In the days following the Norman Conquest of 1066, a humble idiot named Ethelbert the Excessive had inherited the role of musician or bard to local battle-chief Thane Thripp who controlled the lofty valley of Cumbersholm, where lay the unimportant hamlet of Bodbick, the woods of Bod Geir and a few thorpes that were too insignificant for their inhabitants even to remember their way home to them.

 Situated in what is currently called the Lake District, this ravine at Cumbersholm was originally only settled by chance, or by a very kinky curl of fate at the most. Legend has it that round about the time of the birth of the legend of Christ, a handful of Welsh pilgrims (or perhaps holiday-makers) were on their way to worship (or perhaps have a picnic) at what-may-or-may-not have been King Arthur’s Round Table at Penrith.

 When they were still some miles from the henge whence they were headed, their humble troupe was snatched up into the heights of the crags by a savage blow from the churning bellows of some daemonic sorcery. Then again, perhaps they would have been less likely to attribute their depressing uplifting to a frenzied and cosmic horror than a freak uncommon hurricane, if they were the sort of Britons just going on holiday to do some sunbathing and not the sort to be going on a Holy Day to do some Sun-worshipping (or even Son-worshipping if the Celtic Welsh were then using the newer system of metric religion they were encouraged to switch to).

 Either way, believing themselves to have been cursed forever to live on the heights with the rams, they saw no alternative but to make their dwellings on this damned peak for now.

For ‘tis true that within the grike’s confines, a definite memory rose among the skalds and bards on the fell of that dread day. None of them could remember it, from through the skins of several concentric wombs. But they were getting much more expressive at singing of that dread day so long ago, when their forebears had been swept up by dark magics.

 Nowadays, they enjoyed the fruits of the land even on these slopes grazed by rough sheep, so everyone agreed that it had been decided they weren’t leaving.

 “No,” sang out the passionate Ethelbert the Excessive in a startling new departure from his previous material; “surely a booming voice rang out

And it had been heard to pronounce

That never again shall you go hence,

Nay never again can you go hence,

Not til a ray should come

Forth from the sleeping sun

And strike upon the sap from a stone

From a flower more dear than gold,

And deadlier than trolls.”

 But they weren’t that bothered about the dark lyrics that some tortured artist chose to put behind his ditties; he could pretty well wail, but if it rocked out, they’d quaff ale and fuck loud.

 So the folk did come and go, and the more the folk come, the more folk come, and then go and don’t come again once they’re gone.

 Subsequently, they were so cut off from the surrounding lands that no-one there realised there had been not only an invasion by the Normans but a series of counter-invasions.

 They still believed themselves still to be ruled by the timeless Old King Coel, and even he they knew of only from a snatch of mythical song that had been passed down from Ethelbert’s ancestors. They’d never even received any really valid confirmation that the Romans had indeed withdrawn their forces six centuries previously.

 By now these interbred rustics had variously been in the territory of the Brigantes, Britannia Inferior, Rheged, Northumbria, Mercia, England, Northumbria and now England again, though none of its rulers had chanced across the place to claim it since what had become known as the fifth century.

 Well, one day, Ethelbert was in the woods at Bod Geir with his daughters two playing hide-and-seek.

 While he was up against a tree counting as far as he could, he happened to accidentally peek from between his eyelids and his gaze fell through a chink between his fingers upon the distinctive aelves’ cap-shaped cap of a certain kind of mushroom, one favoured among his people. How can we judge from our future whether he may have had the noble purpose of just sampling one to be sure that the year’s liberty harvest had indeed arrived early? Sure enough, once he’d picked one, he saw another and quite soon they were everywhere, especially in his gut, and he’d forgotten what game he was supposed to have been playing with whom, and why he would have to spin a ridiculously crazy yarn to cover for it.

 But it seemed good.

 Knowing only that he was absent from something, whether or not it was from reason, whatever that was, he called on Runerwigh, the Celtic god of cowards (whom he’d never actually heard of), for inspiration to write a new epic saga. For if there was one skill Ethelbert the Excessive had mastered in his profession, it was the lyre. And like everything, he was excessive with it.

 He leant back on the tree and drooped slowly down against it, feeling it to be quite comfortable and soft.

 When he got up again, it felt quite firm and tough enough to support the weight of his saggy frame.

 He’d written a riff, a chorus and a couple of verses, and he was stuck on the bridge. Still, not bad, he thought to whoever is listening, but he didn’t know if it was exactly good, since he’d been sitting there under the tree for a whole sevenday.

 Thankfully his children had been hiding in Thane Thripp’s court anyway, it was he who’d located them, where they’d been hiding behind the fronts of his children.

When Ethelbert finally returned to perform his new number for Thane Thripp it just seemed to his young girls, Blair and Cameron that he was just being really, like, casual about them staying out all week on sleepover, and quite a cool dad for once when he showed no surprise at finding they’d left him by the tree to play a different game with the thane’s two sons, Prince Cadwgawn and Prince Einion.

 Well, Ethelbert had imagined no-one would ever find out how stupid he’d been if he pretended he’d come across a new song from a wandering minstrel, with news that the entire land has been taken over by strange men with short hair and armour made of metal hoops, but his girls were so excited by having got to spend the day having had Thane Thripp’s sons to keep them amused, that they insisted that their daddy should bring back this entertainer for their incredulous eyes.

 “We beseech you father, ‘tis not that we yearn to know if he can play lute better than you lyre!”

 “Oh no, my sire, only it just doesn’t make sense that you’re using a word like ‘minstrel’ that probably hasn’t even entered the Frenchmen’s tongue yet, let alone the English language.”

 Ethelbert sensed a tenseness in the narrative.

 “Ah, fer cryin’ out loud, y’all’d never’ve even heard of Frenchmen if it weren’t for dese nu beats I been layin down. No way can such as dem irie styles not do it fo yo?”

 The balladeers’ two daughters here spoke as one voice. “Father, your language is getting sooo unrealistic. You’re not even trying to convince your audience you’re from a Dark Ages society. You’ve been eating those mushrooms again!”

 And the thane did asked is it was true and whether he’d thought to bring any back for the rest of their brave clan.

 But Ethelbert had only just managed to bring himself back to the village.

 “In sooth, Ethelbert, I find myself in agreement with Blair and Cameron, and I charge thee as your lord and your employer not to return to the village until perchance you return with one of these strange creatures of whom you sing so convincingly. Or henceforth thou shalt be known not as my trusted companion but as Ethelbert the Egg-betterer, charged with motivating the hens to lay saltier breakfasts.”

 Well, Ethelbert was sore vexed, for he’d always considered his name to be silly enough as ‘twere. And fancy treating a shamanic drug-slayer of his calibre with such scorn!

 Ethelbert had to wait a while to find his way out of the valley because he just couldn’t find any way through to the outside world.

 Was there an outside world?

 “Oh my sacred stem!” Ethelbert cursed. And he was cursing himself, because he was the one who’d cooked up porkies about an enchantment being put on them. And just because I felt like I needed to be saying something that was more happening than the traditional folk medleys my dear dada Eldric the Elder  taught me in my crib.

 Now it seemed it really was happening, that there actually was a hex on his spellbound countryside, a hex preventing him from venturing forth beyond their nearby horizons. And all because of me being the kind of a prannock who eats a whole hillside of psilocybin and then goes making up daft chants!

 Aaaah!! But no!! Hadn’t I put an end bit into the song, a get-out clause? A few extra lines to fade out to? That it still was possible to exit the unnatural vale under the right conditions? Yes, I did! I’m a genius after all. My name will go down in myth as Ethelbert the Extraordinary!!!

 Now how did the words to that bloody coda bit go?

 I won’t bore you with all the words he tried until he fell asleep again. Needless to say they were hardly more nonsensical than the original version seemed to be;

“Nay never again can you go hence,

Not til a ray should come

Forth from the sleeping sun

And strike upon the sap from a stone

From a flower more dear than gold,

And deadlier than trolls.”

 Anyway, to cut a long story short, he did find a way out of the valley; or more accurately the way out presented itself to him. He was still tripping balls, and now he could hardly remember any words at all to accompany his spacey thoughts.

 It really looked to Ethelbert in this, thingy, in this light, like that rocky outcrop atop the Tor that looked like one thingy-thing sometimes and another nothery-thing at other times, and a third thing a third time, a – what was the word for someone like himself, the word for someone who just goes right ahead and breaks all the rules without even trying, not a lunatic, that’s a French word that I just made up - a hero, like yeah, that’s it, the bard is back in town, and rockin’ on gas!

 Yes, it brings out the best in the civilised spirit to have a good guffaw at the unenlightened primitives all those centuries before our time of greater awareness.

 So Ethelbert the Egg-butterer found his way out of the valley at last, and was promptly captured by a Norman patrol.

 They beat him black and blue with the pummels of their swords, but he wouldn’t lead them to his settlement – he meant to surely, but lost consciousness at once. Realising that this peculiar fellow, who was dressed in a very old-fashioned style for the Early Middle Ages, might be able to lead them to a cabal of Northumbrian resistance fighters, the Frenchmen woke him by slapping his cheeks with their cold wet calloused palms. But he was still too mashed to tell them anything.

 And in fact it was when all else had failed, and when they gave up on violence and resorted to threatening that they would start to threaten him more and more seriously with really threatening threats that he broke.

 Their captive found he couldn’t stand thinking that after those vicious threats they might just let him go entirely. It would make the threats seem so – so – so empty. From having believed he’d fabricated the existence of these miraculously cruel foreigners to suddenly being brought to the point of death too real to imagine by them, to being released all in one evening…

 It would have been too bizarre a turn of events not to drive him to such absurd heights and dizzying depths of insanity, that he would have to have given such a hearty thank-you to Runerwigh (God Of Cowards) for his deliverance it would demand him offering his suicide as a sacrifice the weight of a human heart.

 He decided it was surely wisest to betray his people at once.

 Now his tongue drooped and dribbled mushroomy slaver, but it only took an extra tickle and a squidge from the experienced hands of the Norman leader to coax him to part with the location of his village. For this Norman was the very same William who was son of  the Norman they called William The Conquerer, the very same Norman they called William II, for the very same William I was his father, whom they did not call William Rufus, for that was his son’s name, who was not called William the Bastard, for that is how they called his father at times.

 And neither of them were actually named Norman – that was Norman Tebbit, known as Norman the Bastard.

 Verily the same William Rufus of whom history has come to imply that he oft had a way with the lads which his red-faced chroniclers would show little favour to (although they might on occasion call him Conquering Willy perhaps in pencil in the margins of the chronicles they’d filled up)!

 And thence, Rufus and his Norman boys were led by Ethelbert up into the abode of the Cumbersholmfolk and into their village of Bodbick and into its thane’s cottage by Ethelbert, who was now certain he would never again do better for a name than Ethelbert the Egg-betterer.

 There William Rufus bellowed at his vanquished foes that he was going to chain them all up with a big rope made of frogs’ legs, and force-march them back to his court where he’d make them all fan his hunky brow with pages of scented vellum upon which was depicted the tender Christ-child being mercilessly and rudely sXdXmXsXd…

 But I fear this Rufus causes me to rue beginning this tale which is too rude in its conclusion to conclude. Haply I must agree with the Chroniclers’ Guild that a French fairy he may have been but this William Rufus was possibly in league with his own butch brute of a red-helmeted demon...