A Dispatch on the Watching-of-Carts, As I Did See It From the Hedge

By my troth, they set me to watch a great contest this day, and I confess before God and this parchment that I do not know what manner of game it was, nor who won, nor whether anyone won at all — only that there were carts in it, more carts than I have seen in all my days, and men who watched the carts without ever once racing them, which seems to me a poor sort of sport, but I am a serf a long way from his field and I do not judge what I cannot follow.

Here is what I saw, set down true as I am able.

There is, in this age, a manner of watchtower — small, mounted upon a post, no bigger than a hen — and it does not blink, and it does not sleep, and it does not even, so far as I could tell, employ a man at all. I took it at first for some device of falconry, a perch for a hunting bird trained to mark thieves, and I waited a good long while for the bird to come. No bird came. Instead the little watchtower simply *looked*, all day and all night, at every cart that passed beneath it, and it wrote down what it saw in a great invisible ledger that I could not see but was assured was there, the way a priest assures you of Heaven — on faith, and because clever men have told you so.

I am told this ledger is kept by the reeve's men — the keepers of the King's peace in this land, though they answer to no king I could name, only to a council of some kind, a shire-moot perhaps — and that they use it to catch the wicked: the horse-thief, the cutpurse, the man who takes a cart that is not his and rides it somewhere he ought not. This seems to me a fine and honest purpose, the same purpose as a good hound or a sharp-eyed miller who marks who comes and goes past his gate, and I said so, out loud, to no one, because I was alone in the hedge.

But then I am told — and this is where my poor plowman's head began to ache something fierce — that the little unblinking towers do not merely watch for the wicked cart. They watch *every* cart. The good goodwife's cart, off to market with her eggs. The priest's cart, on his rounds to the sick. My own cart, if I had one, which I do not, for I am but a serf and walk everywhere on my own two feet, thank you, and glad of it, for I should hate to think what a little tower might make of my walking, though I suppose it cannot read a man's gait the way it reads the marks upon a cart's hindquarters. Small mercies. It watches them all the same, the good cart and the bad cart alike, and it remembers where every cart has been, and for how long, and it never once forgets, the way even the sharpest miller must sleep sometime and so misses a thing or two. The tower misses nothing. That is the whole of its trade.

And here, my masters, is where the contest — if contest it was — grew heated, for I did see men of the shire-moot stand upon one side of the green and men of the common folk stand upon the other, and neither side wielded lance nor mace nor even a stout cudgel, which disappointed me greatly, as I had settled in for a proper tourney and instead got only talking, though I will own the talking was fierce enough in its way. The reeve's men said: is this not a marvel, that we may find the wicked cart quicker than ever, and bring the thief to justice before the goodwife's eggs are even cold? And this seemed to me well argued, for I have known thieves in my own village and would not weep to see them found out by tower or by hound or by any means at all.

But the common folk answered: aye, but the tower does not forget the *innocent* cart either, and who holds the ledger of the innocent, and who says what is done with the knowing of where the goodwife goes of a Tuesday, and the priest of a Thursday, and every soul in the shire on every day of their lives — for that is a great store of knowing, greater I think than any lord has ever held over his villeins, and my grandsire always said a lord who knows too much of a man's comings and goings is a lord who will one day find a use for the knowing that the man himself did not intend. This too seemed to me well argued, and I confess I stood in the hedge turning my head from one side of the green to the other like a man watching two rams butt heads, agreeing with whichever ram had spoken most recently, which is I think the mark of a very poor judge of contests, and I am sorry for it, but there it is.

I will say this: I did not see the ledger-tower itself do any harm this day. It only watched, the way I watch my own turnip row, which is to say faithfully and without opinion, and it is the men who read the ledger after who must answer for what they do with the reading — same as it is not the plow's fault what furrow a bad farmer cuts with it. But my grandsire also said a well is only as safe as the man who draws from it, and every well in this shire, it seems, now empties into the same great cistern, and that gave me a chill I could not shake even standing in the sun.

I did try, God forgive me, to follow the true business of the contest a while longer, but I own I spent the better part of an hour instead marveling at a fellow selling little tubes of hot meat from a wheeled stall not three paces from where the shire-moot argued, and I have not yet decided which was the greater marvel of the day, the meat-tubes or the tower, and I am ashamed to say the meat-tubes may have won, for they at least I understood, and a man does like to understand at least one thing in a day.

The light is going now and I can hear, in the part of my head that still knows such things, the lowing of beasts that want penning, though I own I have no beasts here, nor pen, nor field, only this hedge and this parchment and my own great confusion — but the feeling of the work undone sits on me all the same, and I must away to it, whatever and wherever it is.

— Hodge o' the Field, who saw the tower watch, and understood the watching not at all