The serfs of Wiltshire are revolting

Talking of wild asparagus - Sarah and Isobel picked a bunch on a footpath through the woods recently and then was chatting with a friend just beyond the woods when a lady saw the bunch in her hand and interrupted her mid-sentence and said ‘That’s my wild asparagus’.

Sarah, turned from her friend and gave a quizzical look and asked quite naturally ‘Your wild aspagus?’

To which the old bag replied, 'Yes these are private woods and I was going to pick that asparagus later with my daughter'.

To which Sarah replied: ‘I picked it on the public footpath’.

Now this old bag was with her husband, who then asked; ‘Do you often pick wild asparagus in these woods?’

To which Sarah replied, ‘No’. (as if it was any of his effing business).

Now I guess you’re thinking, blimey nobody told me Britain had returned to being a 13^th century feudal Barony, but wait for this…

Sarah starts walking home (about 2 minutes away from this previously idyllic forest glade, now patrolled by foresters ready to flog any peasants found lurking on their land) and this old fascist starts following her.

By the time he’d followed her to the bottom of our road, Sarah turns back and hands him the asparagus in disgust saying something like ‘Here you have it if you want it so badly’. I don’t think she recalls this bit because the blood was probably ringing in her ears with primeval rage. She may well have said ‘Go home and iron your brown shirt you horrible old Nazi.’

Anyway, it so happens that this Sheriff of Nottingham character has been fencing off sections of the wood that had tracks that people used to get to their back gardens and then going round to his neighbours and telling them they can’t cross his land. Now he can’t do this with the one public footpath Sarah was on, but he just wants to piss everyone else off by scolding kids who play in the woods and prosecuting any ‘wood thieves’ (someone collecting some dry twigs for their barbeque) and telling people with a mouth full of marbles to ‘Stay orf our private woods.’

Now in the old days the villagers might have picked up their pitchforks and descended on the old rogue’s castle to give them a piece of their mind, unless he happened to have his private army with him stationed at the watchtowers pointing their crossbows in their general direction. But people are too polite today – instead of dashing his brains against the nearest stone wall, the good folk of Westwood bite their lip and go home to write angry blogs about it all.

Anyway it so happens that under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981 Sarah is perfectly within her rights to pick any of the Four f’s ‘fruit, foliage, fungi or flowers’ which are ‘growing wild if they are for personal use and not for sale’. So long as she was on the public footpath, which she was – so we made a point of picking the stuff, every scrap of it, going through King John’s hunting grounds - as we do most days.

The twist to this story is that the couple have been found murdered in their beds apparently bludgeoned to death in the night with a frozen leg of lamb by a masked psychopath high on vintage cider and guarana. The offending weapon was then fed to our dog and the ashes of the bone found on our garden bonfire, so now the finger of suspicion is pointing at us.

No, I made that bit up, but the rest is true.

In fact the real twist is that we discovered that wild asparagus is a blasted protected species, (confound these environmental protection laws), and so we had our very last plateful three days ago (delicious). Mind you if I ever see that couple picking any frigging wild asparagus I’ll make a citizen’s arrest and frogmarch them the five miles to Trowbridge Police Station at the end of my sharpened hoe.

There, now I got that off my chest.

I watched a programme on 1066 the night Sarah had this friendly encounter about which explained how William the Conqueror slaughtered 10,000 Englishmen freemen at Hastings and left their bodies to rot for ten years on the battlefield as a warning. He confiscated all the land in England - kept a half for himself, gave a quarter to the church and another quarter to the 170 Norman nobles who fought under him and whose descendents are still the biggest landowners in Britain. They forced the English to build the castles which were fortresses to impose the new order at the point of a sword. That order is alive and well down here in Wiltshire.

Bastards.