Of the Great Reckoning at Clacton, and the Man Who Came as a Bin

By my troth, I have seen many strange musters in this shining age they have set me to watch, but never one so strange as the joust I watched last night, where a lord of the county stood against a bin.

I must set down what I saw plain, for that is my labor, and the reeve does not pay me in ale to leave things out. There was a great hall, though it had no roof I could find, only a bright tapestry hung in the air that showed numbers climbing and falling like grain prices at market, and men in fine dark coats stood before it and spoke very fast and very grave, as priests do when the harvest has failed and someone must be blamed. I took this tapestry at first for sorcery, and I hold to that still, for no loom I have ever turned out cloth that counted votes.

The contest, as near as I could reckon it, was a tourney for the reeve's staff of a whole shire, and the champion set against all comers was one Nigel Farage, a lord well known to me from other musters, who has stood in the lists many a time before and been unhorsed as often as he has stood victorious, and yet always rides again next season, which I confess I admire in the way one admires a stubborn ox. He is a public man and does his jousting in the open square, so I will say what I saw of him: he came to this contest as he has come to others, and the article the priest gave me to study says plain that he won the staff of office, and so the tourney went to him, fair and reported.

But it was not Lord Farage who held my eye, for across the lists from him rode the strangest knight I have ever set down in ink, and I do not have the words for him, so I will use the ones I have. He came, so I am told and so I believe, in the guise of a bin. Not a knight's bin, mind, not some device upon a shield showing a bin rampant, but the very shape and person of a household bin, such as the miller keeps by his door for scraps, only grown to the size of a man and given, God be good, a voice and a jest for every occasion. They called him Count Binface, and I set my quill down a moment when I first wrote that, for I thought the ink had betrayed me, but no. A bin, ennobled, entered the lists against a sitting lord.

Now here is the marvel I must report true, though I do not understand it: the smallfolk loved him. I watched the crowd, which is ever where my eye wanders when I cannot follow the great matter at hand, and I tell you the common man and woman in that square cheered the bin-knight louder, by my reckoning, than they cheered the lord who actually won the staff. They did not give him the office. The scroll is clear on that; Lord Farage carried the day and the bin-knight did not. And yet the people's hearts, which are not always given to the victor, seemed to ride with him anyway. This is a mystery of the human heart I cannot untangle, no more than I can untangle why the priest weeps at weddings, and I set it down without understanding, only wonder.

I will confess, as is my duty, that I spent overlong a portion of this dispatch on matters beside the tourney proper, but that is ever my failing and I have made my peace with it. There was a fellow near the lists selling meat wrapped in bread from a little wheeled stall, and he did brisk trade among the onlookers, and I watched him longer than I watched the tapestry of climbing numbers, because I understood him, and I understand precious little else in this age. There was also a man whose whole labor, so far as I could see, was to walk before the great hall with a broom and sweep a floor that did not look dirty to me, and I wondered if he was some manner of squire doing penance, and no one would tell me otherwise, so I have let it stand as fact in my heart if not upon this page.

The bin-knight's squires, or whatever men serve a bin in his campaigning — for I am told this was no single night's joust but a long season of riding from town to town, as a wandering player might, or a peddler with a cart that moves by no ox I could see, which I take for further sorcery and will not investigate further, having been burned by sorcery before — his squires, I say, had fashioned for him jests and mottoes that the smallfolk repeated to one another with great delight, the way we repeat a good riddle at the shearing. I do not have the wit to reproduce these jests here, having heard them only once and through a strange glowing window, but I am told they mocked no plowman and no goodwife, only the great houses and their doings, which even a serf knows is fair sport, for the great houses have broad shoulders and can bear a jape same as they bear a tithe.

I want to be honest in my accounting, as the reeve requires of me at Michaelmas: I do not know what it means that a shire would cheer a bin nearly so loud as its lord. Perhaps it means the smallfolk are weary of lords who look like lords and speak like lords and promise like lords, and found something honest in a fellow who came before them plainly declaring himself rubbish, and let them laugh, and asked for nothing more solemn than their laughter in return. Or perhaps it means nothing at all, and I am a serf a very long way from his field trying to read scripture in a puddle. Both may be true. I have found in my time watching these great games that they very often are.

The lord won. The bin did not. This much the parchment tells me plain and I do not doubt it, for I was told to keep the facts the size they are given me, and I will not swell them, however much my heart wanted the bin to carry the staff, for I liked him, God forgive me, more than I ought to like a household object with a title.

The light is going now over the far hedge and I have turnips yet unturned and a beast that will not milk herself for love of my dispatches, so I must away from this shining square and back to the mud that knows me. I do not know what I have seen. I have written it down anyway, as true as my poor eyes could carry it, and left the sorting of wheat from chaff to wiser heads than mine.

Yours in mud and honest confusion, Hodge o' the Field