Regional legend · 4 min read · Set in Fenwick ·
Why They Never Rate the Fourth Field
Three Fenwick fields pay their rates and are walked every Michaelmas, and the fourth is fenced, refused, and let lie under a refusal signed year by year.
- status: folklore
Now you will want the fields first, or you will want nothing right after. Off the fen causeway at Fenwick the fields lie in a row, and three of them are on the rate roll as plain as noon: Broad Furlong, Mill Field, and the Walk. Every Michaelmas the rate-walkers come over the causeway two by two, with their staves and their books, and they walk those three fields and the hedges between them, and they set against each field in the book what the field carries — sheep on the Walk, barley on Broad Furlong, hay off Mill Field — and the rate is laid on the carry. A field is its carry. That is what the walk is for, and the parish has kept the custom longer than the parish has kept its present walls, and the walls are old.
And now the fourth field. The fourth is fenced. Post and wire, and a hurdle gate that wants both hands and a knee, and the fence is kept, though nobody will meet your eye and claim the keeping of it. It has not been sown these many a year. The grass lies long all season and never seeds, and no beast grazes it, and no beast needs telling twice; a heifer put her head through that wire in my great-grandfather's day, and she was brought off quiet at the end of a rope, and she never offered again her whole carting life. There is nothing in the fourth field to lay a rate on. Mind me well: I am not saying there is nothing in it. There is plenty in it. There is just nothing in it the books have a line for, and a rate cannot be laid on a thing the books have no line for — for what would the collector put in the carry column, and who would sign to it?
The fourth is refused. That is the next part, and the custom is exact. A field off the roll is a field owing, and no collector will carry a field owing past his own night, so each Michaelmas the collector brings the refusal paper up to the gate: one sheet, the field named as four, the rate named, and the word refused set under it, and one line left for one name. Any hand will serve if it is the hand of the house that keeps the gate key. The key passes at the signing; you sign, you hang the key on the nail inside your door, and there it stays till the next Michaelmas, and the houses that have kept it will tell you the nail holds better than most nails, which is a small thing to notice and truer than the weather.
My grandmother signed that paper forty years running, and her mother signed it before her, and whoever signed it before them handed on the key the same way, at the gate, paper folded into the collector's bag and the bag strapped and the collector away. There was never a year without, save one. The year of the causeway floods, 1958, the water held the collector on the town side two days, and he brought the paper the third. By then it was late. He would not say how he knew it was late, but he stood at the gate wet to the middle and asked to sign it himself, and the grandmother would not let him, for the paper wants the house's hand and the key was on our nail. She signed. It held. But the collector's book for that year is another matter, and that book is in the district chest to this day: the roll in it that year carries four fields, and the fourth's rate stands struck and entered, and no hand in the parish could lift it off, and it is carried on the arrears page still against a name the book keeps shut. No collector since has opened that page. His father did not open it. You may lay money the grandfather did not either.
Who tells it today? I tell it, and I sign the paper now myself, and my son stands at the gate the while, because somebody of the house should watch the sheet go down into the bag. The churn-side women at the town end keep the 1958 half of it, and the gate houses the signing half, and the mart keeps the whole of it for the nights the frost is thick. And every Michaelmas, under the word refused, I set my hand down under the one question the fence and I keep between us without ever saying it across the wire: if the paper went unsigned one year — whose name would the roll open to, and what carry would be struck and entered ready against it?