Fast Fiction: Don't Shoot The Messenger
Richard Mallinson tells a medieval tale which confirms that one should preserve the well-being of the messenger.
Tell your master,' bawled Earl FitzNorman to the messenger, 'that I will send twenty archers to help him kill all those restless peasants on his lands.'
The messenger grovelled, then sped off back towards his master's castle - but he was soon caught up by the twenty archers.
'Get out of the way,' yelled Archer Drog, the leader, but had the messenger heard or not? Either way, he took no notice.
Furious, Archer Drog shot him through the back of the neck with an accurate arrow and some of the archers ran over the dead body.
As they neared the late messenger's master's castle, however, all but one of them ran straight into a concealed pit and were impaled on pointed stakes.
They stayed there, screaming for their mothers, until they died.
Of course if the messenger hadn't been killed he would have warned them about the pit and they would have lived to be of some use to his master - about whom, by the way, nothing is known.
To proceed . . . The archer who survived, Archer Pule, had lagged slightly behind the others owing to a cautious but not a cowardly nature.
He ran back to Earl FitzNorman, went down on his knees and said, 'It wasn't my fault that they're all dead, your lordship. I didn't shoot the messenger. It was Archer Drog that done it.'
The earl glared and glowered. 'You're all the bloody same, you archers,' he roared, 'always trying to put the blame on somebody else.'
At which he ordered Archer Pule to stand up and then ran him through with a heavy sword but not a heavy heart.
A few days later, though, he could have used Archer Pule (as well as Archer Drog and the others) to help defend his castle against a roaring splurge of peasants - but perhaps the result wouldn't have been any different.
