
A Proclamation
Whereas the common population of this sceptered isle was attached to answer the Lords Farage of a plea why they refused to serve — whereas it is ordained that any man and woman of the Queens’s realm of England, being able of body and below the age of sixty years, not living by trade or practising any specific mystery or having his own land about the tilling of which he can occupy himself, not being a servant to another, if he should be required to serve in a service considered fitting to his estate, shall be bound to serve him who so requests and shall take only the wages, liveries, rewards, or salaries which were in force, in the place where he should serve, in the sixty-fourth year of her Gracious Majesty or the average in the five or six preceding years. — Now the said common population was found guilty as charged, are required to till in the fields and raise crops from the earth as villeins nativus and shall to their home church by Tuesday 7 June for service, at the failiing of which to take the stocks for three days and thereafter be imprisoned.
Explanation
I based it on a text from a proclamation from the Middle Ages when most tenants were under some kind of mutual obligation with the landlord and not free to come and go and be tenants of whomsoever they pleased and in the period of disruption during the black death some tenants were arguing that they were freed from their obligation and so the Lords took them to court and the proclamation was that they were bound and they had to work in the Lord’s fields.
Assuming there’ll be a clarification for those of us ‘Offshore’… other than that of pure whimsy, of course?
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Ah, thank you. It is gallows whimsy. I added a section at the end of the post to explain it.
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