Sir Alexander Crowle

One of the named men who drive the Reclamation Feuds. Like every man on either side he claims to be imposing order, and like every one of them he lives by survey paper, winter riders and the threat of burning whatever cannot be held.

The Northern Fringes Reclamation Feuds have run since 4611 and are running still: the long afterwar of recovery, in which land informally won hardens into contested right the moment it begins to pay. Small barons, retired captains, road syndics, chapel trustees and opportunistic earls have spent a generation turning half-reclaimed country into hereditary fact before the centre can decide how much of it is lawful. The fighting is driven by named men rather than by policy, and Sir Alexander Crowle is one of the names. With Earl Nicholas Blackmere and the mercenary warden Owen Pike he stands on one side; on the other are Baron George Keldwick, Captain Jim Rook and two younger Ashdown cousins.

Each side claims to be imposing order, and each lives by the same three instruments: survey paper, winter riders, and the threat of burning whatever cannot be held. No sheriff in the fringes has the force to intervene, none has been instructed to try, and the feuds have never once been put down by anybody. The law beneath the quarrel is the law of recovery, by which a man who brings unheld ground into ordinary use at his own charge may claim it, entered once in the local register and once in the royal. No statute says a claim must survive a bad winter, and no northern clerk will certify one that has not. Hence the riders, and hence the burning: a claimant must be seen to keep his ground through the dark months, and what he cannot keep he would sooner leave useless than leave to his neighbour.

Crowle’s part in that arrangement is the armed one. Where the earl beside him is strong in old papers and thin on the ground, Crowle is a knight who rides, and his men are said to winter on ridges the Blackmere carts no longer reach, so that nobody may mistake absence for surrender. The fringes have their own verdict on the whole business, and it is the most quoted sentence in the north: nobody rebelled, nobody was invaded; a belt of the realm simply began settling its property questions with armed men, and has not stopped.

Companies meet Sir Alexander when they come north to clear a valley and find they have been hired into the feud instead, or when his riders stop them on a disputed ridge and ask whose articles they carry. He pays for men who will hold ground through a winter, and he pays promptly, which is itself a warning. A party offered his work should ask, as the March advises of any fringe lord, which ground is truly kept, which is merely claimed, and who will say the same thing when the party reaches it.

In person

Sir Alexander Crowle is about forty-two, six feet tall, broad in the shoulder and lean in the waist. His hair is very dark, with a single white streak above the left temple, and his eyes are a pale steel-grey. His face carries its history plainly: part of the nose cut away by an old blade, a scar beneath the right eye, a split left earlobe and two powder burns on the right cheek. In the field he wears a riding coat over a blackened breastplate, with sabre, pistol and musket; indoors he can be the formal soldier by the fire.