Black Lantern Brethren

When a parish asks, this order attends upon troubled ground. Its Kentish presence is one small house, at Wye, and from the sending it is commonly nine to fourteen days in coming. An ordinary attendance brings two brothers and costs eleven shillings. If matters proceed to a bounded suppression, the house goes to work after dark, four strong. By a suppression the order means its fixed procedure for bringing troubled ground to quiet; and before any begins, the ground is walked and a boundary marked about it, called the bound, over which no one may pass until all is finished. Of the four, two do the work and two keep an inner mark; the outer bound is held by hands the parish hires. The order finds against no person. Its business is with the ground, not with whoever may be to blame.

An order sent for to plague ground, to prison chapels and to roads where the dead keep bad order; and where others would treat with a power on terms, it breaks it. Of the realm's three professions of the unseen it is one, and the only one present in London, where four houses attend those parishes that send for them. Two brothers come, for one night or for as many as four, and the house bills the ward by a fixed schedule: eleven shillings an attendance, two pounds four shillings a suppression. Its Sarrum house, nine brothers and some twenty lay staff, attends the pits, the closed burial grounds and the workings that are on no plan. Since 4606 that house must have one of its officers present, paid by the owner, whenever a working is opened into ground that is not on a plan.

Named with it

• Brother Anselm of the Black Lantern (Sarrum house
• keeper of the suppression book, 4619)
• Brother-Lantern Aldous Fell of Sarrum
• Brother Anselm
• Brother Anselm (head of the Sarrum house
• keeps the suppression book)
• Brother Edmund Rowse (officer
• keeps the attendance book)
• Brother Wulfgar · author of Measures for a Quiet County, 4544
• Brother Nicholas Stourmouth · of the Brethren house at Wye
• Brother Anselm Hoy · Attendance Book of the House at Coldrake
• Sub-Prior Hugh Malby · The Rule of the House at Coldrake
• Brother Crispin Ayre · A Defence of the Houses

Ties

• one of the suppressing orders alongside the Brotherhood of the Lantern Grave
• long and bitter history with the Ladies and pact-families
• contrasted with the Concord of Saint Winnow and the Wardens of the Quiet Ground
• quarrels with the Concord and the Wardens in the country
• bills ward committees, who dispute the accounts
• rival in method to the Concord of Saint Winnow and the Wardens of the Quiet Ground
• work with the chapter court on grave cases
• endorse suppression bills of taking used in the Cambridge essence market

In the chronicle

• 4189 · The Amendment of 4189
• 4468 · The Black Lantern House at Fleecegate
• 4574 · The Brethren attendance schedule of 4574
• 4590–4614 · The Black Lantern attendances at the Nine Acres
• 4597 · The Suppression at Crozier Hill
• 4602 · The Ninefields calling of the Brethren
• 4606 · The Blackdown Stope
• 4606 · The Unplanned Ground Rule of 4606
• 4609–4612 · Barrow Ash
• 4611 · The Hollowgate suppression
• 4615–4617 · The Black Wake

At the table

Its standing schedule is eleven shillings for an attendance and two pounds four shillings for a suppression; a full engagement, with bounds, hired hands, travel and keep, comes to between eight and fifteen pounds. A house sends four men, and they come on foot. The order will not attend unless the request comes from somebody with standing in the place, that is, with recognised authority there, as a parish has; nor until the fee is settled. Hired companies commonly keep the outer bound. Yet no brother will attend where anyone is being paid to be present, and so to hire a company is to shut out the house, unless the company's fee is surrendered to the parish in writing. Nothing entered in one house's books is ever copied into another's. The Molling Marsh attendance of 4586 ran to nine nights, the longest the Sarrum house has undertaken, and was entered as a vampire attack upon no evidence whatever. Twice the house has declined to attend drowned Netherlode, no parish having asked; to Ironmere it was never called; and at the Stonecourt cavities it has not attended. Its books of attendance show the settled wards served the same night, while the four southern riverside parishes wait some three days. In grave cases of forbidden practice the order is called in beside the chapter court, and for failed graves it is sent for, when a village can get it. Among the brothers the strict party of the High South is strong, they being those who hold that a power should be broken rather than bargained with. The order's own records concede that districts it has cleansed tend to come back angrier.