A Brief Note on the Matter at Hand (and Why It Smells of Pickled Onions)

Presented here, for your fascinated bewilderment, are selected extracts from the notorious and unwieldy Tome of Local History compiled by the region’s most persistent footnote-wrangler and celebrated mild enthusiast, Dr. Aldous Nibs Thackery. The original manuscript — a vast, leathery contraption bound in what may once have been upholstery — is kept under lock, key, and mild suspicion in the secure cabinet of the Little Country Library (behind the Local Invertebrates section, second drawer down).

Access to the manuscript is strictly limited to every second Tuesday, and then only if it’s raining and only if Mr. Bleevin, the assistant librarian, hasn’t gone off sick again with his recurring echo. As such, this collection will expand sporadically, page by questionable page, as opportunity and damp weather allow.

We begin, logically enough, with the Introductions — both of them — written by Prof. E. Sylvester Glöve, who appears to have been conscripted into the task twice, under conflicting sets of pretences. Readers may note that much of what he asserts in one foreword is flatly contradicted in the other, possibly due to time, wine, or lingering resentment over a shared cottage holiday gone wrong.

Do read on — and do so with your margins open and your disbelief lightly pickled.

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INTRODUCTION
to A Compendious History of the Little Country
By Prof. E. Sylvester Glöve (ret.), FBA (self-nominated), Unaccredited Honorary Sub-Vice Dean of the Society for Regional Chrono-Mythology

“It is the duty of the historian not merely to record, but to interpret; not merely to interpret, but to apologise profusely when none of it quite lines up.”

There comes a time in the life of every obscure region—be it fen, moor, fell or inexplicably mist-prone hamlet—when someone, often unqualified and increasingly unsupervised, feels compelled to “set the record straight”. It is with that noble, if occasionally confounding, impulse that Dr. Aldous Nibs Thackery has produced this present volume: A Compendious History of the Little Country.

I have been asked, for reasons still unclear to me, to introduce this effort. It is a task akin to providing the foreword to a diary found nailed to a tree in a thunderstorm—bold, possibly haunted, and containing several questionable assertions about turnip-based economies.

Thackery—known locally as “Dr Dr” due to an unfortunate clerical duplication on his library card—has been amassing this work since 1982, mostly in the snug of The Crowned Stoat, with assistance from a revolving cast of unpaid interns, discarded Parish newsletters, unreliable weather diaries, and one deeply mistrustful badger named Philomena.

This tome is not a definitive history in the academic sense, but it is a definitive history in what one might call the “rural anecdotal mode”—that is, one part recollection, two parts speculation, with a generous splash of something he insists is corroborated “folk memory.”

Among the events herein chronicled (and I use the word with affectionate looseness) are:

The 1654 Great Panic of a Second Black Death, later traced to a spilled treacle shipment;

The Four-Day Witchfinder Symposium of Lower Bodgley, which ended in a furious debate over whether a man with a suspicious mole was in fact a mole;

The brief yet impactful Pirate Administration of East Lint, 1712–1712½;

And the now-canonical “War of the Turnip Rights,” which, according to Thackery, may or may not have involved actual turnips.

It would be churlish of me not to commend Dr. Thackery’s tireless commitment. His handwriting alone should earn him a grant from the Department of Decipherment and Ornamental Scripting. It is both marginal and baroque—frequently on the margins and frequently baroque. Footnotes abound, though they are occasionally footlong.

Readers will discover in this volume a blend of history, hearsay, annotated sandwich recipes, and numerous clippings from a now-defunct newspaper called The Little Country Bugle, most of which focus on “ominous weather.”

In conclusion, while this book may not satisfy the rigorous expectations of the Royal Historical Society, it will undoubtedly delight those with a fondness for curious footpaths, spectral livestock, unknowable local saints, and a nearly pathological mistrust of maps.

Let it now reside on your shelf, somewhere between Morris Dancing and the Apocalypse and Fungus of the Known Parish Boundaries—a proud if peculiar monument to the Little Country, and the man who tried, bless him, to make sense of it.

With all the cordiality of professional rivalry,
Prof. Sylvester Glöve, F.E.B. (Fellow of the Excessively Biased)
Cambermouth, Candlemas

INTRODUCTION
by Prof. Emeritus Oswin Glöve, B.Cleat, M.Cobweb, H.A.R.M.

I write these lines with the reluctant hand of a man summoned once more into the morass of provincial history, a realm where folklore, supposition, and outright invention are served warm on a pewter plate and declared nutritious. The subject of this volume—if such a term may be applied to a bundle of misfiled anecdotes stitched into an old gardening ledger—is none other than Dr. Dr. Aldous Nibs Thackery, who continues to enjoy baffling reverence among a certain stripe of wool-coated amateur archivists, parochial eccentrics, and individuals who store jam in the same cupboard as sulphur.

I have known Thackery for some decades—though “knowing” Nibs, as he insists on being called, is less a social connection and more an ambient condition. He has the air of a man who was once very nearly run over by a revelation, but it dodged at the last second. Standing somewhere between five-foot-seven and unknowable, he wears a permanent expression of academic suspicion, as though history itself had just spilled something sticky on his footnotes.

At first glance, he resembles a scarecrow dressed for a job interview with the 19th century, all frayed corduroy, elbow patches on garments without elbows, and a pocket watch that contains neither mechanism nor time. His beard, which he refers to as “my woollen appendix,” is variously home to crumbs, chalk, and, on one occasion, a complete lineage of dormice.

Thackery’s career, if we may use the term broadly, has been characterised by brief appointments at a number of rural institutions — the most notable being the Little Country Institute of Loose Chronology, now sadly repurposed as a high-end cider shed. He was once Acting Interim Deputy Associate Archivist at the Royal Order of the Rusty Trowel, a society which dissolved after its members buried their own charter by accident and refused to dig it back up without permission.

His qualifications, often written with redundant duplication (he claims a Doctorate in History and another in Metaphorical Geography), have never been verified, and may in fact be certificates of attendance from a series of damp lectures in his own potting shed. Nevertheless, his prodigious output has made him a fixture in certain types of rural libraries where the reference section includes horoscopes, parish curses, and pamphlets on what constitutes legal bread.

Thackery’s most cited work, A Definitive List of Muffled Bells (And What They Meant), remains unchallenged if only because no one dares to challenge it. His longstanding feud with the Historical Society of Upper Haddle has generated more footnotes than most actual wars, and possibly one minor skirmish involving custard.

He is a founding member (and currently sole subscriber) of the following organisations:

The Society for the Study of Inverted Monasteries

The Fellowship of the Folded Map

The Museum of Historical Utensils (open Wednesdays or on request if it's not raining)

The League Against Chronological Tyranny

Friends of the Stoat

Though Thackery’s methods are unconventional—he once performed a séance to confirm the date of a chimney collapse, and regularly cites “Time Itself” as a source—his instinct for local myth, pub-based recordkeeping, and the overlooked marginalia of rural experience is undeniably potent.

Readers are advised to approach this work with an open mind, a firm mug of tea, and a flexible understanding of what history is for. In its pages one will find war, famine, pageantry, supernatural livestock, local saints of deeply uncertain character, and enough conflicting accounts to build a polite argument society that meets monthly in a shed.

And so I hand over this preposterous, fragrant, unindexed codex to the reader with a mixture of admiration, alarm, and a strong sense of personal distance.

Yours historically (but not legally),
Prof. Oswin Glöve
Institute for Footwear Archaeology
Haddle-under-Weft
Octoberish, 1997