The Sloggard Episode

It was early in the reign of Bottelhassop the Addled, while the mulliners were fibrillating in the southern quinsy, that the infamous Prurience Sloggard began making himself known among the common people as a "Healer and Comforter", usually by setting fire to old women and publicly slashing their mattresses. Little is known of Sloggard's origins. He is thought to have been born in Lower Yattering, the second son of a mendicant toadwiper, and to have served as a brevet pillager during the protracted and complex local skirmishes which followed the fatal seating of the mayor, Sir Curdibras Mattock, on a brace of skewers one midsummer. After order was restored under Basingstork the Unlikely, the young Prurience Sloggard was apprenticed to a nearby filleter and ladies' outfitter, but seems to have found either the work or his master uncongenial, since he left after only a few months having learned little beyond the rudiments of whalebone corset-making. Many years later, at his trial, Sloggard claimed that he differed with his employer over the possibilities of a new innovation involving cod; but the surviving documents make this assertion impossible to verify. Sloggard was, in any case, a notoriously unreliable witness, claiming at the same session of the trial that he had been a friend of Sir Curdibras Mattock and had, through his supposed gift of prophecy, warned him against placing his body-weight on sharp objects. Aside from the unlikelihood of the pious and superstitious Sir Curdibras ignoring such an oracular pronouncement had he heard it, the social spheres in which the two men moved were almost ludicrously non-contiguous. Indeed, a popular parlour game of the time, "Twenty-Six Degrees of Prurience", turned on the very fact that connections between the two were virtually nonexistent, and for decades the mention of both their names in the same sentence was considered an hilarious faux pas. Sloggard made himself notorious in the area over a period of about six years, during which he roamed between towns and villages abominating all who stood in his way; but when he attempted to elope with the fifteen-year-old Lady Goneril Mickelgizzard he overreached himself fatally. Caught at Stoutley Preening by his mortal enemies, the de Boleprangs, whose grandmother's metatarsals he had caused to be displayed in the market-place only the year before, as a warning to the unheeding, Sloggard was taken in chains before the Lord High Paperhanger and sentenced to be fetlocked, quired and galligaskined, his property condoned by the state and his issue slung at Midgeley Hampton and cashiered in unconsecrated ground.