On the Loosening of the Girth-Rules of the Poor Children's Race

By my troth, I have been set this day to watch a race, and a stranger race I have not seen since the miller's boy raced the miller's goose round the tithe-barn and the goose, I will say plainly, acquitted itself the better runner. They call this race the Head Start, and I am told — though I confess I had the whole of it secondhand from a crier standing near a great glowing tapestry of small moving pictures — that it is a race run every year, and has been run every year since a great lord named Kennedy, whose nephew is a man of some standing even now, decreed long ago, in a year so recently past it beggars belief any lord could have decreed anything at all in it, that the poorest children of the realm should be given a head start in the running of their lives. A fine and Christian notion, and one I do not mock, for I have seen what becomes of a boy who starts his ploughing three furrows behind the others and never once catches up the difference, God rest him.

What I am charged to report today, though, is not the race itself — for it seems the race runs on regardless, quiet and steady as the plough-ox, and no crowd roars for it the way they roar for the painted-beast games I am more used to watching — but a great stirring among the King's new men, who have decreed that the rules governing how the race is run shall be loosened. I do not know the whole shape of these rules, and I will not pretend to you that I do, but as best I have followed it from the crier's account, there were stewards aplenty set along the course of this children's race — men whose whole labor was to walk the line and see that the porridge given the runners was proper porridge, that the tents where they rested were sound tents, that the ribbons marking who had run and who had not were honestly tied — and it is these very stewards, or the weight of their office, that the King's new men mean to lighten.

I confess I do not understand why a race for poor children should want fewer stewards rather than more. In the manor races of my own home field — and we did race, at Michaelmas, the young ones round the sheep-pen, for a prize of a wheaten loaf — it was always held that the fewer eyes upon the course, the more room for a cheat to slip a stone in his rival's shoe. But I am a serf a very long way from my own hedgerow, and I have long since stopped expecting the customs of this shining age to run on the same logic as the customs of mine. Perhaps here, in this place of glowing tapestries and carts that move without oxen, a steward is not a guard against cheating but a weight upon the runner's own ankle, and the King's new men mean only to cut the weight free so the children may run the truer and the faster for it. I offer this only as a farmer's guess. I have not the learning for it.

What troubles me more, and here I will speak plain, is that this race was decreed by a lord now generations gone — his own nephew, they say, sits now among the King's men who oversee it, which strikes me as a fine strange thing, as though the miller's own grandson had grown up to inspect the mill his grandfather built, and found the millstone set too fine and ordered it coarsened. I do not say this is wrong. A grandson knows his grandfather's mill better than any stranger could. But I have watched enough of these great glowing-tapestry contests now to know that when the rules of a game are loosened mid-season, it is rarely the strongest runners who feel it first. It is the ones already three furrows behind.

I fixed my eye, as is my custom, upon the wrong part of the spectacle entire, for that is where my eye is happiest. While the crier spoke gravely of budgets and provisions and the weighing of porridge-grain, I found myself instead marking a man who stood near the great tapestry selling small bright tubes of meat wrapped in bread, and doing, I should say, a brisker trade than any steward of the race, loosened rules or no. I watched him a good long while. He seemed a man untroubled by lords living or dead, which I confess I envied him for. There is wisdom, perhaps, in tending only the cart in front of you and letting the great decrees of great men pass overhead like weather. I have not yet achieved that wisdom myself, being a serf and thus obliged by nature to fret over every decree that passes, whether it touches my own field or not, and this one, I am told, touches many fields at once, and many children in them, and so I set down my meat-tube-man and fret on.

I will say this for the King's new men, and I say it in fairness, for a serf who reports only complaint is no serf at all but a rabble-rouser, and I have not the belly for rabble-rousing: it may be that the old stewarding was grown too heavy, too many clerks counting too many grains of porridge and too few hours left to actually spoon it into a child's bowl, and if that is so, then a lightening is mercy and not neglect, and I should not gape at it as though it were plague come again. I do not know which it is. I was given no scale to weigh it on, only a crier's account and a great deal of confusion, which is, I have found, the ordinary ration of my days in this age.

What I know is only this: a race decreed for the poorest children, so that they should not start three furrows behind the rest of their lives, is being run today under looser rules than it was run yesterday, by order of men who serve a King I have never seen the face of, in the name — or so they say — of the very lord who first laid the race's course. Whether the children run the faster for it or only run the harder, unwatched, I cannot tell you, for I am not permitted past the fence, and the light is already going long and gold over wherever it is I am meant to be standing, and the crier has moved on to speak of a vaccine now, which I take to be some fresh apothecary's blessing against the ague, and that is a dispatch for another day, if the reeve does not send for me first.

The field wants tending, and so, God be good to the runners, do I.