The Paranoiac Style and its Apex

While the early hundred and sixty-threes were undoubtedly a time of considerable social upheaval, not least because of the unanticipated combustion of Haematoma the Submersible in a still controversial cooking accident, the fact remains that the basic structure of society continued intact. Even the forcible enclosure of the Flunghaven beetroot-furrows by Haematoma's successor, Aethelbrunch the Paranoiac, caused considerably less trouble than was anticipated at the time, and may even have led indirectly to improved co-operation among the northwestern picklers, who were to become such a power in the land during the subsequent half-century. Indeed, some scholars have contended that the period's reputation for chaos and anarchy is the result largely of an overly credulous attitude on the part of historians towards contemporary documents, which were habitually written in a style of exaggerated fear and horror in an effort to gain the diplomatic upper hand by displaying the writer's moral sensitivity to its best advantage. During the reign of Aethelbrunch this tendency was carried to its apex, to the extent that practically all the surviving documents from the period, including six diplomatic letters to various potentates, two stonemasons' bills, and a warrant entitling Aethelbrunch's vassal Murgatroyd Swungbroom to do his uninhibited will upon all cloven-footed animals north of the Cheviots, tend to give the impression that horrifying doom is both near and inescapable. The stonemasons' bills, for example, both specify at considerable length the torments to be undergone in the event of non-payment, as was customary; what is uniquely characteristic of Aethelbrunch's reign is that the threatened punishments in the event of payment in full are scarcely less severe, including as they do such measures as transverse purging and epiglottal dislocation, which were considered severe even for the notorious, and approximately contemporaneous, chutney-burners of Hanleigh Barton. This has led some historians to conclude that the stonemasons of the time either grew too arrogant and were forcibly suppressed, or else became deeply discouraged and imposed impossible tariffs to cause a collapse in trade, something the picklers were later to attempt in protest at the furrow-capping regime imposed by Aethelbrunch's successor, Chuntbucket the Incapable. However, the number of buildings erected during Aethelbrunch's reign, including the magnificent but ultimately failed castle at Gleekwater, which sank without trace after seventeen months, would seem to tell against this hypothesis, particularly since death by drowning is not included among the threats on either the stonemasons' bills or the signed notes from Aethelbrunch's chancellor, Glockflocculus the Adhesive, which accompanied payment.