A True Accounting of the Five Solemn Vows Sworn by the Armored Men

Friend, I have been to the great field again, as is my charge, and I set it down here plain, though God knows I understood perhaps one turn in ten of what passed before me, and that turn I likely have wrong as well.

It came to my ears — for a crier in a bright coat announced it before the contest proper, in the way that heralds do before a joust, though this herald wore no colors of any house I know and spoke very fast — that the great armored men of this league, all of them together, of one accord, like a village agreeing at last on how the common field shall be plowed, have sworn among themselves to keep a close eye upon five particular sins. Five! Not four, not a dozen, but five, chosen out of what must be a great teeming flock of possible wrongs a man might commit while wearing a helm and running very hard at his fellow man. This struck me as wise. Even the reeve, when he comes round at Michaelmas to count what we owe, does not try to reckon every sin in the parish at once — he picks his battles, same as these men in their armor have picked theirs, and I confess I felt a kinship with them I did not expect to feel, watching from so very far outside the wall of the field.

I could not tell you the five sins by name, for the herald spoke them in a manner too swift for a man who reckons time by the church bell, but I gathered they concern the safety of the body, which seems to me a most Christian concern for men whose whole trade is to hurl themselves at one another like rams contesting a ewe in springtime. Where I come from, a man who struck his neighbor so hard as these men strike one another would be hauled before the manor court and made to pay a fine in eggs, or stand in the stocks while the children threw turnip peelings at him, and rightly so. Here, instead, they have made of it a covenant, a compact, a sort of tithe of good behavior that all the armored men swear together — and I am told the great lords who own the teams, who I picture as fat barons in high towers, counting coin and never once touching the field themselves, have agreed to it also, which is more than I can say for our own lord, who has never agreed to anything a serf proposed in the whole history of the manor.

Now, the game itself, near as I could follow it — and here I beg your patience, for I have not the learning for it — is played by two great households, each in their own colors, contesting for an egg-shaped stone across a field marked out in furlongs, or something very near a furlong, I did not have my rope to measure. The object, so far as my poor wit could discern, is to carry this stone to the far hedge without being struck down by the opposing household's men, who are permitted — nay, encouraged! — to tackle you as a wolf tackles a lamb, provided they do not commit one of the five newly-forbidden sins in the doing of it. I saw a man carry the stone the whole length of the field and the crowd rose up as one and roared fit to wake the dead, and I confess I do not know if this was a home run, of which I am told this game has many, or something else entirely, but it was plainly the finest thing that had happened all evening and I set it down as such.

I will tell you what I understood better than the game, and that is the man who sold the meat-tubes.

He stood behind a little wheeled stall not far from where I had been seated by whatever kindly soul mistook me for a ticketed man, and he called out his wares in a voice near as loud as the herald's, and he had a great tub of hissing water in which he kept perhaps forty of these tubes of meat at once, each one nestled in a soft white loaf, and a man could have one for coin, with a yellow sauce upon it if he liked, or a red one, or both, which seemed to me a decadence unheard of even at the Christmas feast. I watched this commerce for a good while — longer, I confess, than I watched the actual contest of the armored men, for the meat-tube trade was plain to me in every particular, the coin changing hands, the loaf, the tube, the sauces, the gratitude of the buyer, whereas the game itself kept doing things I could not account for, such as a moment where every man on the field seemed to walk backward all at once, as if time itself had been made to run the wrong way, which I take to be sorcery of some kind, though no one around me remarked upon it, which tells me it must happen often enough that decent folk have stopped being frightened of it.

There was also a great glowing tapestry hung high above the field, taller than any cathedral window, on which numbers and small moving pictures of the men themselves appeared, and a painted beast of some kind — a ram, I believe, or perhaps a hawk, I could not say for certain — that danced along the edge of the field between bouts, tending nothing, herding nothing, simply dancing, which struck me as a fine use for a beast if a fellow could arrange it, though I do not know how one teaches a ram to dance nor what such a creature is fed.

But I return, as I must, to the five sins, for that is the true matter of my report and I would not have you think I spent the whole evening on sausages. It is a good thing, I think, when men of great strength and great violence agree among themselves to spare one another the worst of it — not all of it, mind, for the game plainly requires some violence or there would be no game, only men standing about a field in armor looking foolish, but the worst five kinds, whatever they are. There is talk, the herald said, of contempt and courts and other households of the game — different from these armored men, more of the scholars' sort, young men who play for their colleges rather than their lords — refusing entry to certain veterans of the armored trade who wished to teach the young ones, and lawyers being brought in over it, which sounds to me exactly like the sort of dispute that ends with everyone poorer and only the lawyers fed, but that is a different field and a different day and my legs are already sore from standing at this one.

The light is going now, and there is a hedgerow behind wherever I am that wants tending, though I could not tell you which hedgerow nor whose, only that the feeling of it is very strong in me, and a serf does not argue with such feelings. I have set down what I saw, true as I know it, sausages and sorcery and solemn vows alike, and I leave the sorting of wheat from chaff to wiser heads than mine.

Yours in bafflement and honest labor, — Hodge o' the Field