GRIMSHAW'S HEDGE

A Tale of Sogmarsh — in which two families are finally required to produce the field they have been fighting over for four hundred years.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

The war over Grimshaw's Hedge is the oldest continuous quarrel in the realm, and its distinction — the thing that makes it worth a tale, when the realm is full of quarrels — is that for the last two hundred years or so nobody has been able to find the field.

Not lost the deeds. The deeds are magnificent; both families have a set; they disagree in eleven particulars and agree on the important one, which is that the parcel exists and is bounded on its northern side by a hedge planted by a Grimshaw who has been dead since before the Bastables. It is the ground that has gone. Somewhere between the flooding of the low pasture, the shifting of the Sog, four hundred years of a landscape that will not hold still, and the well-known unhelpfulness of Committee surveys, the actual physical field to which both families are indisputably entitled has quietly stopped being anywhere in particular.

This did not slow the quarrel down for a moment. If anything it improved it. A dispute over a field you can walk on is limited by the field; a dispute over a field nobody can locate is limited by nothing at all, and the Snaggs and the Fettles had been getting four hundred years of excellent use out of it — the cut direct at market, the ostentatious not-being-served, the funerals attended in order to be seen leaving early — when the Chancery, in a fit of tidiness nobody has ever forgiven it for, resolved to settle the matter.

And the Chancery's ruling was, in its way, perfect. It read:

The Court, being unable to determine the ownership of a parcel whose situation is not established, directs the parties to establish it. The parties shall jointly identify and mark the boundaries of the said parcel, and shall report; whereupon the Court will divide it. Costs reserved. The parties are reminded that the direction is joint.

Jointly. After four hundred years. Old Snagg is said to have read the word three times and then gone and stood in his own yard for a while.

They started, naturally, by not speaking.

The first fortnight was conducted entirely through a boy of eleven, who was paid by both families to carry messages between two parties standing about ninety feet apart in a wet pasture, and who is now a grown man with a good farm bought entirely out of that fortnight, and who declines to say what was in the messages on the grounds that he did not always deliver them accurately and it went better when he didn't.

The second fortnight they spoke, because you cannot chain a boundary through a child.

And the third fortnight — this is the part the district enjoys, and the part they tell at Drudgeford market — the two families discovered, standing in the wet with a chain and a bundle of ancient deeds between them, that they were the only two people in the realm who knew anything whatever about Grimshaw's Hedge.

Nobody else cared. Nobody else had ever cared. Four hundred years of a quarrel that had shaped both families entirely — their marriages, their pew, their route to market, the way they held their faces — and the rest of the parish had regarded it, throughout, as weather. But Snagg knew the 1519 survey had the hedge running to a stone that Fettle's grandfather had seen as a boy; and Fettle knew the flood of 1704 had moved the ford, which meant the 1519 survey's north was not the present north; and Snagg had not known that, and stood there working it out with the rain coming down, and said, before he could stop himself:

"…That'd put it under the withy carr."

"It would," said Fettle.

"That's not — hang on. That's not possible, because your lot's 1611 grant has it east of the carr—"

"Which is wrong," said Fettle, with enormous feeling, "and I've said so for thirty years, and my own father would not hear it—"

"Your father," said Snagg, "was a fool about that grant—"

"He was," said Fettle. "He was."

And the two of them stood in the rain looking at each other with the awful dawning recognition of men who have just found, at sixty, the only other person alive who is interested in the thing they are interested in.

They did not find the field.

I want to be clear that they tried, and tried properly, for two years — because the tale is usually told as though they gave up, and they did not. They chained the low pasture in both directions and got two different lengths. They dug for the stone. They found a stone, and spent a memorable evening establishing that it was a stone. They took the 1519 survey and the 1611 grant and the Committee's own sheet and laid all three on the Fettle kitchen table and discovered that they agree with one another in no particular whatever, and that where two of them agree the third is emphatic.

They were, by the end of the second year, the two leading authorities in the Kingdom of Sogmarsh on a piece of ground that is not anywhere, and they were in the Fettle kitchen four evenings a week, and their wives had become friends without consulting anybody, and the boy who had carried the messages was engaged to be married to one of them and neither family had objected, which the parish took as the true end of the war and the parish was, as usual, right.

And in the third year they went to the Chancery, together, and made their joint report, which is entered in the register and is eleven words long, and which is the best-loved document in that office:

"The parties are unable to establish the parcel. The parties will continue."

The Court, to its credit, understood exactly what it was being told, and had the good manners to write back in kind. The matter is adjourned. It is adjourned sine die, which the Clerk explains means without a day appointed for its resumption — a form of words the Chancery keeps for things it has decided not to finish — and the costs remain reserved, and the parties are directed to report if the situation is established, and it has been ninety-one years and they have not reported.

The Snaggs and the Fettles are still looking. It is a fixture now, like the tournament. They go out twice a year with a chain, in April and October, both families, and they chain a pasture that will not give the same answer twice, and they argue about the 1611 grant, and they come back and eat at one another's tables, and neither house has ever suggested stopping.

Because they worked it out, somewhere in that third year, and old Fettle said it out loud at the market once and has never been let forget it:

if they ever found the field, the Court would divide it, and it would be over.

There would be a boundary and a ruling and two tidy parcels and nothing further to say — and the four evenings a week would stop, and the April chaining would stop, and two families who have nothing else in the world in common would go back to having nothing in common, and the oldest continuous relationship in the realm would be concluded.

So they are looking, carefully, thoroughly, in good faith, for a thing they have both privately agreed to hope is not there — which is, the Clerk observes, not so very different from a marriage.

A quarrel that lasts four hundred years is not a quarrel; it is the longest conversation two families ever had, and the only thing it cannot survive is being settled. Some things are best kept unfound, and the wise are the ones who go on looking anyway, twice a year, in the rain, together.