Walking to Camelot (7 page)

“Since we can't seem to rouse anyone at the Oakham police station, John, we have to be satisfied they are doing their job. I have to know.”

“We could just call them in the morning. It must be a good thirty miles back to Tiffany's lane.”

“No, John, I have to know tonight that they have done their job and picked up the clothing.”

“Okay, Karl. We will go back there.”

And indeed we do. The cab arrives at our
B&B
around six o'clock. The cabbie is swarthy and sixtyish, sports a captain's beard, and wears a Greek fisherman's cap. He resembles Captain Smith of the
Titanic.
I show him the location of the Tiffany site, marked with an
X
in my
Guide,
and off we go. He does not seem to find our request at all unusual, and keeps up a steady stream of conversation about his relatives in Canada, who work in the Alberta oil and gas fields.

We pull up to a spot in the road where it curves. Tiffany's lane is marked with a bridleway sign attached to which is the familiar Macmillan sticker. Karl and I both get out and trundle up the dark, mucky track, casting furtive glances around us. The cabbie has positioned his vehicle with headlights shining up the lane to give us more light, but it's a surreal, chilling scene right out of Stephen King's
The Dark Half.
This portion of our otherwise delightful walk has taken on a sinister aspect. About two hundred yards in, we search on the right side below the hedgerow and then reconnoitre for another hundred yards or so.

“Karl, the clothes are gone. The police definitely picked them up.”

He just grunts and says he wants to search farther toward the road, but eventually agrees that the clothes are gone. By this time, the rain is pelting down. I can see the cab driver's dim visage behind the wheel as his windshield wipers kick in.

“Okay, John, I'm satisfied. Now I could use a good stiff Scotch.”

The Crown Inn has great food and two known ghosts. The pub crowd is orderly. It is
de rigueur
in England for the barmaid to display generous décolletage, and we are satisfied that the Crown has passed muster in this regard. The buxom blonde swinging the Guinness is cheerful and friendly. She also smiles at me without any subtle mockery of my foreign accent when I order Karl's double Scotch and my half pint of lager. Wherever one travels, the first thing the natives do is analyze your accent. The flip side of this is that to a villager, we are all foreigners unless we live within a radius of five miles. In these small rural backwaters, a Yorkshireman is a source of wonder, even gossip. But a North American is simply beyond comprehension and can be safely ignored.

We both order the beef Wellington, which is delicious — essentially a filet steak lathered with pâté and duxelles, wrapped in a puff pastry and baked. I have mine with a touch of curry. The dish is named after the Duke of Wellington, perhaps because he was known to love a mix of beef, truffles, mushrooms, pâté in pastry, and Madeira wine. Others suggest that it was just a patriotic chef who wanted to assimilate the French recipe for
filet de bœuf en croûte
during the Napoleonic Wars. Regardless, I could eat this every night, washed down with a spicy Shiraz.

Next morning there is a promise of sun. A winding path leads us out of Belton. There must be horses about, as there is a pervasive odour of horse manure when we emerge from a copse into open fields. In the tiny village of Allexton, the Norman church has been abandoned and is now under the care of the Churches Conservation Trust. The churchyard is overgrown; thistles, brambles, and St. John's wort compete with ivy growing right up the oolite stone walls. Inside, the church is bleak and stark. Little light penetrates, and the black-and-russet tiled mosaic floor is cracked and stained.

Outside, Karl and I poke about a bit in the graveyard. Despite the playful swoop of swallows, there is a problem here. By the vestry door at the north end of the church, the overgrown weeds reach up and partly cover the grand tomb of Thomas Hotchkin, who died in 1774, having, it is stated, “been most miserably cut and mangled, of a fistula.” Hotchkin gained his wealth from his West Indies sugar plantations and slave trading. A rotten smell of decay, redolent of dead rat or mouse, emanates from near his tomb, upon which rests a large urn. Perhaps fitting for a slaver's tomb, I muse. The panelled vestry door glows magically like the Black Gate of Mordor, evilly beckoning us, and there are dark red blotches resembling blood near the old brass door handle. Above us a crow starts cawing and does not cease. I shiver and signal to Karl that it's time to leave. He doesn't argue. This is one morbid place.

We footslog through field after field. The landscape is now rolling, and I can see ten miles toward the Northamptonshire skyline. Karl curses the many rabbit holes, as well as the farmers who do not leave the required swathe in their fields for the prescribed path.

“The law evidently says that we can be fined for trespass if we leave the trail, but the bloody farmer can't be bothered to show where it is,” he says. “So I say to hell with it. Just make for the far stile by whatever route is fastest.”

It is indeed a conundrum, and there are so few walkers on this section of the Way that one can see the farmer lapsing into the habit of ignoring the path with his crop planting. However, we also note the same large boot marks we saw yesterday on the path, and my bet is that the chap who leaves them knows where he is going and we should follow his marks if in doubt.

Both my feet hurt from blisters. The last rabbit hole I stepped into gobbled up my left foot, which is now a tad sprained. The other foot stepped in a wet cow pie while trying to avoid a badger sett, and the boot is bespattered with dung.

Two jackrabbits are so absorbed with boxing one another that they ignore us as we approach to within a few feet — such is the male ego, I suppose, even in the rabbit world. These are, in fact, hares competing to impress the females during mating season. As a former bantamweight pugilist, Karl is highly amused by their boxing antics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In memory of Anthony James Hough,

24 July 1971–09 April 2002.

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

“Poor bugger.”

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