Hamlet · Fringe · The Northern Marches
Slack Riggs
A frontier hamlet of nine households with no wall and no garrison, on the edge of the northern march. Its headman insists that it endures only because nothing has yet come against it. It is also a place whose well, when it goes wrong, is mended by a ridge-wise woman fetched from Thwaite Head.
- Within
- The Northern Marches
- Named in
- Book VI
History and lore
Slack Riggs is a frontier hamlet of nine households on thin upland ground at the edge of the march, one of the nineteen such places in the Under-Sheriff's latest return, which counted twenty-six the time before. It has no wall, no garrison and no arrangement with anybody. Its headman, Nathan Ogden, told the Harrowgate market in 4620 that it holds on only because nothing has come against it yet, and that he has looked hard for some other reason and found none.
The hamlet keeps the march's ordinary defences a little harder than most: bells at fold and yard, iron on every door, nearly everyone out walking the bounds because there are too few to send a party, and nobody abroad after dark short of a birth. When its well goes wrong it does not wait for priest or Collegium; it sends to Thwaite Head for the ridge-wise woman, who comes and generally mends it. A curate asked to judge the practice in 4620 replied only that the well was mended.
For the traveller: pay for what you eat, take any warning given without argument, and do not offer to stay and help unless you mean it.
Where the volumes speak of it
- Book VI › 27.3 The Frontier Hamlet
- Book VI › Chapter 28 — The Hedge-Witch, the Ridge-Wise, and Work Without Licence
