Walking to Camelot

by John A. Cherrington

  “They show good form standing like that, cautiously circl-ing one another on their hind legs. They even feint and pivot.”

  “One of them kicks his legs out as well — like Mike Tyson on steroids.” I wonder whether the females are hiding in the tall grass watching the show.

  DIARY: Down into the village of Hallaton, passing a large duck pond and a conical market cross resembling a nuclear rocket silo. Found the Fox Inn, where we enjoyed a pint of local brew and learned all about the famous bottle-kicking and hare-pie-scrambling contests. The village is also famous for the Hallaton Treasure, a hoard of some 5,000 Roman silver and gold coins and jewellery. The odd part is that the coins were in the possession of the local Celtic tribe, the Corieltauvi, well before Caesar’s conquest, and one Roman coin was dated to 211 BC, making it the oldest Roman coin ever found in Britain. The site was also a Druidic shrine.

  Hallaton’s quirky tradition involving ale and hares dates back to 1698. The event also involves a second village, named Medbourne. Folk music, a church service, fierce wrestling, and liquid refreshments combine to stir up the locals in a blend of pride, passion, violence, and virility.

  For almost two hundred years until 1962, the Hallaton rector was required to host the event, because a parcel of land was gifted to the rectory in 1770 on the express condition that the rector provide two hare pies, a quantity of ale, and two dozen penny loaves, to be scrambled for on Easter Monday each year after he had preached his divine service. The land, called Hare Crop Leys, was donated by two ladies who wished to give thanks to God for delivering them from goring by a bull by intervening at the last moment in the form of a hare — the hare having diverted the bull’s attention, allowing the women to escape the field in which they were walking on a footpath.

  The event consists of two segments. First, a parade leaves the Fox Inn, led by a warrener carrying a staff topped with a hare. (It used to be a real dead hare but is now a carved replica.) He is accompanied by assistants who lug baskets of bread and hare pie and three bottles of ale. The bottles are actually kegs, each weighing five kilograms. Upon arrival at the church, the pie is blessed by the vicar then tossed to the assembled crowd in bits and pieces. How much ends up actually eaten and how much is left on the ground for the dogs is an open question.

  The second stage of the event is the macho phase of bottle kicking. The parade proceeds to Hare Pie Bank. Bottle kicking is a rough-and-tumble game. The normally friendly relations between the two villages turns to dark hostility in Hallaton Brook, where it can get downright vicious, and also on the hilltops, where the participants engage in a fierce, rowdy battle to wrestle and wrench the casks of ale back to their own village. It’s down and dirty in rugby-like scrums, with no referee. Torn fingernails, sprains, bruises, and cracked ribs are common. Once one bottle is won by a side, it is hustled up to the top of the hill and a second, lighter bottle is then fought for — and a third bottle in the event of a tie. After the winning village is declared, everyone rushes back to the Fox Inn for liquid refreshments.

  The tradition has been so fiercely defended that when one rector threatened to cease provision of the ale and pies, he was threatened by the villagers: “No ale and pie — no rector.” The rector hastily relented. Villagers know their rights. It appears that they always did.

  The village of Peatling Magna, near Hallaton, supported Simon de Montfort against King Henry III in 1265, in Montfort’s revolt to enforce Magna Carta and protect barons and their villeins from arbitrary exercise of royal authority. When the king’s men entered Peatling Magna after defeating Montfort at the Battle of Evesham, they were given a cool reception — as they were in fact at Hallaton. The villagers told the armed men to leave, on the basis that they were not representative of the communitas regni, or community of the realm, which the villagers believed entitled everyone to basic rights. The villagers sued the king’s representative, Peter de Nevill, and were actually given a hearing in the royal court. Although they lost the lawsuit and had to pay a fine, they took a stand to assert the protection of the following pledges of Magna Carta:

  No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way; nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals, or by the law of the land.

  To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.

  Until recently, most historians have assumed medieval villa-gers to be coarse, ignorant, and utterly servile. Well, they may have been illiterate, perhaps coarse, but evidently not so servile. The distinguished English historian Michael Wood, in his work In Search of England, argues that historians have seriously underestimated the lust for freedom possessed by common people in the Middle Ages.

  Further, the derogatory terms serf and villein (the origin of villain) are much misrepresented in history class. Serfs and villeins thought the term “free man” in Magna Carta applied to them and not just to some tiny group of lords and knights. As Frances and Joseph Gies write in their Life in a Medieval Village, the “unfreedom of the villein or serf was never a generalized condition, like slavery, but always consisted of specific disabilities . . . The villein remained ‘a free man in relation to all men other than his lord.’ ” The authors conclude that “a rich villein was a bigger man in the village than a poor free man.” The prototype of the stalwart peasant, loyal and pious but stubborn, is perhaps best presented in the medieval poem Piers Plowman. The peasant was also independent in thought, as recognized by Oliver Goldsmith when he wrote the line “A bold peasantry, their country’s pride.”

  In medieval times, England’s villages lay at the heart of the open field system, where common fields were available for grazing animals and growing corn and wheat. All of this disappeared for villagers, beginning in the late sixteenth century and culminating in the Enclosure statutes of the early nineteenth century. Freedom of tenure was a concept that villagers had practised from Anglo-Saxon times, even if they did not technically own any of the common land on which their animals grazed or their crops were planted. Yes, they had to do work for the local lord’s demesne, but they got to work their own “furlong” as well — and eventually, instead of having to work the lord’s land, they paid him a form of tribute each year for the right to work land that over time might become their own, either by leasehold or by fee simple.

  Enclosure rendered the poor destitute and retarded the evolution of the peasants’ landholding rights. When the Industrial Revolution arrived, it was the poorest peasants who first drifted to cities like Manchester and Birmingham to seek subsistence wages. A similar movement is occurring in the countryside of China today with the drive to industrialization in cities like Chongqing.

  Hallaton slumbers in peaceful splendour on this late May morning. On the outskirts of town, however, we spy a sobering reminder of the brutish bottle-kicking festival. A plaque on a stone pillar reads:

  In memory of Anthony James Hough,

  24 July 1971–09 April 2002.

  “Karl, I read in the pamphlet that an Anthony Hough died of a suspected heart attack in the heat of a scrimmage at the 2002 bottle-kicking contest.”

  “Poor bugger.”

  We are escorted by thrushes, crows, and rooks flirting and scolding and soaring overhead. The path plunges through a gap in a disused railway embankment, where we cross an old Roman road to proceed across a minute stone span over the River Welland. We have now left Leicestershire and entered Northamptonshire. The sky remains veiled yet bright, like some coquettish bride. The day’s experiences create a rush in my blood. I yearn to pound the trail ahead and drink in the ecstasy of the English spring.

  Throughout Northamptonshire there is a paucity of farm animals. Large, sweeping fields of varied crops predominate. A few tracts are overrun with crimson clover and common vetch, plus purple and rose lupines here and there in clumps, vying with the ubiquitous thistles. We are pleasantly sur
prised today to encounter many butterflies and moths, one of which is the Jersey tiger moth, as beautiful as any butterfly, with vivid orange markings. A day-flying species, it is highly resistant to chemicals.

  There is a familiar leitmotif to this landscape. Everything is topsy-turvy. Roads and lanes twist and curve, elongate and contract. Hedgerows hide their own secrets as well as blocking the view. Grassy uplands, growing crops, and fallow fields twist and contour in the most idiosyncratic, capricious, and erratic manner possible. The only ordered logicality to the landscape is found in the Fens. Elsewhere, a village one mile from one’s home can be literally lost in some coomb that few people ever visit — or leave, for that matter. Many rural inhabitants, like Lady Chatterley’s gardener at Brooke, seldom venture beyond a limited periphery — reluctant like Ratty to ever leave the Wild Wood.

  It was and is all about the shire. The shire or county is equivalent to a North American county in only rough terms, because whereas across the pond the county is merely an administrative territory, in England the shire was paramount, often coming before country. As Kipling wrote of his fellow countrymen, “One spot shall prove beloved over all.” Most of the shire boundaries were settled before the end of the reign of Edward the Elder, King Alfred’s son, who ruled from 899 to 924. And so the identification of the English with the shire as a distinct home territory has endured for over a thousand years.

  The Normans, after 1066, adopted the Anglo-Saxon administrative units but changed the name from “shire” to “county.” The chief officer was the sheriff — hence the evil Sheriff of Nottingham from Robin Hood’s era — who reported directly to the Crown. The sheriff was not replaced in his duties until 1888, when county councils were established. The loyalty expressed by the English to their home turf has spilled over from village and countryside to the urban cores. A man plays football for Birmingham and England, not England and Birmingham. And of course, within one’s shire, loyalty is first and foremost to one’s village or town.

  In a succession of high, muddy fields near Braybrooke, the sticky wet rape plants obscure the footpath. I holler at Karl to stick to the proper route, but I really just want him to slow down. In any case, he pays no attention.

  I finally rationalize — it may be trespass, but it’s the farmer’s own fault, so I follow Karl’s easier route around the field. I remember A.E. Housman’s lines:

  Laws for themselves and not for me,

  And if my ways are not as theirs

  Let them mind their own affairs.

  Fortunately, we hear no shotgun warnings in these Northamptonshire fields. In fact we often walk all day and barely see a soul. Even the normally ubiquitous crows and rooks shun our company. Mind you, I do receive a scare: upon topping a rise in a high field I find myself staring at a grim-faced soldier near the path, clad in scarlet uniform, bearskin hat, and wellies, brandishing a real musket, fresh off the battlefield of Waterloo! I approach him cautiously, and it is only when ten feet away that I am certain that this apparition is a scarecrow — one very sophisticated scarecrow. I don’t know if the rooks and crows are impressed, but the dude certainly had me fooled.

  DIARY: Saw a sign for cyclists on a post: “Over Kelmarsh betwixt woods and spinneys.” How quaint.

  The Guide cautions: “Watch for holes in the path — badgers abound here!” Too late for Karl, as ahead of me I see him suddenly lurch and fall to his knees. But he picks himself up, cursing, and dusts himself off.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Damn rabbits! Twisted my ankle a little — nothing much.”

  “The Guide warns that these are badger setts.”

  Karl grimaces. I hear another muffled curse, and then off he goes, stamping his walking stick furiously, his pace unslackened.

  Brampton Ash village is full of hundreds of colourful hens running free range on a covered run. Karl spots a milk delivery van in the lane and hails the driver, and before I know it he is quaffing back fresh milk from an old-fashioned glass milk bottle. I follow suit. Milk never tasted so good. We return the bottles empty to the van before climbing a long, steep hill out of the village.

  We are halfway up the winding hill when I hear a clattering racket. Around the bend bearing down on us is a pony trap being driven by a slender, rosy-cheeked woman, her long raven hair flying in the wind, with an elderly, hollow-cheeked man resembling Frankenstein’s monster standing on a platform behind her. Karl and I dive into a ragged hawthorn hedge to save ourselves. I wave as they go thundering by, but they seem oblivious to our presence.

  “That girl could be the free-spirited Bathsheba right out of Far from the Madding Crowd.”

  “It’s certainly strange, John, that neither of them even gave us a glance. If we hadn’t rolled smartly into the hedge, I swear they would have run us down without a thought.”

  We soon turn right at a group of unusual red-brick barns called the Red Hovel. On the far side of the busy A6 we hit a spinney (a small area of scrubby bush) and navigate a flimsy plank bridge over the River Jordan. At Braybrooke we find the earthwork mounds of Braybrooke Castle, which was once a fortified manor house owned by the Latimer family. An interesting stone monument here commemorates the turn of the millennium by giving the history of the village in a nutshell — an outdoor sculpture with carved representations for each topic and event. The story is presented as follows with my gloss:

  Chetelbert the Dane, first recorded resident; 13th century church; The river Jordan, named by the Baptists, with a chapel built in 1788; The bridge, originally a pack bridge; The knight, Thomas Latymer; A Lollard taking copies of the translated Bible to Thomas Wycliffe at Lutterworth; The Lollard Bible translated into Middle English from the Latin by Czech scribes living in the castle — a heretical occupation, which could get you hanged, drawn and quartered or burnt at the stake; The castle in flames, possibly an accident with gun powder; In the castle gateway are a set of wickets to represent the local cricket club; A carp, farmed in the castle fishponds as food for local inhabitants; A roll of fabric representing the weavers of the village who made cloth for the soldiers fighting the Napoleonic Wars; Ammonite, represent-ing the Jurassic Way; Plate made by the village potter from local clay; The sun and flying swan represent the two pubs of the village; In the present day the fields are used for rearing beef and lamb on the rich grassland surrounding the village; Morris Dancer’s bell representing Braybrooke Morris Dancers.

  What a wonderful way to summarize a village’s history. Additional images interspersed on the face of the column depict animals of the countryside: badger, fox, hare, even a fairy.

  Usually I try to line up our bed and breakfasts three or four nights in advance, but sometimes we get stuck, and this is where the Macmillan Accommodation Guide is of great help. Just past Braybrooke we can walk northwest on an authorized diversion to Market Harborough, where I have booked a B&B. We will then rejoin the main Way in the morning near Great Oxendon.

  Karl is apprehensive.

  “Are you sure this is legitimate? I said I would walk the entire Macmillan Way, and I damn well mean to.”

  “Karl, even the Guide provides this as an alternative — it’s a spur route; and we will end up walking several miles farther anyway.”

  He grunts acceptance, and we trudge toward the market town that used to be part of William the Conqueror’s Rockingham Forest, which stretched from Market Harborough all the way to Stamford. In forty-five minutes we see the steeple of St. Dionysius Church looming ahead, and on our approach discover next to it a beautiful half-timbered building called the Old Grammar School, dating from 1614. Here there is a covered market area; the upper end of High Street is a wide boulevard of unspoiled Georgian-style buildings. It is late afternoon and there are many people on the street. I notice a couple of rough, burly, tattooed men pushing baby prams with their partners.

  Our B&B is a few blocks west of the town centre, and we find it just as a downpour strikes. The frumpy landlady greets us as if she is surprised to see us, but
welcomes us in. I immediately plan my attack on her precious central heating system.

  After a pleasant cup of Tetley tea with biscuits, we are all sorted out, ready to head downtown to dinner. On High Street there is every kind of shop: Oxfam, a Waterstone’s bookstore, a Lloyd’s Bank in Venetian Gothic motif, pharmacies, a bike repair shop, and a café called Zizzi’s where people are enjoying beer and mochas outdoors even in the drizzle. Numerous white-haired couples are lounging on benches clustered around the Old Grammar School. West meets East down a side street, where stands the quintessentially English Swallow Cottage — climbing roses and all — offering “Traditional Cantonese Foods and Hot Food Take Away.” (The English love chicken chop suey served with chips.)

  We decide to try out the Red Cow Hotel. Its façade is a gaudy mélange of orange bricks and cream-coloured stone. The pork pie is overcooked, and we are distracted by the loud blare of the telly broadcasting a soccer match. But it is a fun place, with darts being played and crowded tables occupied by loquacious diners. Many locals are here for dinner: families; a young buck wearing a tartan sitting on a barstool; a fiftyish, red-faced, short, stocky man with a peroxide blonde looking older than her aspirations; and a Prince Charles look-alike with a doughty, horsey brunette fawning over and pecking him. Much Guinness and lager are flowing freely. Does this scene represent the safety valve for an otherwise docile race?

  “Karl, this brochure states that the town was known far and wide for its corset factory, which, commencing in 1876, supplied most of Britain’s ladies with their corsets and stays for a good century. In later years they exclusively produced the ‘liberty bodice’ as a modern alternative to the corset. The factory shut down in the late seventies.”

  “You don’t say? Did the factory close down because of outsourcing to China, or do the ladies just not wear corsets anymore?”

  “I believe the latter. In any case, the factory building still dominates the centre of town but now houses a library, museum, and government offices. It should be just down the street from here.”