Dyrnseith

Nothing is free. Every working disturbs something. What is disturbed is paid for.

In 2019 a private collection was broken up and sold. Among the lots was a bound set of papers in a single hand, unsigned, catalogued only as "notes, English, c. 1900." No purchaser was found. The papers passed to the publisher by default.

They are the working notes of a man called E. Harrow, who spent some years collating four incomplete copies of an older manuscript, together with the testimony of people who claimed to have practiced from it. What he assembled is a record of a tradition called Dyrnseith: a body of doctrine, a catalogue of working materials, and a multitude of rites, set down without apology and without instruction as to what should be done with them.

Harrow was a scrupulous editor and an increasingly unwilling one. He records what he was shown and what he was refused. He notes the leaves that are missing. Where his copies disagreed he preserves the disagreement rather than choosing between the readings. Where one of them contains an error, he leaves the error standing - on the grounds that the error is what was practiced.

The tradition he describes was never a society or an order. It had no school, no congregation, no body to which a practitioner might belong. It passed between small, isolated lines, often staying within families for generations, and it hid in plain sight inside ordinary village custom: boundary walks, harvest observances, a household tithing at a grave. Whole communities kept these openly and would not have recognized the name at all.

Around the rites are the hands that carried them. A compiler who never signs her name. A cataloguer counting implements she cannot account for, including one entry she left blank. An annotator who performed these workings and wrote in the margins what they cost her. They argue with the text. They argue with each other. On one page, five hands across three generations dispute whether a thing left open can ever be closed again, and reach no conclusion.

The collection rests on a single law, stated in its earliest pages and never once varied.

Compiled from the papers of E. Harrow. Presented as found, with its gaps, and with the leaves that are missing noted where they are missing.