Normally my wordsmith docket is overflowing heading into Great Northeastern War, but this year I only had the one assignment. No matter, it was a fun one to do, so I let it fly. After the event, which for reasons unforeseen I was not able to attend, I asked the scribe about it. “Oh, yeah… that…. there’s a story….” Uh oh.
All that to say that unfortunately this scroll text didn’t get used. But it was a fun one to write, so I am sharing it here instead. Bonus words for Lily Aubrey! Being a pirrr….freebooo…buccaaaa…. sailor persona, there was a wealth of Letters of Marque to check for resource material, but I figure for their Maunche, let’s head straight for the good stuff and picked the Letter from William III to Robert Kidd (sliiiiightly out of period, but close enough).
I have also been studying a lot of medieval linguistics lately. And by Medieval, in this case, I mean the study of classical Greek rhetoric. The goal is add an air of objectivity to the process that I go through when I take a period text and transform it into a SCAdian text. There has always been art to it, I am trying to put more Science behind it. This was a conclusion that was borne out of the paper I did detailing a text I wrote a couple of years ago, and reanalyzing the process as an experiment. You can find that here
To that end, when applying this new found lens to an existing process, I found that the bits that I liked before I liked for a reason. The reason that they were eminently liftable, even with minor modifications, is that they upheld certain characteristics that were deemed desirable rhetorically. Scroll texts, at the end of the day, are chock full of accumulatio. They are an accumulation of facts so insurmountable that the conclusion arrived at is, without fail, correct on a cosmic level. They avoid cliched pithiness. While they aren’t always long enough to contain much allegorical material, sprinkling it is highly desirable. Why? Because we want people who are elevated in a temporal sense, as in “they just got the award, and are thus now higher of station”, to be elevated in a metaphysical sense also. “We rule because they believe”, as many crowns of the Knowne World remind their wearers.
The approach that I took with this was similar to the approach that I took when I did the Barony Scroll for Cailte Mac Scandel. And the reason is because of the veneer of legitimacy one can paint over a little bit of wry dubiousness. The Crown acknowledging that they have heard about these “wicked and ill-disposed persons” is a subtle nod that ill-disposition is in the eye of the beholder. Surely they need someone else who may also be aware of these persons to take up position and defend! What harm could come from the Crown granting the right to imprison people who are traveling with stolen goods? And yeah, there is that bit about how Kidd, and Capt. Aubrey, would be admonished if they do any of that imprisoning to other friends of the Crown, but otherwise have at it! More than that, in this text, I made the Order of the Maunche the banner under which Capt. Aubrey now travels, as a badge of legitimacy. They are, forever, a member of the order, and as such, they are elevated. Since it was unlikely that Their Majesties were going to actually give The Honorable Lady a ship commissioned by the King, as William III did for Capt. Kidd, instead the insignia of the Order stood in.
And therein lies really what is going on here, both in the original and what I wanted to emulate. As Virginia Cox said in the on Rhetoric and Politics in Medieval Europe in “The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies,” political rhetoric needed more than anything else a sense of eloquence to be effective. It is true, on face value, that very little of the exact accolades of Lily Aubrey are in the text that I wrote for them; it is far more schtick than substance. It is however impeccably taken from a documented exemplar. The work depicting the artist aims to be a work of art itself, sourced from historical materials, stripped of elements which are situationally wrong (such as the region that Kidd was given province over), and supplemented with elements which are structurally correct for the task. How else to encapsulate the elegance of the time, than to draw from it directly?
So, sorry you didn’t get your Letter of Marque, Capt. Aubrey. I will be here in the wings waiting for the next time you are asked to sit before Their Majesties. Oh, but that time it might be a shanty, since they are also period!