~ The Village

Scorch Norton at its present size has existed since c.1428, when a daughter of Lord de Mohunt married into the Fox family, bringing trade and fame to her new summer residence. The village had already become more than a hamlet as survivors of the Black Death reconsolidated communities and banded together to render the land productive once more. There is a tale of a foray into the Wyzenwood during this period, led by newcomers thinking to use the ancient timber for (accounts vary) housing, a barn or a church: of those who entered the wood to shift their felled logs to the edge of the slope at the end of the day, two were seen again, perishing within days mute from terrible retching coughing and wits scrambled with fear.

There is evidence in the surrounding areas for settlement in distant prehistory: to the southeast of the current village, elfshot often turns up under the plough, and water-worn stones. The standing stone with the pecked ring-mark (or the mark of the Devil's hoof, if you prefer, matching the stone he 'kicked into' the church) marking the boundary between the village proper and the fields below the Wyzenwood can also be presumed to be Neolithic.

There are rumours of chambered cairns somewhere about, an arrangement of three such tombs close together, their exact location has been lost to history. The villagers attribute all these to "Druids", the popular catch-all term for the entirety of pre-Roman humanity in the British Isles, considered to be equal parts primitively noble and ultimately savage. There is, in fact, some Iron Age activity on Beacon Hill to the northeast: the remains of hillfort ramparts locally known as Kennick's Camp.

Kennick Rolger is held to be a giant who lived in the nebulous time B.C., who drove his extensive flock of sheep down to said camp in the summertime and dwelled there, occasionally eating people, until a mortal shepherd boy tricked him into throwing a huge rock directly upward to knock cottage cheese out of the clouds, crushing the giant flat and creating the remnant ditch at the base of the hillfort. Ash and char-preserved log fragments in the soil from burning at/of the fort is taken to be ash from his campfires, where the giant would stack whole trees, and the occasional fragments of human remains from the Roman Empire's rather decisive way of dealing with unruly natives are considered to be his unlucky meals.

The name probably references Kendric Hrolfgar, a 9th century mercenary leader who did once clear and encamp at the hillfort site, his sheep a garbled folk memory of Anglo-Saxon livestock management practices where drovers would live out on the land with the stock in sheiling houses come summer.

There was definitely Saxon activity at the village site itself, probably centred around a large farm somewhere near the village green and the little church shortly built beside it, across the slight dip in the landscape. The newcomers of the late 14th century considered the then-field to the north of the green quite miraculous, since with the timber foundations of the first farm gone they could only surmise that pots and stone dishes spontaneously generated in the ground, and that the occasional glass bead was surely fey work.

At any rate, once the famed Rosalind of Fox Hall brought attention and bounty to the village, the road connecting it to her winter home near Wedmore gaining more traffic and continuing to see use as a coach road up to the present time.



~ The Church of Saint Giles in the Fields

The current church has humourless 11th-century foundations and a patchwork of additions over the centuries, culminating in a spire just tall enough to pretend enthusiasm for the return of the then dubiously-Anglican monarchy. The interior is still puritanically whitewashed out of habit, trapping whatever mediaeval frescoes and adornments that might have excited the illiterate mind in ages past under layers of bright blankness. A few Foxes and a handful of other influetial personnages are buried under the floor, and some precious stained glass - actually hidden as full panels in the roof of the old inn for the duration of the Civil War and interregnum period - brightens the windows.

Despite this determination to retain the church's fixtures, the only stone ornamentation to survive is the massively-constructed font with all faces gouged out of its admittedly largely foliate ornamentation, and a few rough gargoyles at the gutter line. The pews are plain wood, and period custom is to bring one's own kneeler to the service or donate for the hire of one, since the building is unheated and unkind to stuffed textiles.

In the most southeasterly pillar of the church can be seen another interrupted ringmark or 'cloven hoofmark' from what might actually be another standing stone preserved in situ with the church built around it. The vicar neither encourages nor discourages the peasant mythology that the Devil was so vexed at the building of a church he leapt onto a boulder with enough force to split it, and kicked the fallen half into the area of construction. Indeed, the reverend speculates that there may have originally been more stones in some kind of pattern as seen elsewhere, and that one of those not lost or broken up over the years was incorporated in the first stone church to prevent the locals using it for heathen purposes (rubbing up on the Binding Stone, as the freestanding marker is known, is still held to be a fertility charm).

~ The Inn

The current inn is only a century old and in very good condition, reflecting the advantages of being situated directly on the main road with the capacity to cater to coaches. The name is a reference to the previous establishment, the Harvester, since what comes after the harvester is surely a completed harvest with hare and sheaf laid out in the proper order (see below).

There is a fairly spacious arrangement of taproom and parlour on the ground floor, separated by an open arch: the latter has the main fire at the end and most of the windows, their recesses flared outwards to spread the light and provide a handy shelf for drinks if tables are taken up with food, cards, or anyone drunk enough to be dancing on them. The windows have some span-sized (if bullseye'd) panes in the centre and are otherwise cross-leaded with a casement at the top, making them both decorative and very hard to throw oneself (or anyone else) through when drunk. The kitchen and other family rooms are behind the bar, the stairs to guest accomodation and corridor to the privies/inn yard out back beside it. Villagers without barns are allowed to store any objects that need to be kept dry and don't fit in their own homes in the shelves/hooks near the ceiling here.

Upstairs, continuing from access to the rooms above the tavern area downstairs, there is a small passageway across the arch to the coach rooms and stables for those that pay upfront and need to leave at strange hours of the morning or night. Rooms towards the back of the inn are cheaper in summer due to their proximity to the midden and tannery behind, which makes use of the stable drains and liquid chamberpot contents emptied into them. Floors are generally bare but varnished and swept, with the odd rug for guests and a runner along the upstairs corridor against the tendancy of the floorboards to yell at any sign of humidity combined with weight.

The building across from the church that was once the Harvester is now a house on one side and a smithy on the other.



~ Local Traditions

Naturally, the main festivals are Easter and Christmas, and occur in the church with much merriment beforehand and often a day off for many workers in the latter case. Scorch Norton has a very active folk tradition, however, and the first of May is marked by feasting and a dance to celebrate the true end of the 'hungry gap' and the coming of summer.

The May Mummers also come out, a carefully-chosen selection of local men, four of whom take specific character parts in the local mummery and Morris dance. These are not particularly complex, consisting mostly of appearance and a simple idea of personality to portray: Losk's entire head is blacked with soot, as is his outfit, and he dances or interacts with locals in an 'angry' fashion; the Crogg costume is a waistcoat embroidered with flowers and dances with his arms tied behind his back and a rope around his neck and waist, acting 'dignified' as the master of the troupe; Erskin Marion has two pheasant tailfeathers in his hat, a beribboned dog skull on a striped stick and a handkerchief 'tail' pinned to his backside, and is both 'energetic' and 'cowardly'; Bogi has a conical arrangement of reeds for a head and plenty of ribbons, and should seem 'melancholy' or 'morose'. Heavy men are traditionally preferred for the last role, both since the character is supposed to look fat and since Bogi cannot be roused to a proper dance without a shot of spirits or half-pint of cider or strong beer.

Sometimes a last named character appears, according to what are rumoured to be secret conditions but is likely simple availability: Trugred the 'oby 'oss, an ambiguous and extremely wild personifcation that may fawn on or 'attack' onlookers at random to delighted (or terrified) squeals from the audience. The man playing Trugred is intended to remain annonymous under the costume, a fact that has occasionally been used to get away with the odd vengeful stomp or illict snuggle in public. 'Oss is as 'oss does! 

The mummers dance about the village, visiting people's houses and being given food, firewood, flowers or alcohol, the quality of which determines the scale of the "ritual" enacted there - from a bow and three stick-clacks to a small girl offering a handful of dandelions to an elaborate dance around the lady of the house picked up on a stool, visits to every room with high jumps over the threshold and even singing circumnavigation of the entire property in exchange for good food and generous drink. Once the village has been generally visited the mummers morris on the green and 'chase' and 'kill' Marion (who gets up and humourously runs away during the last dance) at the end of the penulitimate set.

At harvest time, if the last field to be cut is out of sight of the Wyzenwood, all men, youths and whatever women can be spared from child or beast-minding duties go out and trap a hare within its bounds. The field is cut slowly by its owner's team, the animal being contained by the rest of the village until it is stunned with exhaustion in its last hiding-place of the last sheaf: in the best-case scenario the hare is dispatched and the last sheaf cut in the same sickle blow. The dead hare and stained portion of the grainstraw are kept buried in the owner's barn over winter in a box, and reburied boxless in the first field to be planted in spring. If the hare escapes, great misfortune will follow. If the last field is in sight of the Wyzenwood, the village witnesses the owner drawing a full handfull of their own blood to grasp the last sheaf with and a semi-figurative 'dolly' is made of the results, treated in the same way as the hare.

The mummers are said to reconvene at night on All Saints' Eve, but where and when is not public knowledge.



~ The Wyzenwood

The Wyzenwood has been there forever, as far as anyone can tell. Even the visible trees can be recognised in drawings of the village as far back as such records go. Venturing partway inside during daylight has always felt like being a fly strumming a spider's web, and remaining in it past sundown has always been an incredibly bad idea. The wood has always been near the settlement, and the people who live in the settlement have always left it alone.

The only possible exception to this rule would logically be in prehistory, so this is where the more history-based folk explanations are set: some say there is a grove sacred to the Druids at the centre, where nonspecific dark and savage rites were conducted; others that some native princess was dragged within it by Roman soldiers keen to avoid their law's only protection for women, and died there with a curse that blackened the ground and rips souls from bodies with blind unhealing vengeance.

A few tales claim what's in the Wyzenwood is a power once worshipped as a Goddess, the femmininity a recurring feature that likely reflects more on the "correct" patriarchal social order of the present British Empire contrasted to the hazy "flawed" (and conquerable) past than any true thread of identification. Still, it was a Goddess up at Bath - Mother Sulis as the tablets tell - so even the more speculative learned tend to refer to the subject of such a theory as "she".

Another femminine suspect for the disturbance is Cwenhild Aelfgarsbane, a stubbornly pagan Anglo-Saxon witch said to have killed an early bishop with a stola made of cloth woven and stitched left-handed out of anticlockwise-spindled thread. Speaking wickedness over the unassuming garment with every stitch and shuttle of the loom, pouring hatred into it until the making was as much curse as cloth, it was little wonder that being laid on holy vestments turned the thing instantly into a serpent, furious at contact with all it was not. The attack being witnessed before the garment resumed its normal shape, Cwenhild was hunted down. Taking refuge in a dark wood where she had often practiced her dark arts, the witch laughed even as they hanged her from the great tree said to lie in the middle, claiming that enough of her had been in that place already that in joining with the tree she would grow and spread roots forever. This version is one often told to children, with the warning that even the outskirts should not be dared a moment past sundown, since if Cwenhild's toes are now roots she can re-ea-each out and tweak the roots of other trees to grab anyone right out to where the fields stop.

Others say it's the Devil haunts the Wyzenwood: Old Nick was there first, and carries nocturnal trespassers off to Hell out of petty spite for building a church nearby. The hoof-marked stones are held up as evidence of this theory, alongside the notion that if the Wyzenwood has been here forever, the Devil would logically have a long time to heap it up and plant his Hell-trees before any of Adam and Eve's descendants got as far as English soil.

Almost everyone in Scorch Norton and several folk from surrounding villages have a friend-of-a-friend tale of some known person testing the wood's properties and coming off the worse - or not at all. Most stories agree that the wood has got a bit smaller over the centuries, whether naturally or with the advent of iron or Christianity, or through lack of active encouragement.