In Hoc Signo VincesIHSVAerth Reclaimed

From the fall in 2666 to the present year, 4621 A.C.

351 events (424 with their episodes)

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The fourth age · c. 4063–the present

Restored crown

309 events (361 with episodes) · Hide them ▴

  1. 4063 Coronation & succession · London Enthronement of Cenred I Ash-Crowned In 4063 Cenred I Ash-Crowned was enthroned, and hence it is to that year that the common school forms assign the first ash-oath. His name clings yet to proclamations, and to the old language in which restored rule is spoken of.
  2. c. 4063 Era · Britannia The Restored-Crown Age The span from 4063 A.C. to the present in which London and Westminster again became the summit of legitimacy and the island was slowly re-bound through charters, councils, boroughs, sea law and house patronage.
  3. 4086 Trade & industry · Founding & charter · London Raising of the King's Basin pumping frame Between 4084 and 4116 the new capital was hardened, as London says, which is to say made solid by pumps, bridges, yards and raised works; and among the first machines of that hardening that could be depended upon was the pumping frame of the King's Basin, which is commonly dated to 4086.
  4. 4088 Religious · The High South The Great Reckoning The Office of Bells declares the belt's calendar, its seasons and its moving feasts, and this is the bound record it keeps. Every season-run the Office has declared since 4088 is entered there, every intercalation, by which is meant a span added that the calendar may keep true, and every parish that took the reckoning or refused it. Only the drover rolls are consulted more often in the High South belt. In the bad years its entries cease to be a register and read as a chronicle.
  5. 4091 Trade & industry · Founding & charter · London Building of the Borough Lift The Borough Lift is usually dated to 4091, one of the early mechanical works by which the capital hardened after the Crown of Ash settlement.
  6. 4098 Coronation & succession · London Accession of Alured I Bridge-King Public king-lists place the accession of Alured I Bridge-King in 4098; his portraits still oversee Westminster corridors and his name stays attached to bridge lore.
  7. 4098 Trade & industry · Flood & weather · London The first great floodgate works The first of London's great floodgate works belongs to 4098, the same year to which the king-lists assign the accession of Alured I Bridge-King. They stand among the earliest machines of the city's hardening that could be relied upon, in the years when the new capital was made solid with pumps, with bridges and with works.
  8. 4101 Founding & charter · Law & ruling · Britannia The Crown Charter of 4101 The Crown Charter of 4101 A.C. granted broad local authority to councils while placing major action under noble sponsorship and high review, becoming the legal hinge by which councils and lords share responsibility for road, ferry and bridge order.
  9. 4118 Rising & riot · Britannia East Fen Tithe Rising A rising in the east fen in 4118, when reeves, ferrymen and marsh households refused a levy they said would starve the dike line, forcing mounted correction and grain release. Its depositions later shaped the High South’s village tithe audit.
  10. c. 4118–4138 Law & ruling · The High South The valley tithe-audit settlement after 4118 In the two decades after the East Fen Tithe Rising, men who had read its depositions settled the valleys' tithe audit: auditors sitting in the village, the vestry present by right, returns read aloud and objections heard before signing.
  11. 4182–4217 War · Era · Britannia The Era of Silent Death and the War of Shadows A long emergency from 4182 A.C. in which ground the realm had held for centuries was being lost. Book III treats it as the pressure behind the amendment of an absolute canon in 4189 and behind the examiners' victory in the Cambridge Assay Conflicts.
  12. 4186 Founding & charter · Kent and the Narrow Sea The last chartered port grant The youngest grant of self-government to the old chartered ports, given in exchange for ship service, was made in 4186; none has been made since.
  13. 4187 Politics & diplomacy · Kent and the Narrow Sea The county meeting of 4187 At the county meeting of 4187 began the Maidstone corporation's quarrel with the Pikes of Wye over precedence. It concerns nothing of substance and has been fought in complete seriousness ever since.
  14. 4189 Religious · Law & ruling · Britannia The Third Council of Westminster It was this council, by its canon xiv in 4189, that amended the Church's absolute canon on spirits. A spirit brought to terms, so the canon runs, has not been consorted with; it has capitulated to the sovereignty of Christ, and that sovereignty His Church administers. The High South is governed by it still, and three parties are divided over it still.
  15. 4193 Founding & charter · Law & ruling · The High South Founding of the Chalk Wold Water Court Four lay dead in 4193 after three valley parishes and a holding on the Wold fell out, and the court was constituted in that year. Its founding instrument holds that the ground tells nobody the truth and that someone must answer for it nevertheless: whatever caused a trouble may never be proved, and for that very reason the court exists, that responsibility be fixed regardless. Its sittings are held at Sarrum and at Oxford.
  16. 4209 Flood & weather · Britannia The Long Spring In 4209 A.C. the season was gentle, and thanks are given for it yet, every 4 April, on Long Spring Mercy Day. It is kept most earnestly where the gentle years are reckoned against the hard ones, and there households pray that the hard years may be softened once more.
  17. 4211 Disaster · London Lower Estuary Quake An earthquake of 4211 A.C. that cracked quays, chapels and tidal stairs from Southbank to the outer basin. Later harbour law repeatedly cites it as the reason inspections must follow any quake.
  18. 4211 Founding & charter · The High South The Hazelrigg Assart In 4211 the Crown granted the assart at Hazelrigg as part of a larger settlement of forest ground. The High South volume treats Hazelrigg as a matter that has gone some four centuries without judgement.
  19. c. 4221 Demons & possession · Beasts & monsters · Kent and the Narrow Sea The Crooked Hearth visitations A demon panic of the Stour valley, and one that takes a single household at a time. There is warmth out of its season first; then a small and unlooked-for plenty; then the deaths in the house. Since about 4221 the Godmersham almanack has set down four visitations it holds certain. Twice since 4541 the signs were read in time, and nobody died.
  20. 4244–4361 Disaster · Flood & weather · Kent and the Narrow Sea The silting of the Kentish charter ports Storms between 4244 and 4361 shifted shingle and moved rivers, turning the great Kentish charter harbours into creeks and meadows. New Romney was left over a mile inland and Sandwich on a river that takes nothing serious.
  21. 4248–4253 War · Trade & industry · Kent and the Narrow Sea The Pilot Wars Fought 4248–4253 among Britannians over pilotage in the Kentish approaches, with continental money behind the companies. They left the Battle of Lantern Head and the Sounding off East Shoal, and a settlement giving the water to working pilots.
  22. c. 4250–4299 Raid & skirmish · The High South Chalk Wold Pursuit A pursuit across the open ridge country of the Chalk Wold during the Time of Trouble. It is remembered for exposed flight and hunting along the ridge roads, and for a feud that one skirmish could not end.
  23. c. 4250–4299 Crime & case · The High South Feud of Stone Oast A feud in Stone Oast and its lane country during the Time of Trouble. It grew out of wealth from the kilns and local oath pressure, and slowly hardened a household grievance into danger on the roads.
  24. 4271 Law & ruling · Politics & diplomacy · Britannia The Chancery Standard In 4271 the Chancery settled the spelling of the realm. Oxford alone refused the Standard and went on refusing it for fifty years, a stand remembered as part of its claim to moral and visual authority.
  25. 4271–4321 Politics & diplomacy · Law & ruling · The High South The Long Refusal The Oxford schools refused the Chancery Standard of spelling for fifty years on scholastic grounds, and no act has defined them more. The refusal cost them in trade, and it left behind it legal instruments in the old spelling which hold good to this day; but it settled, once and for all, that the chapter's learning bows to no convenience.
  26. 4271 Law & ruling · London The Standard of Rolls and Registers In 4271, the fourth year of Edmund III (the Surveyor), the Chancery at London required one settled spelling for every roll, register and issued copy, for plain administrative reasons. Cambridge conformed within six years; Oxford resisted for fifty.
  27. 4276 Coronation & succession · Kent and the Narrow Sea The ennobling of the Pikes, 4276 In 4276 the Pikes of Wye, former reeves turned landowners, received their title for service, some three centuries after they acquired the estate, a sequence the older untitled gentry still enjoy explaining.
  28. 4287 Flood & weather · Disaster · The High South Cutting of Reedgate Causey In 4287, during a dispute over labour obligations, men who knew exactly where to cut breached Reedgate Causey at night. The water rose for four days and drowned eleven miles, and six settlements ceased. The breach is still open water, called the Cut.
  29. 4287 Disaster · Flood & weather · The High South The Breach of 4287 In 4287, with labour obligation in dispute, Reedgate Causey was breached by night where it crosses the deepest channel, and by men who knew to a yard where to cut. The account of the campaigns and the line records it.
  30. 4292 Beasts & monsters · Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County Market Bell Wyvern Panic The panic of 4292 A.C. in Sarrum, when the Market Bell Wyvern drove trade from three fairs. County teaching still uses it as a favourite example of how one beast can wound a whole quarter's confidence.
  31. c. 4324–4326 War · Unknown Crowferry Ferry War A ferry conflict of the Time of Trouble, dated in older notes to about 4324–4326 A.C., fought over Crowferry ferry, its chain-boom lines and the lower-river supply routes, and remembered for route-war and coerced passage.
  32. c. 4325–4328 Raid & skirmish · Britannia Blackthorn Bridge Feud A cycle of feuding over Blackthorn Bridge on the semi-reclaimed southern bridge roads, dated in older notes to about 4325–4328 A.C. It is remembered for its weight in matters of inheritance, oath and retaliatory passage.
  33. 4328–4331 Beasts & monsters · Trade & industry · Britannia Crowmere Tusker Drives The drives of 4328 and 4331 A.C. against the Crowmere Tusker, still cited because three councils, two House interests, a shrine-road office and a licensed monster company had to cooperate simply to keep the droving lanes open.
  34. 4329 Fire · Disaster · Haunting & wonder · Kent and the Narrow Sea Green Fire of Hampton Bridge The fire of 4329 A.C. that destroyed Hampton Bridge, one of the Narrow Sea's most prosperous fortified ports. Public memory insists that quay, granary and chainwork were reduced to slippery mossy glass after forbidden arcane rituals failed beneath the harbour.
  35. 4336 Disaster · Kent and the Narrow Sea South Coast Earthquake and Cliff-Fall Season The earthquake and cliff-fall season of 4336 A.C. that damaged the Dover approaches, two harbour towers and several chalk roads. It remains the best-known later earthquake in British coastal memory.
  36. 4358 Beasts & monsters · Disaster · Over the Horizon Black Fir Flights The crisis of 4358 A.C. on the Vulcan Peninsula, when flights drove refugees, relic traffic and monster pressure westward through the old passes. It became one of the best-known continental crises in British convoy and chapel reporting.
  37. c. 4361–4370 War · Britannia The Mercenary Barons War A decade of mercenary and baronial violence, 4361–4370 A.C., remembered by the drover courts as the years the roads were unsafe. In the High South tithe country Merefield was fought over twice for its stored grain, and the barns raised afterwards were built like keeps.
  38. 4374 Trade & industry · Law & ruling · Kent and the Narrow Sea Fixing of the boat shares at Hythe, 4374 In 4374 the division of catch by shares was fixed at Hythe: a lugger eight shares, a punt three, costs taken off first. The same arithmetic has held at every gap and at the port ever since.
  39. 4378–4380 Crime & case · Religious · Britannia The Ashcroft Witch Panic From 4378 A.C. a witch panic ran its course, and the hangings it brought were two, the one at Mere Ash and the other at Orchard Ditch. In any strength it never reached the High South belt; its memory did. There it schooled the Ladies, the women the country recognises as able to treat with the powers that hold its land, in the rule they practise yet: let several parishes know you and stand in your debt, and let no single one have the whole use of you.
  40. 4381–4402 Law & ruling · Trade & industry · Politics & diplomacy · Sarrum and Its County The Two Petitions For a century and a half before it took to coal, Sarrum worked iron with charcoal, and the county's complaint of it is called the wood grievance. Two petitions were made over it, which the county dates to 4381 and to 4402; Sperrin's notes keep both entire.
  41. 4388 Politics & diplomacy · Trade & industry · Kent and the Narrow Sea The pilots' refusal of 4388 When outsiders were proposed for a vote on the pilot roll in 4388, no pilot took a hull out until the proposal was withdrawn; the port stopped, and no one was prosecuted.
  42. c. 4390 Disaster · Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Enginemead Abandonment When the Enginemead seam was abandoned about 4390, men were lost in the workings, and the workings hold them still. The county treats this as plain fact rather than a mystery or a haunting.
  43. c. 4400 Crime & case · Law & ruling · The High South The Wanfleet mill-water dispute A quarrel over the cut of water shared by four mills and the meadowmen at Wanfleet has gone to the chapter court a dozen times since 4400 and run for two hundred and thirteen years.
  44. 4402–4461 Trade & industry · Kent and the Narrow Sea The loss of the Wealden iron trade The Weald made much of the realm's charcoal iron for centuries until the northern belts' coal and coke ended the trade between 4402 and 4461, leaving furnace parishes with empty churches.
  45. 4402–4407 Spirits & pacts · War · Haunting & wonder · Britannia The Spirit War of the Three Fens A conflict of 4402–4407 A.C., fought out in three half-held belts of marsh. There, for a generation, bargains had governed the raised paths and the seasonal tolls, the burial islands and the licensed ferries. Then came the charters for ditching, for embankment and for reclamation, and the outsiders who held them ceased to honour those bargains, driving their dike works beyond the old limits. The ground made its answer: banks slumped, channels were lost, and burial islands seemed to move. No case is cited more often in the fen sessions.
  46. 4402 Politics & diplomacy · Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Weavers’ Wall Proposal In 4402 the Weavers proposed a walled enclosure around the fulling yards and staple houses alone, a trade wall rather than a town wall. The other guilds refused to contribute, and the proposal failed.
  47. 4406 Raid & skirmish · London Deptford Crane Seizure A London waterside action named in the older AC narrative, which dates it to 4406 and places its fighting among yards, stairs and rope courts rather than open fields. London later named such actions as carefully as any provincial battle.
  48. 4412 Law & ruling · Trade & industry · The High South The Chalk Wold Water Court schedule of 4412 When a district suffers a souring, its springs turning cloudy and bitter and unfit to drink, the Chalk Wold Water Court gives out water commissions, and for these it has fixed both a schedule and a scale of rates. Neither, the volume observes, has been touched since 4412.
  49. 4417–4419 Beasts & monsters · Founding & charter · Britannia The Wychwood man-eater hunts The man-eater hunts in Wychwood from 4417 to 4419 made Saint Hester's Hounds famous enough that their field reputation was turned into charter and privilege.
  50. 4419 Spirits & pacts · Treaty & settlement · The High South The Mere Wold Winter A vale on the Wold kept its side of its terms in 4419, those terms being the standing bargain it held with the power of the place; and yet something on the far side of the bargain altered. For three months the vale was cut off. Nine households went away and did not return, and the hamlet at the vale's head has never been settled since. The terms made in the aftermath are kept to this day, and the Concord of Saint Winnow, which keeps the record of such terms, has the year often in its mouth.
  51. c. 4421–4621 Spirits & pacts · The Northern Marches The attempts to hear an envoy again Four attempts in two centuries to repeat the envoy proceeding all failed differently. Twice nothing came, once the humans abandoned it, and once an arrangement was made with something other than what the parish believed.
  52. c. 4421–4621 The restless dead · The Northern Marches The ground that would not take on Saint Ceolwulf's The grave book of Saint Ceolwulf's burial island records four places in two centuries where ground refused a grave, none used again. The present sexton saw it twice; the second time water rose in August into a dry quarter where he had opened forty graves.
  53. 4428 Disaster · Kent and the Narrow Sea Cave opened by a cliff fall, 4428 A fall of the chalk face on the eastern cliff coast in 4428 opened one of the four caves the shore is careful about. The nearest gap village knew of it within a week; it was never reported or written down where the county could find it.
  54. c. 4435–4447 The restless dead · Religious · The High South The Chalkmere burial missions The belt sent clergy to the Chalkmere dead in 4435, 4443 and 4447. They brought back a procedure rather than a doctrine, founding the valleys' trade in correcting bad burials, ninety years older than the Collegium's licensing.
  55. c. 4438–4448 Law & ruling · Trade & industry · The High South The Putting in Order of the Books Within a decade of the Second Baron War, after the Reckoning was caught giving three irreconcilable versions of its figures, Halden Close recast its books into three series, recruited clerks from the valleys and adopted its rule of answering enquiries without supplying returns.
  56. c. 4440 Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The first coal up the Sarr Coal first reached Sarrum by water from the estuary in the 4440s as fuel for the fulling coppers, the wood having gone; its cost made the trade look hard at the ground under the southern shires.
  57. c. 4441–4448 War · Over the Horizon The Bad Years The Near Coast's name for a long internal disorder among eleven banners, lasting much of two generations and never under one command. Lyonnais chronicles place Kent's War of the Azure Banner inside it as its maritime phase.
  58. c. 4441–4481 Law & ruling · The High South The Exclusion Writ Oxford's eleventh-century instrument against the Afflicted. Within one generation a chapter ruling on who might be received hardened over forty years into a rule, then a Writ; Isabel Croke's 4441 notes record the process.
  59. c. 4441–4481 Law & ruling · The High South The Oxford Writ The Writ excludes from Oxford and its ring of about forty parishes anyone visibly marked by affliction. Its costly appeal has been completed only eleven times in 140 years, each time with a patron, and two chapter attempts to widen the ring were defeated by those parishes.
  60. 4441–4452 War · Coronation & succession · Britannia The War of the Two Kings The succession war after Julian II's death, when Stephen III was crowned at Westminster with dock and convoy backing and Robert II at Oxford Gate with Harcourt riders, elder Ashdown circles and St Albans chapter men. Both were anointed; sieges, bridge-burnings and requisitions divided the south.
  61. 4447 Trade & industry · The High South The Carriers’ Refusal After the Chalkmere ground had swallowed three armies in twelve years, the carriers stopped going in 4447. They refused the road rather than the battle, and no instrument then existed that could compel them.
  62. 4448 Founding & charter · Trade & industry · Kent and the Narrow Sea The founding of the Dover packet calendar After the Azure Banner, from 4448, Dover's packet calendar entered crossings in advance so sailings could be grouped and convoyed; the book still governs the trade.
  63. 4452–4457 War · Over the Horizon The Blood Isle War The war of 4452–4457 A.C. is called the ugliest thing in the record, and it was fought against a people whom no crown claimed. Abroad it left little trace. Its mark is at home, and lies in a decision: that certain enemies must be denied the social glamour, the reputation and the romance, by which they might one day come back into favour. Their names were therefore kept out of the ballads, out of the broadsheets and off the stage, so that no later generation should make heroes of them. The realm has not been easy about that decision since.
  64. 4457 Demons & possession · Crime & case · Haunting & wonder · Sarrum and Its County The Black Rites Case The city keeps it as its great warning. Four people were hanged in 4457, once deliberate dealing with demons or spirits, by compact, by invocation, by sacrifice and the like, had been established at law; and afterwards the evidence on which it was established vanished. The town changed swiftly in the years that followed. No record ties those changes to the assize.
  65. c. 4460–4520 Spirits & pacts · Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Clearances Between about 4460 and 4520 Sarrum's coal town spread across four villages: ground bought, bounds built over, springs culverted, stones set into walls, and the keepers of old arrangements gone. It was sixty years of ordinary commercial decisions, never called a campaign.
  66. 4460–4464 Famine & dearth · Raid & skirmish · Sarrum and Its County The Long Hunger The famine years of 4460–4464, by which the county measures everything. It is remembered for Randal Hartfell, the Pale Stag, turning levy-men into reavers on the hay roads while the drover courts recorded every instance; the drovers have distrusted House Hartfell since.
  67. 4462 Trade & industry · Kent and the Narrow Sea The winter convoy surcharge The underwriters' surcharge of a third on a hull crossing alone in the closed months was fixed in 4462 and has never been revised.
  68. 4466 Law & ruling · Kent and the Narrow Sea The Dover licensing decision of 4466 At the licensing session of 4466 the Dover corporation decided that a port works when it is drinking, so licences are refused almost only for disorder, never for the number of houses.
  69. 4467 Spirits & pacts · The High South The Angelmead Mowing In 4467 a new steward had mown a strip at the edge of the great field at Angelmead that had always been left standing. The parish lost eleven people in fourteen months, and the archbishop had the strip restored. It has stood unmown since, and no one will cut it to learn why.
  70. 4468 Founding & charter · Sarrum and Its County The Black Lantern House at Fleecegate The Black Lantern house at Fleecegate was founded in 4468, eleven years after the Black Rites case of 4457, in a town that had not wanted one and could barely afford it. Nobody ever recorded why.
  71. 4471 Politics & diplomacy · Sarrum and Its County The Proposal of 4471 A proposal put to the city in 4471, one of a series discussed in the account of why Sarrum was never walled. It failed on an argument the city still makes, and it is reckoned the one of the series worth reading.
  72. 4478 Politics & diplomacy · Law & ruling · The High South The Marle Match The broken betrothal of Katherine Marle, Halden's heir to White Barley Vale, to a Beaumont: the Beaumonts withdrew on eleven days' notice over a four-generation-old flaw in the Vale's water title. She took vows within the year. The belt gives it as the root of Halden–Beaumont coldness.
  73. 4482 Founding & charter · Sarrum and Its County Founding of the Guild Hall The standing association of Sarrum's transport and maintenance companies was formed in 4482 to maintain the roads, tramroad, wharf gear and cistern fabric that all of them use. It has never tried to fix a price.
  74. c. 4485–4489 Famine & dearth · Sarrum and Its County The dear bread before the Cinder Rising Across the failed wool years the price of bread in Sarrum doubled because of two bad harvests in the eastern shires, part of the four years' poverty behind the rising.
  75. 4485–4488 Famine & dearth · Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Failed Clip The wool clip failed in 4485 and stayed poor for three years, putting the yards on short time. Wages were cut in 4486 and again in 4488 while bread doubled in price, conditions that led toward the Cinder Rising of 4489.
  76. 4486–4488 Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Sarrum wage cuts of 4486 and 4488 Yard wages were cut in 4486 and again in 4488 amid the failed clips; the cuts stood after the Cinder Rising, which conceded nothing.
  77. c. 4487 Religious · London Fourteen Fires London’s principal memorial sequence for the First Great Fire of 4487, opening on 6 August with bells, ward readings and fire-watch sermons. Better districts remember disciplined rebuilding, poorer ones evictions and warehouses saved while houses burned.
  78. 4487–4556 Fire · London The Great Fire The name for London's two great burnings: the wind-driven fourteen-day firestorm of 4487 that razed much of the Lower City, and the eight-day fire of 4556 from the Southbank yards. Both are kept in the city's memorial year, from the Fourteen Fires to the Day of Ash and Water.
  79. 4487 Fire · Kent and the Narrow Sea The Weald vestry fire of 4487 A vestry fire in 4487 destroyed the registers of one of the four Wealden furnace parishes, leaving its four centuries of ironworking burials without a record.
  80. 4488 Other · The High South The asked-after column of 4488 In 4488 Frideswide House added to its register of the missing a separate column, never explained, recording who asked after each person.
  81. 4488 Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Black Stone Purchase In 4488 the Guild Hall bought the four acres around the spring in Black Stone from minor owners who could not use them. It wanted water for its carters that would not spoil on a long run.
  82. 4488 Rising & riot · Fire · The High South The Cadaver Riots Four days of rioting in Cambridge in 4488 after it became known that the Schola's anatomy teaching was supplied with bodies bought from men who did not explain their sources. Anatomy rooms burned and nine died. The warranted supply that followed has held since.
  83. 4488 Law & ruling · Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The mineral conveyance of 4488 A conveyance of 4488 severed the minerals of the machine-stone bed from its surface; nobody has produced it in a century, leaving ownership of the bed with four answers and no resolution.
  84. 4488 Trade & industry · Politics & diplomacy · Sarrum and Its County The Weavers–Staplers dispute The Weavers' and Staplers' halls have disputed wool and cloth prices without a break since 4488. Both ignore their standing arbitration. The quarrel has twice brought the county close to a general stoppage.
  85. 4489 Rising & riot · Fire · Famine & dearth · Massacre & reprisal · Sarrum and Its County The Cinder Rising Four days of rising from the Sarrum ash tips in summer 4489, after two wage cuts and doubled bread in a bad wool run. Hall bands and two companies of Crown troops put it down: 411 dead, two districts burned, eleven hanged, nothing conceded. The Articles of the Halls followed.
  86. c. 4489 Politics & diplomacy · Sarrum and Its County The walled Rows proposal After the Cinder Rising a walled Rows was proposed at the Halls and carried in principle but never costed; the estate ring walled itself instead.
  87. c. 4489–4499 Founding & charter · Sarrum and Its County Walling of the estate ring After the Cinder Rising and later the Water Days, county families raised walled, planted estates on the first clean ground about five miles out, as a defence against crowds rather than armies. Most date from the decade after 4489.
  88. 4491 Treaty & settlement · The High South The Reed Cross anatomy agreement Proposed by the Reed Cross after the Cadaver Riots and made in 4491 despite the chapter's objection, it supplies unclaimed marsh dead to the Schola's anatomy rooms, entered and later buried, and has run for 130 years.
  89. 4494 Treaty & settlement · Founding & charter · Sarrum and Its County The Articles of the Halls The standing treaty among Sarrum's eleven halls, first written in 4494 after a Weavers–Carriers quarrel silenced the wharf. Its preamble alludes to the Cinder Rising. It covers demarcation, arbitration, band limits, common charges and a fourteen-day stoppage clause, and has since been amended about thirty times.
  90. c. 4494 Trade & industry · Rising & riot · Sarrum and Its County The Weavers–Carriers wharf stoppage A quarrel between the Weavers and the Carriers that left the Sarrum wharf silent for a month. It directly prompted the first writing of the Articles of the Halls in 4494.
  91. 4497 Founding & charter · Sarrum and Its County The re-forming of the Blue Sleeves The armed hall bands grew up in the decade after the Cinder Rising, the Blue Sleeves taking their modern form in 4497, the band that would refuse an order sixty-two years later.
  92. 4498–4504 The restless dead · War · Haunting & wonder · Britannia The Grey Necromancer War Between 4498 and 4504 A.C. a war was fought over the traffic in corpses, a war of grave roads travelled under mixed escort, of exhumations made under arms, of barrows sealed or consecrated afresh at ruinous expense. The Lantern Graves Massacre was its worst night. Of its sieges, that of Pale Orchard Abbey is the one the Concord of Saint Winnow still cites before any other.
  93. 4498 Disaster · Founding & charter · Kent and the Narrow Sea The hop-season deaths of 4498 The hop-picking of 4498 cost four lives, and in its wake the first of three burial funds for pickers was opened, each kept by one of three hundreds, the districts into which the county is divided. Two of the three funds keep a plot for burying, and in neither case is the plot described as a churchyard.
  94. c. 4498–4525 Reclamation & expedition · Law & ruling · The High South The Ruin Commissions of the upper Thames Called in the last century when the Oxford reach had silted and grown dangerous, these commissions settled which parish owed which stretch, which old works could be removed and who paid. Several villages hold charters from them and appeals continue.
  95. c. 4498–4504 Rising & riot · Trade & industry · The High South White Furnace Yard Fight A fight at Cambridge's White Furnace Row over worked stone that should have been ground and had not been. It produced no conviction, but the present system of double witness and independent weighing dates from it. The town will not discuss it with strangers.
  96. 4501 Spirits & pacts · Treaty & settlement · Religious · The High South The Coldharbour Understanding A standing arrangement at Coldharbour, entered in no roll, that the Concord of Saint Winnow endorsed in 4501 and that the verderers call 'the understanding'.
  97. c. 4502–4588 Law & ruling · Sarrum and Its County The Refused Compoundings The rolls the drover courts kept between 4460 and 4464 set down the reaving of the drove roads by Randal Hartfell, the Pale Stag, and House Hartfell has never once disputed them. What it has done, twice, is offer to compound, that is, to pay such a settlement as would put an end to the matter. The courts refused in 4502, and refused again in 4588, and gave the same reason on each occasion: a compounding would close the matter. The courts did not wish it closed.
  98. c. 4504–4507 Crime & case · Massacre & reprisal · Over the Horizon Hanging of the Korenbruck harbour clerk The scandal the free ports still name from the truce: the Redhats hanged a Korenbruck harbour clerk found copying tide timings for British agents into the margin of a prayer book. Some men in the city will not discuss him with foreigners.
  99. c. 4504–4511 Siege · Over the Horizon Siege of Albrecht Quay In the resumed fighting of the free-ports war, siege parallels were dug at Albrecht Quay and British guns were landed under canvas to the sound of chapel bells. The city's chapel keeps the garrison dead of both sides on one wall.
  100. c. 4504–4505 Treaty & settlement · Over the Horizon The mid-war truce in the War for the Free Ports A truce partway through the free-ports war that brought no real peace. The ports used it to bury their dead, rebuild and quietly betray one another: weather readers were bought and mooring books altered.
  101. 4508 Founding & charter · Sarrum and Its County Endowment of the Wetherslade grammar school Wetherslade's grammar school was endowed in 4508, one of the institutions of the county's second town and first wool market.
  102. c. 4511 Treaty & settlement · Over the Horizon Settlement of the War for the Free Ports The peace ending the free-ports war removed the Pruss garrisons but kept the mooring privileges, and conceded the great powers' right to watch the quays. It set a yearly reading of the war dead, held at the same hour in all four cities.
  103. 4512 Other · The High South Collegium survey of the Ladies, 4512 In 4512 the Collegium sent men to record the Ladies' practice systematically; the record survives unpublished and contradicts the later 4577 survey in nearly every particular.
  104. 4514 Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County Winding-up of the Cut navigation company The navigation company that owned the Cut, a disused barge channel, was wound up in 4514. No successor to its title has ever been established, leaving the underground passage without a clear owner.
  105. 4519 Trade & industry · London The Common Shelf The first authorised editions issued jointly by the London presses in 4519, corrected, uniform and cheap. Where the Standard had commanded clerks, the Common Shelf reached households, and within a generation ended the old grammar that had outlived the old spelling.
  106. 4519 Religious · Sarrum and Its County The Oxford visitation of 4519 An Oxford visitation return of 4519 described Sarrum as a sink into which the province drains, referring to the Afflicted. It is the earliest recorded use of the insult still used against the city.
  107. 4519 Law & ruling · Kent and the Narrow Sea Withdrawal of the sealed-lamp licence, 4519 The examiners ceased licensing a pattern of sealed lamp in 4519 and have never licensed it since; three Kentish landings still hold such lamps among the unclaimed wreck goods kept in their barns under the Night Attendance.
  108. c. 4521–4621 The restless dead · The Northern Marches The eleven risings of the century The parish books of the march record eleven bodies in the century that did not stay where they were put. Each was dealt with by the parish at night without a priest; four had been watched and seven had not.
  109. c. 4521–4621 Spirits & pacts · The Northern Marches The moving of the Wandale shrine When the spring at the Wandale shrine failed within the last century, the village moved what was there half a mile to a crossing over four days, with the whole settlement attending. It is the only shrine-village act recorded in any document.
  110. 4522 Law & ruling · Sarrum and Its County The truck prohibition of 4522 Since 4522 the Articles of the Halls have banned paying wages in drink. The ban reaches only members of hall trades, so truck survived among wharf gangs, carters and general labour, and each of the four abolitions left it standing outside the halls.
  111. c. 4530–4546 Haunting & wonder · Disaster · The Northern Marches The Crowdyke business The worst matter in the March's records within the century: at a fen holm, after a hard winter in which eleven died and four were buried late, four parishes turned out together for three nights until it was 'finished'. Four parish books and the island grave book disagree on the details.
  112. c. 4530–4546 The restless dead · The Northern Marches The grave left open overnight Three generations ago a cut on Saint Ceolwulf's was left open overnight because the light went. The island book's next entry says only that the ground was closed at first light and the burial made at Mereton.
  113. 4531 Disaster · Kent and the Narrow Sea Loss of a man in the Long Gut, 4531 A man was lost in the Long Gut, a sea cave on the Kentish cliff coast that floods from the back before the front, cutting off anyone far inside. He was never recovered, and the trade will not use the cave.
  114. 4534–4536 Beasts & monsters · Britannia The Black Fen eel-wyrm scares The Black Fen eel-wyrm scares of 4534 and 4536 produced years of argument over bounty, carcass right, salvage, damaged nets and which authority had actually paid to make the lower routes usable again.
  115. 4536 Treaty & settlement · Religious · The High South The Cambridge–Oxford feast schedule of 4536 Cambridge's kilns are never suffered to go out, and in 4536 Cambridge came to terms with Oxford for a lesser calendar of feast days to be kept at them, giving the parishes compensating observances and payments in return. Twice the agreement has been made over again. It has never once been broken.
  116. 4540 Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Opening of the Line Among the city’s dates the trades reckon 4540, and hardly anybody else does. It is, in their phrase, the year the line opened; by which they mean the year the Sarrum and London line was opened as a venture, when the line company was formed under its Crown licence, the route surveyed, and Enginemead laid out to house the engine works. No train ran upon it for many years after. The line was not finished until 4574, as the entry for The Cutting of the Line sets down.
  117. c. 4540–4620 Haunting & wonder · The Northern Marches The recorded attempts on Gant Fell Six parties are documented trying Gant Fell in eighty years. Two turned back at the scree; three turned back lower, each on a settled conviction that going on was pointless; the fourth went on.
  118. c. 4541–4621 The restless dead · Kent and the Narrow Sea The last Brethren suppression on the marsh In eighty years the Brethren have made four formal workings on the Romney levels, more than in any other part of Kent. The last of them, which is the one the county still talks of, ran the full three nights, while the wall men of the levels held the outer bound, the furthest line drawn round a working, which nobody may cross. Since then the house has not returned.
  119. 4541–4588 Religious · Kent and the Narrow Sea The last crossroads burials on the pilgrim road Kent kept burying suicides at crossroads later than most counties; parish books record four such burials on the pilgrim road between 4541 and 4588. Three sites later got yews; the treeless fourth is the only one opened in living memory.
  120. 4543 Plague & sickness · Sarrum and Its County The Fever of 4543 In the wet summer of 4543 a fever rose from the fulling yards and ran through the low city in eleven weeks; burial returns give four thousand one hundred dead. The dead went into pits wherever the ground would dig.
  121. 4543 Plague & sickness · Sarrum and Its County The Fleecegate Sickness In the wet summer of 4543 a fever came out of the fulling yards and the Rows and in eleven weeks carried off some four thousand one hundred. There was no physic to be had. The estates shut their gates; the associations buried their own. That summer is the reason the Sarrum Bill of Rights carries its article on free surgeries.
  122. 4544 Trade & industry · Law & ruling · The High South The Breaking of the Vessel Rule In 4544 the trade’s standing rule against reusing a vessel for a different class of material was broken, the only time it has been. The yard does not discuss the consequences, but the Collegium’s procedures still reflect them.
  123. 4544 Religious · Law & ruling · Kent and the Narrow Sea The chapter's refusal to certify, 4544 In 4544 the Canterbury chapter declined to certify for a family powerful enough to ruin it. It survived the refusal, which is cited as the source of its slow, record-based authority.
  124. 4544 Law & ruling · Sarrum and Its County The Netherby enclosure Netherby enclosed its common grazing in 4544 on terms its descendants call a swindle, leaving it the only one of the six chalk villages with no common left.
  125. 4547 Founding & charter · Sarrum and Its County The Administered Grounds In 4547 the council laid out its two administered burial grounds, partly on the land that had taken the pits of the 4543 fever. The expedient grounds east of the tips thus became permanent.
  126. c. 4547 Spirits & pacts · Reclamation & expedition · Haunting & wonder · Britannia The Ashfall Reclaim of Saint Merrow’s Fort Commonly dated to 4547, and of the four spirit reclaims, the cases by which the realm judges ground recovered through the powers of place, it is the one held up as a warning. Men lost the fort; before they came back to it, it had passed under another order. Hence it is cited to prove that stone, patrol and prayer will all fail, unless the land itself consents to be founded a second time.
  127. c. 4550–4604 Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Building of the Tramroad The tramroad was built in eight or nine sections between about 4550 and 4604 by five owners who never consulted one another, yet the whole of it came out to a single gauge.
  128. 4551 Trade & industry · Rising & riot · Sarrum and Its County The Fullers' stoppage of 4551 In its sixth week in August 4551 the Fullers' stoppage led the council, with two Guildmasters present and the Bank Council's knowledge, to shut the conduits to the strikers' streets, beginning the Water Days.
  129. 4551 Religious · Sarrum and Its County The visitation of 4551 at Netherlode In 4551 the Church made a visitation, which is to say an official inspection, at Netherlode, and its record notes a plot of unconsecrated ground lying beside the churchyard. Of that plot no later record says a word.
  130. 4551 Rising & riot · Treaty & settlement · Trade & industry · Massacre & reprisal · Sarrum and Its County The Water Days In August 4551 Sarrum shut the conduits to break a Fullers' stoppage; the associations combined and some nine thousand held the Fleecegate cistern. The bands killed 160 in one afternoon, but the Crown refused troops and eleven days of negotiation produced the Bill of Rights.
  131. c. 4552 Founding & charter · Sarrum and Its County The first association burial fund Nine years after the Fleecegate Sickness, when associations had buried their own dead, Ninefields raised the first association burial fund. Such funds now mostly pay for a burning, or for carriage and a grave in a county parish.
  132. 4552 Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The relaying of the Fleecegate conduit Of Sarrum's four conduit channels, laid between 4470 and 4552, the Fleecegate channel was relaid in 4552 and remains sound. Two older channels stand in a condition engineers have recorded and nobody has paid to fix.
  133. 4553 Haunting & wonder · Flood & weather · The High South The Bourne Year By this year the High South belt measures every other. Valleys that lay dry ran with water; springs turned in three counties; and within the Oxford jurisdiction the correcting of bad burials rose tenfold. The Great Reckoning says only that the bournes, those chalk streams which run in some seasons and not in others, ran in Lent and ran again at Michaelmas. The water procedures now in force were drawn up in the decade that followed.
  134. 4553 Law & ruling · Kent and the Narrow Sea The burial-club articles of 4553 Since 4553 the Kentish burial clubs' articles have required a year to pass before paying for a man lost at sea and not recovered, leaving families of the drowned in a difficulty the poor law does not name.
  135. 4553 Law & ruling · Sarrum and Its County The Sarrum powder prohibition of 4553 Since 4553 Sarrum's hall bands, guild servants sworn to hall courts, have been forbidden powder in the city, the weightiest standing agreement in the belt and never broken.
  136. 4553–4556 Crime & case · The High South The White Vault Scandals From 4553 to 4556 A.C. the vault books at Cambridge were falsified. Material the books called condemned, and therefore owed to the grinding, had never been ground; material not yet proved had gone out of the town; and the books hid the one and the other. Three clerks were convicted. The machine-stone of the higher grades that went out of Cambridge has never been accounted for.
  137. 4558–4574 Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Cutting of the Line Licence and ground came first: in 4540, the year from which the trades still count, the line was licensed and Enginemead laid out to serve it. The cutting itself waited until 4558 and went on until 4574, sixteen years of labour for ninety-one miles of iron laid across the county. In 4574 the first trains ran, and from that year the line stood as the engine trade’s first customer and its first carrier on a national scale, both at once.
  138. c. 4560–4600 Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The ploughing-engine displacement From about 4560 Sarrum-built ploughing engines put labourers out of work across four shires; eleven drove villages lost a fifth to a third of their workers by 4600 while Sarrum grew by over twelve thousand.
  139. c. 4560 Beasts & monsters · Kent and the Narrow Sea The sheep-taking dyke on the levels There is a stretch of dyke on the Romney levels where sheep are lost from below the bank. The ground is opened in the night, in a line, and nothing has ever been seen to do it. For upward of sixty years four lookers, one after another, have kept a lantern there from October onward, and at their own charge. One flock, over three years, lost between nine and fourteen head a year beyond what the others lost.
  140. c. 4561 Haunting & wonder · London Alice Fenn turned back on Mudgate Stairs About sixty years ago the laundress Alice Fenn said she was turned back from a flooded step in the dark on Mudgate Stairs, the founding testimony for the Cold Nurse said to walk the lower flight. It has never been checked against the tide tables.
  141. 4563 Siege · Over the Horizon Relief of Argent Basin A costly convoy success in which relief shipping broke hostile pressure on a starving overseas station port and restored the position. London and naval officers still cite it as proof that convoy, credit and stores can save an outward foothold when all arrive together.
  142. 4566 Horrors · Disaster · Haunting & wonder · Kent and the Narrow Sea Opening and stopping of the Walled Hole, 4566 A cliff fall in 4566 exposed a void in the chalk behind the eastern shore. Within the week the nearest village walled its mouth at its own cost, without telling the corporation that owns the ground; it is now the Walled Hole, where a lamp is kept.
  143. 4568 Raid & skirmish · Over the Horizon Sack of Candle Cape Station The surprise, burning or abandonment of a Britannian station overseas, remembered as a disgrace in sermons, counting houses and naval testimony. London took it as a humiliating lesson in how fast insurers, rope merchants, chandlers and ministry men must pay for distance.
  144. 4568–4570 Haunting & wonder · The High South The Green Mast Disturbance Between 4568 and 4570 three shifts at Sawston saw lights moving round one mast in patterns no signal book knew. The Yard closed and examined it, found nothing, reopened it and saw them again; no cause was established.
  145. 4568 Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The striking of the green seam The green seam was struck at Blackdown in 4568 below ground never before kept dry; within three years an Enginemead experimental engine ran a deep pump for days on it, making the county a strategic coalfield.
  146. c. 4570–4600 Religious · Other · The restless dead · London Abandonment of the grave-watch by eleven London parishes Between 4570 and 4600 eleven London parishes gave up the customary three-night watching of new graves, citing money in their own minutes. Their burial books survive alongside those of four parishes that never stopped, though no one has compared them.
  147. c. 4570–4590 Flood & weather · Disaster · Sarrum and Its County Forming of the Sarr levels flash Subsidence over worked coal slowly turned seven separate ponds of 4570 into one water by 4590. It now covers over four hundred acres of land still called farmland on paper, including the Ridley family's hundred and ten acres.
  148. 4570 Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Cambridge fodder contract of 4570 Under the contract of 4570 Cambridge takes a fixed share of the county storage houses' grain and fodder; the county's largest contract, it is renegotiated every seven years by Master Alaric Voss in person.
  149. 4571 Law & ruling · The High South The Assay Refusal of 4571 Cambridge three times refused a lifting frame meant for a new crossing below Oxford; the crossing was abandoned and its promoters cried spite. Nine years later a frame of that pattern failed at a colonial station port with heavy loss. 'A Cambridge refusal' became proverbial.
  150. 4571 Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Foreclosure of 4571 After three bad years and a call it could not meet, the Stourmead estate was lost to a Council bank and sold on at a loss to a Stapler fortune. The county never forgave it, and the Bank Council has since avoided taking a great house.
  151. 4571 Famine & dearth · Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Long Feed The winter of 4571 when hay failed across four shires: contracts fell due against a surplus that did not exist, the drove roads shut nine weeks, and beasts sold at a quarter of value. Three southern villages lost a generation. The city recorded only that the wool came late.
  152. 4571 Disaster · The High South The Mooring Failure A mooring failure in 4571 prompted the practice the yards credit with most of their improvement in fifty years. The stone yards have declined to adopt it because of the cost.
  153. 4571 Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Opening of the New Lode The New Lode was opened in 4571. By Ambrose Kite’s account this was partly because the old workings had become impossible to work in, which nobody would put in writing.
  154. 4571 Politics & diplomacy · Trade & industry · Kent and the Narrow Sea The pilots' refusal of 4571 A second attempt in 4571 to give outsiders a vote on the pilot roll was defeated the same way: an unannounced absence of pilots until it was withdrawn.
  155. 4573 Founding & charter · Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Standing Draw of 4573 In 4573 the Guild Hall granted the Brothers of Mercy a standing draw. It remains the only grant of its kind ever made, and the reason for it was never recorded.
  156. 4574 Founding & charter · Sarrum and Its County Creation of the Crown surveyor at Sarrum In 4574 the Crown created a resident surveyor of aerial and rail works at Sarrum to give Westminster its own account. Nine holders have written eleven reports, four badly wrong because the Enginewrights supplied the figures.
  157. 4574 Law & ruling · Religious · London The Brethren attendance schedule of 4574 When a London parish sends for the Brethren, what their houses may charge the ward has been fixed by schedule since 4574. An attendance, which is an ordinary visit by two brothers, costs eleven shillings; a suppression, the full night's working against a trouble, costs two pounds four shillings. So wide a gap breeds quarrels, and there is scarcely a season without a dispute over which of the two was in fact performed.
  158. c. 4574–4582 Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The loss of the drove trade Once the through line was finished in 4574 the capital trade moved off the southern droves in about eight years; Mereford Cross became a detour, drover court fees fell by two thirds, and Great Ashen, Marlow Bridge and Stone Pyle halved.
  159. 4574 Reclamation & expedition · Kent and the Narrow Sea The search for the Four Grounds, 4574 Four times in six hundred years men have gone through the documents in search of the burial grounds of the Obedience War that were never located, and this was the latest search. No spade was put in. Yet the searches yielded sites, disputed ones, for two of the grounds, near Hackington and near Fordwich; and since then no building has been permitted at either.
  160. 4574 Crime & case · Sarrum and Its County The Warehouse Prosecution A man taken at night inside a bonded warehouse, with no sign of entry, was prosecuted as an interference with the Rows rather than as theft, and hanged. The Rows were entered from below in 4574, 4591 and 4608.
  161. c. 4575–4615 Haunting & wonder · The High South The walled cavities at Stonecourt The quarrymen at Stonecourt broke into two hollows, and the floors of both had been walked upon. Within a fortnight the first lay buried under spoil. The second was walled up, and eleven years afterwards, the first wall having failed of its purpose, it was walled a second time. To neither has any order, house or chapter ever been called.
  162. 4576 Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Admission of the Enginewrights The Enginewrights were admitted in 4576 to a position the Articles of the Halls were never shaped for, since they serve every hall and can stop all of them at once.
  163. 4577 Other · The High South Collegium survey of the Ladies, 4577 In 4577 the Collegium made its second attempt to set down the practice of the Ladies, the women whom the country recognises as able to treat with the powers that hold its land. The survey contradicts that of 4512 both on the number of the Ladies and on when a Lady's affinity for the work first shows; and it is kept, accordingly, as the most embarrassing record the Collegium possesses.
  164. 4577 Flood & weather · Politics & diplomacy · Kent and the Narrow Sea Lydd's refused drainage cut, 4577 In winter 4577 Lydd refused a drainage cut across its old ground and took the flooding instead, one of a uniform run of refusals by the silted ports to break ground that may hold unrecorded burials.
  165. 4577 Disaster · The High South The Chamber Failure of 4577 Cambridge has had four aerial failures, and only this one weighs with its institutions. The chamber stood on the register, its certificate was in date, it had been inspected eight months earlier; and for all that, no cause was ever found. Every procedure the Collegium had was tightened in consequence. Its strict party draws both its name and its vigour from that failure.
  166. 4578 Disaster · Kent and the Narrow Sea Loss of a man in the Long Gut, 4578 In 4578 the Long Gut took a second man, and he, like the first in 4531, was never brought out. The gap village that stands above the cave has never once asked that it be shut. It tells strangers plainly how the cave fills, and leaves the rest to them.
  167. c. 4580 Disaster · Over the Horizon Frame failure at a colonial station port About nine years after the 4571 refusal, a lifting frame of the refused pattern failed at a colonial station port with considerable loss of life; the White Walls kept a pointed silence.
  168. 4580 The restless dead · Sarrum and Its County The Black Lantern attendances in Yellow Ward Since 4580 the Black Lantern house has attended Yellow Ward eleven times, more often than anywhere in Sarrum except the closed nine acres, and has never given a reason. The ward's long-standing rumour of a resident vampire and its unexplained losses of women stand behind the attendances.
  169. c. 4580–4591 Blight & corruption · The Northern Marches The blight that stopped One blighted piece in the march spread about sixty yards over eleven years and then stopped, in a year the parish book notes without remark. It has not moved in the thirty years since.
  170. c. 4580–4599 Flood & weather · Disaster · Sarrum and Its County The drowning of Netherlode Netherlode, a hamlet of eleven houses, drowned by degrees over the 4580s and 4590s and lost its last household in 4599. Its chapel, smithy and unlifted churchyard lie under water, yet it remains an undissolved parish.
  171. c. 4581 Spirits & pacts · The High South The Concord's keeping of two forsaken springs Within living memory four spring households of the upper Thames, families that kept a spring by custom, have failed, and after each failure, some years on, the water went wrong. Two of those springs the Concord of Saint Winnow took into its own keeping. It has kept them now for some forty years, and calls the arrangement temporary.
  172. 4581 Politics & diplomacy · Law & ruling · Sarrum and Its County The Crown requisition of the line, 4581 In 4581 the Crown requisitioned the Sarrum line without consulting the county, which never pressed its claim that it would have supplied what was wanted, so county right went untested.
  173. c. 4581–4604 Politics & diplomacy · Law & ruling · Sarrum and Its County The Enforcement Debates Between 4581 and 4604 the council twice debated a general enforcement and twice abandoned it on the same reasoning. On the second occasion the clerk recorded that reasoning without embarrassment.
  174. 4581 Crime & case · Haunting & wonder · The High South The Expulsion of Severin Beaumont In 4581 Doctor Severin Beaumont was expelled from the Collegium for binding engine-stones to unlawful corpse-light, in experiments that no school now admits took place.
  175. 4581–4585 Religious · Britannia The Heresy of the Open Gate After the heresy of 4581 A.C. the realm spent four years disputing a single question: whether a thing shut for good reason may be opened by a man who holds his own reasons to be better. In the same season at Cambridge, Severin Beaumont was put out of a licensed bench, that is, a workshop, which had been labouring at that very question.
  176. c. 4581 Blight & corruption · The Northern Marches The two-way blight above Rigg Head The smallest of the march's nineteen blighted pieces, at a spring above Rigg Head, has been measured for forty years and has both advanced and retreated by a few feet. It is the only piece ever known to give ground back.
  177. 4582 Haunting & wonder · Beasts & monsters · Kent and the Narrow Sea The Dover Surf Revenants For about half a season in 4582, things came ashore at Dover with the wreckage often enough that harbour priests, tide men and paid hunters had to work as one line. The coast still cites the arrangement it forced.
  178. 4583–4604 Trade & industry · Disaster · Sarrum and Its County The Redlode lode failures of 4583 and 4604 Two smaller lode failures at Redlode, in 4583 and 4604, moved perhaps ninety households to Sarrum or other workings within weeks, unrecorded by any authority.
  179. 4584 Rising & riot · Crime & case · The High South The Seven Lanes War Six weeks of street disorder behind the Oxford colleges in 4584 over gambling rooms and protection money, fought by loose companies of porters, runners and debt men. Three men died; the city records one and calls it the Lane Disturbances.
  180. 4586 The restless dead · Disaster · Unknown Molling Marsh In September 4586 the fen village of Molling Marsh, about ninety people, stopped answering its bells. Militia fired into fog and saw black blood that vanished by dawn; on the fifth day eleven were brought out alive. The most studied such event, and the least explained.
  181. 4586–4593 War · Over the Horizon The War of the White Banner Alliance The war of 4586–4593 A.C. in which Britannia intervened against an attempted partition of the White banner's position, because White credit carried too much British paper. It ended in the Compacts of Saint Corin, placing British commercial oversight inside the Blanchefleur harbour apparatus.
  182. 4586 Reclamation & expedition · Religious · Over the Horizon The Wye Brethren's crossing of 4586 Two Brethren of the Wye house crossed the water in the spring of 4586 to learn how the villages of the Near Coast attend their ground, which is to say how they watch over troubled ground and see to it. Their report is read to every band the house hires. It found that the Near Coast had come to the Brethren's own practice, but had set out from the other end.
  183. 4587 Famine & dearth · Sarrum and Its County The Bad Reckoning of 4587 The year Sarrum's September estimate of winter fodder fell short and the county bought in fear at panic prices from Kent and the west. It cost more than anything since the Water Days, and the storage houses speak of it as others speak of a battle.
  184. 4588 Law & ruling · Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Bank Council's certificate rule of 4588 Two benches, those licensed workshops, went into bankruptcy while they waited upon a Cambridge assay, and in 4588 the Bank Council took a rule from it. Thenceforward it would lend against no security whose worth hung upon a Cambridge certificate not yet issued.
  185. 4588 Fire · Haunting & wonder · The High South The burning of Wanfleet's fourth mill In 4588, the only year the Rogation blessing of the hatch was omitted, Wanfleet's fourth mill burned; it has stood a ruin since, its right never extinguished, and the village has never omitted the blessing again.
  186. 4588 Plague & sickness · Sarrum and Its County The Well Fever A fever in Sarrum's eastern quarters after a dry autumn in 4588, killing about eleven hundred. A Ninefields surgeon and a Cambridge physician traced it to burial grounds above the wells, in a report never answered. Some six hundred people left the city, many taken in by Cambridge.
  187. 4589 Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Enginewrights take a share in the Deepcut In 4589 the Enginewrights took a share in the Deepcut in lieu of a debt and have refused to sell it since, making the quarry a three-way holding with the Bank Council and House Hartfell that no dispute has shut.
  188. 4589 Politics & diplomacy · Kent and the Narrow Sea The Packet Office refusal of 4589 In 4589 a great house searching for a daughter asked the Dover Packet Office for its sailing records and was refused bluntly; it did not press.
  189. 4589 Other · Sarrum and Its County The river-line survey begun in 4589 In 4589 Ellis Mow's predecessor walked the Sarr bank to mark where the river stopped being drinkable. The surgical houses have repeated this every spring since, making the belt's only continuous record of any water.
  190. 4589 Flood & weather · Sarrum and Its County The stopping of the Combe Bourne The Combe Bourne, which gave its parish its name, stopped running in 4589 because pit pumping drew off the water beneath it. Its bed is now a lane, and three other Wold bournes have shortened or moved.
  191. 4589 Famine & dearth · Politics & diplomacy · The High South The understated shortfall of 4589 In 4589 Halden Close is understood to have understated a grain shortfall for three months to keep the capital from panic; no outsider can say whether it was right.
  192. 4590–4620 Crime & case · Law & ruling · Sarrum and Its County The assize hangings for alleged powers, 4590–4620 In the thirty years from 4590 to 4620 the county assizes hanged thirty-one people upon indictments that alleged a power, oftenest some harm done by charm or by ill-wishing. The power seldom stood alone in the indictment; it was laid beside a charge of theft, of arson, or of a child's death, that the conviction might be certain. Nor has the county any examiner able to tell true guilt from a neighbour's grudge.
  193. 4590–4614 The restless dead · Religious · Haunting & wonder · Sarrum and Its County The Black Lantern attendances at the Nine Acres Four times the Sarrum council has paid the Black Lantern house to attend the Nine Acres, the burial ground closed in 4590: once in that year itself, and again in 4597, in 4608 and in 4614, the last being the longest of them. A wet autumn went before every one. And every one after the first came only when the mission women had carried the district’s complaints for a year or two, before anybody who had money stirred to act. There was a fifth attendance, in 4620, for which the house waived its fee; the council’s accounts do not record it, and it has an entry of its own.
  194. c. 4590–4600 The restless dead · Sarrum and Its County The Brethren at the Sarrum burning ground Sarrum took to burning its dead, and in the thirty years that followed the Black Lantern house attended the burning ground twice and no more, both times within the first ten years. Set beside its four attendances at the closed nine acres, the figure asks for an explanation. The house has never given one.
  195. 4590 Law & ruling · Sarrum and Its County The Burning of the Sarrum Dead Sarrum council's answer, in 4590, to the Well Fever report: rather than move the burial grounds, it closed them to new burial and contracted furnaces east of the tips. It was cheap, left the old pits above the water, and the Oxford chapter has never approved it.
  196. 4590 Law & ruling · Sarrum and Its County The Decision of 4590 Following an engineer’s report, the council in 4590 closed the burial grounds beyond the Cinders rather than move nine acres of unmarked pits, and made burning municipal, permanent and contracted. The city has burned its dead since.
  197. c. 4590–4620 Horrors · The Northern Marches The tenth-day fogs in the warden's book Over thirty years a Swaledale warden recorded eleven fogs that moved up the dales against the wind, never crossed a watershed and often followed fallow ways. Nine people failed to come in on those nights; six were found drowned or fallen and three were never found.
  198. 4590 Trade & industry · Treaty & settlement · The High South The White Yard Stoppage The 4590 stoppage in the Cambridge yards that established the balance between certification and the guilds’ power to refuse work. Guild halls remember it more vividly than civic stone, and every memorial proposal reopens the argument over what it was.
  199. c. 4591–4621 Beasts & monsters · Kent and the Narrow Sea Burrowers opened on the pilgrim road Twice in thirty years parties opening shallow boundary ground beside the pilgrim road found the burrowers at work there. Parishes along the road now light the unowned stretches between villages from October to March, hiding the cost under other headings.
  200. c. 4591–4621 Haunting & wonder · Kent and the Narrow Sea Deaths following the marsh lights Pale lights are seen over the inner dykes of the Romney levels, chiefly in autumn before dawn. The parish books record four deaths in thirty years with the single word 'following'.
  201. 4591 The restless dead · Religious · Sarrum and Its County Suppression Book entry at the Ninefields churchyard, 4591 In 4591 water opened a grave in the churchyard at Ninefields. The incumbent sent for the Black Lantern house, which came, found nothing, said the office, that is, its set prayers, set no bound about the ground, and charged eleven shillings. Most entries in the Suppression Book, the register in which the house sets down its work, run after that same ordinary pattern.
  202. 4591–4607 Spirits & pacts · The High South The blockings of the Wanfleet cut In the dry summers of 4591 and of 4607 the head of Wanfleet's cut was found stopped, in a manner nobody will lay at any door, and on both occasions the blessing had already been said. After the second, a spirit worker was called in. The terms, she said, by which she meant the standing bargain held with the power of that place, were not hers to read.
  203. c. 4591–4621 Haunting & wonder · Over the Horizon The fine-morning emptyings of Lucerna Maris Three times in a generation Lucerna Maris has cleared its quays in under an hour on a fine morning when its vapour bells spoke. Each time, something followed that justified it.
  204. 4591 Religious · Sarrum and Its County The proctor's report on the Sarrum burnings In 4591 Sarrum's proctor reported the city's open, contracted burning of its dead to Oxford. No answer has ever come. The chapter, which condemns burning, has never approved the practice.
  205. c. 4591 Haunting & wonder · Kent and the Narrow Sea The riding officer's watch on the cave lamp, winter 4591 Through the winter of 4591 a riding officer entered the third cave twice a fortnight apart and established that the old lamp on its cut ledge was being refilled by someone. He recorded it in his own book and reported it to nobody.
  206. 4591 Spirits & pacts · Reclamation & expedition · Haunting & wonder · Britannia The Second Keeping of White Reed A district that neither force alone nor prayer alone had been able to hold was opened again in 4591, and by four hands together: engineers, parish clergy, dredge crews, and a marsh pact-line, which is a family keeping an inherited bargain with the marsh. It stands as the answer to the Ashfall Reclaim, and is cited to show that a valley may be won back by restoring older terms.
  207. 4591 Crime & case · Sarrum and Its County The second Rows hanging In 4591 the halls again charged interference with the Rows on the same facts, citing the 4574 precedent, and the man was hanged. The route he came up by was never established.
  208. 4592 Treaty & settlement · Sarrum and Its County The Joint Instrument of 4592 An early attempt at a joint instrument between Sarrum and Cambridge failed in 4592 over the Deepcut. The present Cambridge arrangement was later built on different lines.
  209. 4593 Coronation & succession · Britannia Accession of Edmund IV Treaty-King Edmund IV, called Treaty-King, began his reign in 4593 A.C. and remains the living sovereign, known for patience, correspondence and preventing avoidable ruptures rather than for battlefield glory.
  210. 4593 Flood & weather · Famine & dearth · Sarrum and Its County The drowning of the western road In 4593 floods drowned the western road, which carries about half of Sarrum's food. For four days no body could say what the city held. On the fifth the council asked Thoresby for her one-road figures, and no lasting arrangement followed.
  211. 4593 Crime & case · Sarrum and Its County The Paid Denial Two men were paid, in 4593, to declare in public that they had walked the Cut, the old navigation tunnel that runs beneath Sarrum, from one end to the other and found it blocked. It was at the wharf company’s standing bounty that the lie was aimed: eleven pounds for information leading to the closing of any entry from the Cut into the Bonded Rows, the warehouse quarter of the city. A tunnel that is blocked admits of no entry, and there is then nothing to find. Both men afterwards confessed it. Neither would ever say who had paid them.
  212. 4594–4597 War · Trade & industry · Fire · Over the Horizon The War of the Two Ledgers Fought 4594–4597 between Crown Meridian and Saint Corvin over bonded custody, pilot precedence and debt recovery at Qadis and Benisafra. Never a royal war, it burned warehouses, ruined captains and taught London insurers that company violence could govern a coast.
  213. 4596 Politics & diplomacy · Law & ruling · Sarrum and Its County The Lodging House Proposal A proposal to license lodging houses was brought before the halls in 4596. It was not seconded, and so it failed.
  214. 4597 Famine & dearth · Sarrum and Its County The shilling loaf of 4597 In 4597, one of only two times in living memory, the quartern loaf reached a shilling in Sarrum, and the associations opened their funds.
  215. 4597 Spirits & pacts · Religious · The High South The Suppression at Crozier Hill Crozier Hill had long kept its terms, the standing bargain with the power of the hill, until in 4597 a chalk working broke them. The Black Lantern Brethren thereupon took a power of the first rank, and took it alive, in a labour of nine weeks for which the Archbishopric paid. It was brought to Oxford drawn in a covered frame, and before the cathedral, to a vast crowd, its terms were read aloud.
  216. 4598 Coronation & succession · Kent and the Narrow Sea Succession of Earl Osbert Pike, 4598 Osbert Pike became earl on his father's death in 4598 and is reckoned the house's most capable head in three generations, though his formal powers are almost nothing.
  217. c. 4598–4618 Haunting & wonder · Sarrum and Its County The damned children of the Cinders mission Across more than twenty years the day book of the Cinders mission sets down four names, each entered as a child's, and sets them down again and again. The women who have served the mission longest say that the names are not the only thing that comes back. Anne Dowsett will not speak of it to anyone.
  218. 4598 Politics & diplomacy · Law & ruling · Sarrum and Its County The Lords’ Enquiry In 4598 the Lords asked the Bank Council for its records and were told that a private meeting keeps private notes, the same answer the Reckoning gives about its books.
  219. 4598 Politics & diplomacy · Law & ruling · Sarrum and Its County The Minutes Refusal When the Lords asked the council of the banks for its minutes in 4598, they were told with cold courtesy that a private meeting keeps private notes.
  220. 4598–4599 Law & ruling · Flood & weather · The High South The Nether Bourne case Nether Bourne ran out of season in July 4598. The parish walked it, then sent to the Water Court in September, which found a cut made three years earlier on Halden ground four miles upstream and ordered it stopped; by the next winter the bourne was normal.
  221. 4599 Spirits & pacts · Reclamation & expedition · Haunting & wonder · Britannia The Black Fen Stair Reclaim In 4599 marsh lights and reed powers are said to have restored order around a customs stair abandoned after a burial failure, before officials could make it usable again. It is one of the four spirit reclaims the realm argues from.
  222. c. 4599–4621 The restless dead · Sarrum and Its County The Black Lantern's refusals at Netherlode Netherlode's churchyard went under the water with no rite said over its dead, which makes it unquiet ground by plain doctrine. The Black Lantern house was asked twice to attend and twice did not, on the ground that the drowned parish has no incumbent to make the request.
  223. 4599–4610 Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Ninefields pay-room scheme From 4599 Ninefields paid members a shilling a week to take their wages at the association room instead of the truck table. It cost about four hundred pounds a year and lasted eleven years. It ended when the wharf company conceded.
  224. 4599 Law & ruling · Politics & diplomacy · The High South The Third Bench Refusal The aerial endorsement is the Collegium’s licence to make lift chambers, those sealed vessels of worked machine-stone by which sky vessels are lifted, and only two benches, as the licensed workshops are called, have ever held it. Both are bound to House Beaumont by shareholding. In 4599 a third bench sought the endorsement and was refused. No reason stands in the register; and the backers of that bench have maintained from that day to this that the refusal was made to shelter the two makers already in the trade. It is, for that reason, the most contested entry the register holds.
  225. c. 4599–4621 The restless dead · Sarrum and Its County The unanswered requests for Netherlode The drowned parish of Netherlode lies over a churchyard whose dead were never lifted and over which no rite was said before the flooding. The Black Lantern house has twice been asked to attend and twice declined, because a parish with no incumbent cannot make the request.
  226. c. 4601–4620 Haunting & wonder · Sarrum and Its County Larkin's third place Hob Larkin, a cellarman, has entered four hundred places beneath Sarrum, and one of them bears a ground-book entry complete in every column but the column for the finding, where what was found should be written; that he left blank, and on purpose. He will not go back. He will not say what it is. Nor did he wish the Brethren sent.
  227. 4601 Spirits & pacts · Religious · Haunting & wonder · Sarrum and Its County The Concord's visit to Combe Bourne A Concord of Saint Winnow roll entry dated 4601 records a visit to Combe Bourne with no term made. That means either nothing was needed or nothing could be arranged, and the entry does not say which.
  228. 4601 Disaster · Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Enginemead shed subsidence and survey of 4601 After subsidence cracked the floor of the second shed, the wharf company commissioned a nine-day survey in 4601. It reported eleven stable acres of workings but had no plan. Bet Marchant later disputed it, and there has been no survey since.
  229. 4601 Disaster · Trade & industry · Over the Horizon The Failed Relief Convoy at Grey Salt Haven In 4601 the failed relief convoy at Grey Salt Haven, following false assay and mutiny, turned the Argent Basin Company’s commercial failure into a loss of people. The company’s name is now a warning against ledgers that grow rich too fast.
  230. c. 4601 Crime & case · Sarrum and Its County The striking of Halloway's Company Halloway's Company of Cambridge carried illicit goods three times between 4598 and 4601. A factor exposed it to the Collegium, which struck it from its list. Within a year no bench, insurer or benefactor would hire it.
  231. 4602 Religious · Law & ruling · Haunting & wonder · Sarrum and Its County The chapter's answer on the Black Stone spring In 4602 the chapter told Selwyn Pace in writing that it had received no petition about any spring at Sarrum and does not raise the sanctity of a water on its own motion. It has not revisited the question.
  232. 4602 Religious · Law & ruling · Kent and the Narrow Sea The chapter's refusal to certify, 4602 In 4602 the Canterbury chapter again declined to certify for a family that could have ruined it, and again came through stronger.
  233. 4602 Politics & diplomacy · Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Council’s Refusal In 4602 the Weavers proposed that the Bank Council be admitted among the halls. The Council declined courteously as not being a trade, a refusal generally read as concerning the stoppage clause.
  234. 4602 Politics & diplomacy · Law & ruling · Sarrum and Its County The Crown grain requisition of 4602 In 4602 the Crown requisitioned again, this time for grain; as in 4581 the county declined to assert county right against a Crown that had already acted.
  235. c. 4602–4621 Haunting & wonder · The Northern Marches The eleven men of the infirmary rooms In the present infirmarer's nineteen years, eleven men came to Harrowgate changed after going into the deep old works. Six recovered, three went to the county town at the bishop's order and two remain; none has ever given an account.
  236. 4602 Politics & diplomacy · Trade & industry · The High South The Halden Refusal In 4602 Halden was approached over the machine-stone tithe and declined, judging correctly that the Crown’s interest lay in the precedent rather than in the wheat.
  237. 4602 Haunting & wonder · Sarrum and Its County The Ninefields calling of the Brethren In 4602 the Ninefields association called the Black Lantern Brethren, who come without fee when an association calls. Neither the association nor the house will say why.
  238. 4602 Rising & riot · Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Tramroad Clearance The wharf company, in the spring of 4602, undertook to clear its section of Sarrum's internal tramroad of riders. Platemen and loaders alike would not work it; two associations planted themselves on the rails; eleven days went by idle, and at the end of them the company withdrew. Riding free has since gained the name of the fourth article, as if it were set beside the three articles of the Sarrum Bill of Rights.
  239. 4603 The restless dead · Beasts & monsters · Sarrum and Its County Suppression on the road above the pits, 4603 At one bend of a road above the pits, in 4603, two carters were taken with eight days between them. It was the hundred that called in the Black Lantern house; the house set the cause down as a revenant and kept a suppression of three nights. In a later hand a note observes that no body in the parish was ever found to have risen.
  240. 4603 Disaster · The High South The Marches, 4603 Few Cambridge companies are known in the trade by name, and the retrieval company of Ismay Vance is one of them. It works the Marches, which is to say the wild country lying beyond the belt, and the Marches have taken their price of her. Her first company was lost there in 4603. Her second came apart some while after, over a disputed bill of taking: the dispute was settled in her favour, and four of her people left her over the settling of it. She leads a third company now.
  241. 4603–4604 Raid & skirmish · Crime & case · Trade & industry · London The Nightstairs War A 4603–4604 gang war between the Nightstairs Combine and interests using the Bellmarsh Black Net over message carriage and porterage below three western wards. Eleven deaths were publicly put down to robbery or accident; lower London remembers more.
  242. c. 4603 Trade & industry · Over the Horizon The Outer Granary Suspension Crown Meridian came nearest to ruin about 4603, when three overstretched depots nearly failed together and only quiet Crown backing kept its credit alive. Counting houses study it for its speed: reliability is a promise, and promises can be doubted fast.
  243. 4604 Coronation & succession · Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County Silas Vane's succession to the factorage Silas Vane took over a Rows factorage in 4604 when his predecessor died. He inherited about four hundred standing parcels, of which some twenty were entered by a man he never met and hold he knows not what.
  244. 4604 Politics & diplomacy · Kent and the Narrow Sea The Packet Office refusal of 4604 In 4604 a Crown office seeking a debtor was likewise refused by the Packet Office, whose value to merchants rests on its refusing everyone.
  245. 4606 Haunting & wonder · Disaster · Sarrum and Its County The Blackdown Stope In spring 4606 a stope in the New Lode broke into old working on no plan; of twenty-seven men who went in, six came out. The Colliers call it an ordinary fall; the Brethren sealed it and keep a brother there. Since then unplanned ground may be opened only with a Brethren officer present.
  246. c. 4606 The restless dead · Kent and the Narrow Sea The Grey Nails in the hop gardens, c. 4606 In the fourth and fifth weeks of the picking a trouble comes to the hop parishes, and roughly once in fifteen years it passes beyond managing; it last did so fifteen years ago. On that occasion the Grey Nails, the sworn lay order that will come within the day, were called in before the Brethren. When it was done, the families who had worked that garden asked to be put to work elsewhere.
  247. c. 4607 Raid & skirmish · Over the Horizon The Brinehook Intervention The action that made the Blackwater Contract Fellowship’s name, about 4607. A situation a ministry would have weighed for two seasons was closed in eleven days by men already on the water. The precedent is still argued over.
  248. 4607 Haunting & wonder · Crime & case · Sarrum and Its County The hanging of 4607 Of the assize cases that alleged a power, the thirty-first was tried in 4607, and its charge was the killing of two men. The depositions described a thing and gave it no name. The prisoner was hanged on the day of trial and the body burnt, and the county had never known either; nor is any attendance by a suppressing house on record.
  249. 4608 Founding & charter · Sarrum and Its County Founding of Ash House Because green coal defied remote assay, the Schola cantabrigiensis artificii arcani set up a field house at Sarrum in 4608, with White Walls examiners seconded to it. It stands in a compound leased from White Falcon, and people call it Ash House.
  250. 4608 Crime & case · Over the Horizon Killing of a boatman at Cobre and closure of the British factor house In 4608 a guard at the British factor house in Cobre killed a boatman. The house was closed for two seasons, and its present articles still require the night watch outside its gate to be appointed locally.
  251. 4608–4610 Raid & skirmish · Crime & case · Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Candlewick War A 4608–4610 gang war between the Three Nails and Ash Dog interests over scrap routes, labour brokerage and receiving yards. It brought ambushes at shift change and burned carts. Local memory counts twenty-one dead; the assize proved seven.
  252. 4608 Haunting & wonder · Sarrum and Its County The Fleecegate cellar entry, 4608 For nine years something had been heard in a cellar in Fleecegate and never once seen, and in 4608 the occupier sent for a Black Lantern house. The house entered it as 'unclassified', a word its own form forbids. Thirteen years on, the entry stands as it was written, unresolved.
  253. 4608 Politics & diplomacy · Sarrum and Its County The Ninefields disablement proposal In 4608 Ninefields costed a permanent disablement payment and found it would empty the fund within four years. Hester Quill put the figures to the meeting, which declined; she voted with it while thinking it wrong.
  254. 4608 Crime & case · Sarrum and Its County The third Rows hanging The third hanging for interference with the Rows, in 4608, was brought by the halls under the Articles on the 4574 precedent. As before, nobody established how the man entered from below.
  255. 4609–4612 Reclamation & expedition · Sarrum and Its County Barrow Ash In 4609, at the Oxford ring, the belt of parishes about Oxford from which the Afflicted are kept out, a family of Barrow Ash was broken apart. Sarrum was where, three years later, in 4612, that family was made whole once more: the work of a company that had laboured eleven months in the service of Frideswide House, the house of the Reed Cross at Oxford that keeps the register of the missing.
  256. 4609 Politics & diplomacy · Sarrum and Its County Bet Marchant before the Bank Council, 4609 Called before the Bank Council in 4609 because insurers wanted the stoppages explained, collier Bet Marchant answered every safety question but refused to say where the stopped roads lay; the Council let her refuse.
  257. 4609 Trade & industry · Kent and the Narrow Sea Failure of the fourth Sandwich haven scheme, 4609 The fourth scheme to reopen Sandwich haven failed in 4609. Its condition that no ground east of the old chapel be broken is on record, unexplained, and carried into the fifth scheme now subscribed.
  258. 4609 Politics & diplomacy · Sarrum and Its County Rushe's address to the province The province calls Sarrum 'a sink into which the province drains', and in 4609 Corwin Rushe proposed an address in answer to the name. He withdrew it before it could be read. Two Guildmasters had counselled him that to answer at all was to concede that the charge merited answering.
  259. 4609 Haunting & wonder · Trade & industry · The High South Stopping of Stonecourt's eastern face Stonecourt quarry's eastern face has not been cut since 4609; the workings book gives the date and depth but no reason, and the quarry-master will explain only if the Collegium asks in writing.
  260. c. 4609 Trade & industry · Over the Horizon The Lantern Receivership About 4609 delayed quarantines and overextended western credit chains froze too much of Saint Corvin’s paper at once. The trade concluded that a method resting on authorities’ goodwill fails all at once when those authorities are under pressure.
  261. 4609 Law & ruling · Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The line company's Collegium refusal Since 4609 the line company has refused without exception any consignment the Collegium has refused, fearing entry in the Register; refused material now moves to Sarrum by road and out by barge.
  262. 4609–4613 Spirits & pacts · Britannia The Nether Studley Case Nether Studley was troubled for four years, from 4609 to 4613. The trouble opened with thin stock and a dog that would not go past a gate, and closed with an order of suppression worked over three nights; and the work cost eleven months and two bodies. Only when the lapsed obligation that lay behind it was found did the parish recover.
  263. c. 4610–4614 Reclamation & expedition · The Northern Marches Strangeways's opening of the Tarn Mound The antiquary Strangeways opened the Tarn Mound under licence, carefully and with the parish told beforehand; he also tested the barrow legends against chronicles and plague rolls and found them wanting.
  264. 4610 Other · Kent and the Narrow Sea The nave-roof survey of 4610 A survey of Canterbury cathedral in 4610 put the want on the nave roof above a thousand pounds, where it has stayed; the fabric is kept only by subscription.
  265. c. 4610 Reclamation & expedition · The Northern Marches The north-west valley reclaim of 4610 Eleven years before the present a gentleman bought a north-western valley and hired a company of nine that cleared and held it. A small settlement now exists, but the company has stayed on and by continuous presence become the valley's effective government, a case every Harrowgate attorney cites.
  266. 4610 Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The shed rate cut of 4610 A Scour Lane yard cut its rate for shed women in 4610 and denied it. Pym produced nine years of figures showing the women's wage gap widening from about a fifth to a quarter across four yards.
  267. c. 4610 The restless dead · Sarrum and Its County The unnamed dead of the Cinders Over eleven years the Cinders mission saw a hundred and ninety of the district's dead burnt, and could name only about sixty. The ash district treats the unnamed as unquiet: two streets go unwalked after dark, a house has stood empty eleven years, and the burial association pays for grave-watching.
  268. 4610 Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Wharf Concession The wharf company gave way in 4610, and with that the Ninefields pay-room scheme was at an end. Its reckoning had been a plain one: that men who came to work sober of a Monday were worth more to it than the goodwill of its foremen.
  269. c. 4611–4621 The restless dead · Kent and the Narrow Sea House attendances at the graves of the Grey Nails' dead Four Kentish parishes that called the Grey Nails in the last decade called the Wye house within three years. In three of the four the ground now troubling them was the grave of the person the order had dealt with.
  270. 4611 Politics & diplomacy · Trade & industry · The High South The Ashdown Silence In 4611 Ashdown was approached over line rates and answered with silence, which the belt regarded as the more insulting of the two refusals.
  271. 4611 Famine & dearth · Rising & riot · Fire · Sarrum and Its County The bread fortnight of 4611 When bread reached a shilling in 4611, crowds burned out two bakers who had not raised prices, although everyone knew prices were set in the Rows. The associations opened their funds and rebuilt both shops within the month.
  272. 4611 Flood & weather · Sarrum and Its County The dry summer of 4611 In the dry summer of 4611 the water over drowned Netherlode fell far enough to show the chapel gable, the only time in living memory.
  273. 4611 Politics & diplomacy · Law & ruling · Sarrum and Its County The Hiring Names Proposal In 4611 a proposal that any name given at a hiring be written down was brought before the halls. It was not seconded and failed.
  274. 4611 Haunting & wonder · Sarrum and Its County The Hollowgate suppression Hollowgate's association called the Black Lantern Brethren in 4611 and a suppression followed. The ground was left quiet but felt wrong for a season, and three streets still tell strangers about it.
  275. 4611 Spirits & pacts · Religious · Politics & diplomacy · Sarrum and Its County The Ladies' refusal of Sarrum The Cinders had come through a second bad winter when, in 4611, Ninefields asked whether any Lady of the county, any of the women the country recognises as able to treat with the powers that hold its land, would come into the city. The answer was carried back by way of Alice Verney and never put in writing. No term, it ran, no standing bargain of any kind, can be held with the ground of the city.
  276. 4611 Reclamation & expedition · Raid & skirmish · The Northern Marches The Northern Fringes Reclamation Feuds Armed feuds running since 4611 A.C., in which land informally won in the long afterwar of recovery hardens into contested right once it pays. Small barons, retired captains, road syndics, chapel trustees and opportunistic earls turn half-reclaimed country into hereditary fact before the centre decides what is lawful.
  277. c. 4611 Spirits & pacts · The High South The two unanswered matters at Cold Fenny The parish chest at Cold Fenny has stood empty since 4611, and a suppression was beyond its means; hence for some ten years it has lived alongside two matters that a richer parish would have had settled in a season. Both have been entered by the Wardens of the Quiet Ground, who walk the bounds and report upon troubled districts. The Concord of Saint Winnow has been informed. The Brethren have been asked twice, and twice have named their usual rate.
  278. c. 4612 Coronation & succession · Sarrum and Its County Duke Nicholas Hartfell's succession Nicholas Hartfell succeeded to the dukedom at twenty-six and is nine years into his tenure, the youngest of the belt's four dukes, active on requisition and absent from the Bank Council.
  279. c. 4612–4621 Beasts & monsters · The Northern Marches The north carrs after the cutting stopped After reed cutting was abandoned at the north end of Lantern Mere, the Mereton bounty book recorded seven of its eleven payments in nine years from those carrs, in clusters. The nearest holms say the north end has got worse.
  280. 4613 Spirits & pacts · Reclamation & expedition · Haunting & wonder · The High South Stillwater Orchard Return In 4613 three parishes admitted in their own books that fruiting and steady soil had returned to their orchards under spirit order before tenancy and parish routine resumed. Pact-keepers cite it against the view that reclamation means conquest by human institutions.
  281. 4613 Law & ruling · Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Deepcut waste-witness reform Since 4613, by quarry-master Ned Dunn's own reform, two men have witnessed every block of stone entered as waste at the Deepcut face.
  282. 4613 Politics & diplomacy · Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Kerrow Election In 4613 Prudence Kerrow was elected to the Weavers’ court on the votes of the fulling hands, against the candidate the wardens preferred. The result was reported in London.
  283. 4613 Demons & possession · Crime & case · Fire · Massacre & reprisal · Kent and the Narrow Sea The Otham Burning Otham's charm house, home of a woman who sold charms, went up in flames in 4613; she was cropped and put out of the parish. For two months afterwards the deaths in the parish did not stop. The earl met her costs and never said why. Of what passed, only Joan Harrietsham left a written account.
  284. 4614 Crime & case · The High South Alys Tredgold's testimony at the Woodmote Alys Tredgold, in an assart dispute of 4614, an assart being a piece of woodland cleared for tilling, told the Woodmote that a family which cuts at fourteen years' growth rather than fifteen 'has ended something'. What, nobody asked. On other grounds the court found in her favour.
  285. 4614 Spirits & pacts · Religious · Haunting & wonder · Sarrum and Its County Hanne Ridley's deposition The flashes are the subsidence waters on the Sarr levels, and in 4614 the Concord of Saint Winnow took a deposition from Hanne Ridley concerning things they had given up, two of which, by her account, she put back. The deposition stands in the Concord's Roll unsummarised, which is the Concord's way with a term that is still in force.
  286. 4614 Other · Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County Skerrit's finding at Blackdown number three In 4614 Joan Skerrit compared the water pumped from Blackdown's number three level with rainfall and showed it was draining a catchment three miles across. This explained the failing springs on the Wold shoulder.
  287. c. 4614 Rising & riot · Over the Horizon The Split-Pay Mutinies Mutinies of about 4614, and the proof that the Blackwater Contract Fellowship might overreach itself once it had governed ground longer than it had escorted across it. A body made to arrive, apply force and depart will rot if it stays; for to hold ground is to pay men on the day, and in such places money comes slowly.
  288. 4614 Haunting & wonder · Religious · The restless dead · Sarrum and Its County The Yellow Ward refusal, 4614 A suppressing house was asked in 4614 to attend a household in Yellow Ward, and declined. Its grounds it entered as 'no finding'; and it stated besides that the house does not attend a person, the business of the Brethren being with ground and never with people.
  289. 4615–4617 Haunting & wonder · Disaster · Kent and the Narrow Sea The Black Wake A dangerous period on the Dover water, 4615–4617, that left moved bearings and a rewritten calendar. Unexplained losses rose to nine to fourteen a year, and the pilot roll briefly carried forty-four names before returning to forty-one.
  290. 4616–4619 Trade & industry · Sarrum and Its County The Candlewick surety changes Between 4616 and 4619 the bonds of three Candlewick public houses passed to new sureties who stopped carrying the slate. In the same years the Candlewick association's relief payments rose by a third.
  291. 4616 Crime & case · Sarrum and Its County The Cinders Refusal In 4616 the Cinders association was asked to look into three disappearances from one street in a single season and declined, the only time it has ever done so.
  292. 4616 Trade & industry · Kent and the Narrow Sea The fourth declination In 4616 Dover's underwriters added a standing refusal to insure any hull using the four old bearings moved during the Black Wake; no reason was given and the figure behind it is unrevised.
  293. c. 4617 Crime & case · London Saint Odilia Ledger Scandal Saint Odilia's Rooms in London began as a refuge for afflicted children, but demand for their records from physicians, priests, patrons and Cambridge correspondents turned the children into marketable case histories, with private buyers suspected. It remains the sharpest warning attached to afflicted charity.
  294. 4617 Crime & case · Sarrum and Its County The Bank Council's Sweetwater enquiry In 4617 the Bank Council began an enquiry into the Sweetwater Fund, a four-ward subscription, and dropped it. What it wants to know is where forty to seventy of the dead each year are going.
  295. c. 4617 Flood & weather · Famine & dearth · Spirits & pacts · The Northern Marches The hard winter of 4617 A hard upland winter, four years before the present, in which two dales lost stock heavily while the Ganthwaites of Gant Fell lost none; asked how, they gave an answer about the lie of the ground that satisfied nobody.
  296. c. 4617–4619 Other · Kent and the Narrow Sea The pilot roll at forty-four In the two years after the Black Wake the pilot roll carried forty-four names for nineteen months, then returned to forty-one, with neither change explained.
  297. c. 4618 Politics & diplomacy · The High South Election of Master Alaric Voss The contested election of Alaric Voss as Master of the Walls, a stone man and the first in forty years to rise from the yards rather than the Schola; the benches called it a correction, the Schola a lapse.
  298. 4618 Other · The High South Hal Tebb's answer at the warden's hearing At a warden's hearing in 4618, grinder Hal Tebb, asked whether grinding disperses or merely divides what rejected stone held, said he did not know. The recorded exchange circulated widely and has never been publicly addressed.
  299. 4618 Famine & dearth · Kent and the Narrow Sea The Dover bread rises of 4618 In 4618 the quartern loaf rose by a penny twice within nine weeks, felt in every house behind the Dover quays, where bread is over half a poor family's food money.
  300. 4618 Other · London The Last Lanterns at the Southbank Rooms Lucia Saye and the Last Lanterns, the Cambridge band that first took the Gloam through the galvanic horns, brought their song The Last Lantern to London's Southbank Rooms in 4618, with a lamp effect at the close that every Gloam room has copied since; Cambridge, London, Oxford and Sarrum have argued over the song ever since.
  301. 4618 Law & ruling · Politics & diplomacy · Sarrum and Its County The Refusal of 4618 Serjeant Aubrey Fenn of the Rows watch, the watch the halls pay to keep Sarrum’s Bonded Rows, came in 4618 to believe that a factor’s office in the Rows had been entered from below, by way of its cellar, and that the cellar lay upon the Cut, the old tunnel beneath the city. He went to the halls for authority to take up the cellar floor. They refused it. Nobody put the refusal in writing; the only record of it is the one Fenn made himself.
  302. 4619 Crime & case · Massacre & reprisal · Britannia Saint Jude's Quay Murders Killings of 4619 A.C. at a labour and reform assembly on Saint Jude's Quay, where powder, pistol fire and panicked flight left customs men, students, porters and bystanders dead together. They fixed the present age's fear of urban terror.
  303. 4619 Beasts & monsters · Haunting & wonder · Britannia The Western Monster Surge Beast pressure rising across the western counties since 4619 A.C.: boar-things in hedged country, cliff-hounds seen inland, road disappearances, failed watch rotations, and creatures appearing together that once kept apart. Churchmen, hunters and surveyors blame different causes, and none is settled.
  304. 4620 The restless dead · Religious · Sarrum and Its County Fourth attendance at the closed Nine Acres, 4620 In 4620 the Sarrum house of the Black Lantern Brethren, the suppressing order that attends troubled ground for a fee, went once more to the Nine Acres, the city burial ground closed in 4590. In the house’s own book the visit stands as the fifth attendance. What it found was what it had found on the four occasions before; it entered the finding as before, and waived its fee of eleven shillings. No fee having been paid, the council’s accounts know nothing of the visit. They record four paid attendances, and the last of them is 4614.
  305. 4620 The restless dead · Religious · Haunting & wonder · Kent and the Narrow Sea The north-side footing opening, 4620 Old burials came up in great number in 4620, when ground on the north side of the Canterbury precinct was broken for a footing. The works lay idle eleven days. By night a hired party held the opening; the chapter read the Kentish form over it; the footing then went in.
  306. 4620 Siege · Over the Horizon The Sand Incursion and the Siege of Port Saint Nicholas Since 4620 A.C. a host out of the Broken Lands has besieged Port Saint Nicholas. Insurance on southern sailings has already risen and the Commons writes of cannibals and sand kings; it is one of three crises straining the realm's attention in 4621.
  307. c. 4621 Reclamation & expedition · Other · The Northern Marches Disappearance of the six-man company on the fell Six men privately engaged to examine something on the fell were last seen at Rigg Head on the fourteenth of September and never came down. Their indebted employer has left the district, no parish is bound to act, and their relatives keep returning to Harrowgate market.
  308. c. 4621 Politics & diplomacy · The Northern Marches The Collegium's proposal to release the northern cuts A live Collegium proposal to release the fen's northern reed cuts, relieving poor villages of unprofitable labour. It would be the first deliberate abandonment in the wet country's record; the fen opposes it without saying why, and the priory will not give its reasons in writing.
  309. 4621 Haunting & wonder · The Northern Marches The trouble at the Stream Head high fold Since Lady Day 4621 something has been at the Stream Head high fold: two lambs and a dog lost in April, a boy frightened in June, and by September a man who will not go up. A priory brother found nothing; the parish has raised eleven shillings and a ring.

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