long Feed, and would be astonished to learn that four petitions have been made about a forest cut down three centuries ago and long since forgotten there.
Fairs, Feast Days, Local Champions, and County Fame
The October fleece fair at Wetherslade is the county's largest temporary city, but it is only the summit of a crowded seasonal circuit. Hiring fairs at the four charter towns move young servants between households. Horse fairs bring dealers, farriers, bookmakers, thieves, and House buyers into the same yards. Parish feast days produce wrestling, shooting, running, bell contests, cake tables, drinking, dances, and the annual argument over which village has cheated at something nobody outside the parish considers important.
Local celebrity belongs to this circuit. A ram breeder who wins Wetherslade twice is discussed for years. A drove master known for getting cattle through winter flood becomes more valuable than his social rank suggests. Wrestlers, runners, shots, bell teams, horse doctors, poachers, pie women, comic singers, eccentric incumbents, and famously hard bargaining widows can all possess county reputations larger than those of minor gentry. The city sometimes mocks these figures until it needs their animals, routes, labour, or information.
Sarrum performers increasingly travel outward into the fairs, carrying city songs into villages that dislike the city and returning with older melodies nobody in Hollowgate remembers are rural. Gang men use fairs to meet beyond their ordinary ground; companies use them to recruit guides; young people use them to court beyond parish scrutiny; thieves use them because everybody else is carrying cash. A fair commission can therefore begin with a missing ram, a rigged wrestling purse, or a stolen harness and end in a dispute between House land, gang debt, and three generations of village resentment.