Fury's Field, or, The Two Great Oxen and the Man Who Greased the Yoke

By my troth, I have seen a wonder today, though I confess before God and the reeve that I understood perhaps one turnip's worth of it. I was sent, as I am always sent, to watch the great contests of this shining and deafening age and set down what passed before mine eyes, and what passed before mine eyes today was this: two mighty oxen of men, each big enough to draw a plough through granite, and word going round the manor that they are soon to be yoked together in the same furrow.

I do not know either ox by his baptismal name, only by what the criers called him, and I will set that down plain, for it is not my place to improve upon what I am given. One is spoken of as a heavyweight, which I take to mean he is weighed, formally, upon some great manor scale, the way the miller weighs a sack of barley before he takes his tenth of it, and that his weight has been found considerable, and this is accounted a mark of honor rather than a thing to be ashamed of, which took some adjusting to, as in my village a man that heavy would be assumed to have gotten into the lord's grain stores. The other ox is spoken of as an elite contender, which I take to mean a man who has already fought his way past several lesser men the way I have fought my way past several lesser turnips, by main force and stubbornness, and has now arrived at the front of the queue.

The great business of the day, as best I could puzzle it, is not that these two oxen have fought. They have not fought. Nothing has been fought. This troubled me greatly at first, for I had walked a fair distance and brought my own bread expecting a contest, and there was no contest, only men in fine coats talking about a contest that has not yet been arranged, the way the priest talks about the harvest feast for a full month before a single sheaf is cut. But I am given to understand this is itself the event. There is, it seems, a whole second trade practiced in this age, quite apart from the fighting trade, which is the trade of arranging the fighting trade, and the men of this second trade are paid in coin and glory near equal to the fighters themselves for the labor of getting two great oxen to agree on a day and a field.

And here is the marvel I actually set down my dispatch upon, reader, for it is the marvel that held me: one of the oxen, a broad pale fellow they say hails from a place called Morecambe, which I confess sounds like a good honest fen and I mean that as a compliment, stood before the assembled crowd and gave his thanks — his actual thanks, as a tenant thanks a good steward — not to the other ox, not to any priest or lord, but to a man who does no fighting at all. This man, called White, is by all report a sort of master of ceremonies for the whole business of oxen-yoking, a figure something between the manor steward who arranges the marriages of the lord's cattle and the fair-day crier who gets two quarrelsome tradesmen to finally shake on a price. The pale ox declared, in words I will not swear to exactly but which I set down in their spirit, that this steward-fellow had gotten the match "over the line," which I take to be a plowing term, meaning the furrow is nearly done though the ox has not yet reached the hedge at the field's far end.

I want to be honest with you, as a serf ought: there is no date. There is no field named. I asked three separate criers when and where this great yoking of oxen would occur and got three separate shrugs, which in my village would mean the whole affair was invented by a bored plowboy, but here it is treated as tremendous and confirmed news regardless, and men in fine coats nodded very seriously about it, and I confess I have caught something of their seriousness myself, though I cannot tell you why.

While the criers debated the matter of the missing date, I will admit my eye wandered, as it does, and I spent no small portion of my watching hours upon a cart near the edge of the yard where a man sold small tubes of spiced meat, tucked into a soft bread trough, to a queue of onlookers that was, near as I could reckon, considerably longer and more devoted than the queue of men actually discussing the fight. I watched this cart a good long while. The meat-tube man worked with the quiet, competent grace of a good thresher, never wasting a motion, and I thought there is a man who understands his trade, whatever the two oxen understand of theirs. I do not say this to make light of the oxen's business, which I am sure is very grave and very lucrative and involves a great deal of the coin this age seems to run on entirely in place of good honest grain. I say it only because it is what I saw, and I was sent to say what I saw.

There was also, I should note, a great glowing tapestry mounted high above the yard, upon which the pale ox's face appeared many times its true size while he spoke his thanks, and I confess I bowed to it slightly before I caught myself, thinking for one foolish moment that some vast lord had descended to address the crowd from the sky. No one else bowed. I have decided not to mention this again.

What I understand, in the end, and I offer it humbly, for I am a farmer and not a scholar of these mysteries, is this: two great oxen who are already accounted among the very greatest oxen in the land are to be yoked together in a contest of some future date, upon some future field, and this is thought to be among the grandest news the fighting-trade has produced in some years, and a third man, who does not fight, is thanked above all others for making the two oxen agree to it, the way a good matchmaker is thanked at a wedding feast though he himself weds no one. It strikes me, turning it over as I walk home in the last of the light, that this is not so very far from my own world after all — for did not old Reeve Aldous spend a full fortnight last spring merely getting Tom Millward and the Fenwick boy to agree on whose bull should service whose cow, and did not the whole village toast him for it after, though the bulls themselves never said a word of thanks?

The light is going now and I have said what I saw, which is all a serf can rightly promise anyone. There is barley half-cut behind the far hedge and it will not cut itself while I sit here marveling at glowing tapestries and meat-tube carts, so I must away, and leave the two great oxen to their yoking, whenever and wherever it is the fine-coated men decide it shall be.

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