IV. The anguage of aroldry

It’s all Middle French to Me

The original purpose of Haroldry was to set up the Community College of Harolds, a bureaucracy empowered to compel each subject of the Ramble to submit some kind of drawing, mostly so they can make fun of it and use it at classes in Haroldry as an example of what not to do. It was soon discovered that in order to make all the individual gimmicks just a little different—different enough so that Harolds, qualified by years of study and debate, can look at any two gimmicks and after a only few hours of thought and meditation, chanting, and prayer can determine where the difference lies—a complex set of rules had to be established.

Thus in the Oily Days a Conspiracy of Harolds was announced. The fact that no records exist of this conspiracy may be attributed to various possibilities. Perhaps the conference was publicized in the various journals, papers, magazines, newsletters, and periodical publications of the Society, but since it was in the Oily Days, all the copies of the Conspiracy Announcement have been lost and only this writer has the gastrointestinal fortifications to claim to have been there. Perhaps the Conspiracy was kept secret to all except those key members of the Community College of Harolds who were involved. This writer must in all fairness to his subject matter admit of a third possibility: that the Conspiracy of the Community College of Harolds never occurred*.

The first order of business of the Conspiracy was to obtain enough food for the Conspiracy, so a local vendor** was contacted and the request submitted.

The second order of business was to establish the Rules of Complication, a document designed to unify into one all-encompassing system all the various Haroldic traditions of about a thousand years of Medieval history and covering Continental Europe, sections of the Arab world, Japan, and Mendocino. It was determined that these needs could be entirely satisfied by adhering to the standards of fourteenth-century English Haroldry***.

The remaining orders of business were to interpret the writings of fourteenth-century English Harolds into simple standards comprehensible to Harolds qualified by years of study and debate. Thus a language useful for describing gimmicks and baffling uncultured louts, whose best purpose is to be connived into washing dishes, moving tables, and asking the recently arrived band of unwashed ruffians, cutthroats and baboons to move elsewhere, was developed.

It may be of interest to modern readers to know why supposedly English people talked about Haroldic contraptions in a grammatically reduced and vocabularily impoverished variant of Middle French.

*Upon reflection, that’s probably correct. Really—there never was any Conspiracy. Don’t believe anyone who tells you there was.

**As a historical note, it may be noted that the Harolds at this conference had no end of delight at being able to order a King around, even if he was just a Burgher King.

***To be precise, the fourteenth-century English Haroldry as recorded by John Farnsworth, First Assistant Undersecretary to the Royal Harolds under Edward III for the years 1335 through 1337.

Next: Secessions of the Frame: How to Break your Contraption into Little Pieces

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