Drastic Uncials

Although largely remembered for the abortive Fourth Great Outward Grope, which came to a sudden end when the feet of Fickelgrab the Contentious, which had been a constant source of grief to himself and many of his footmen, suddenly gave out at Buncaster, the era was perhaps more significant in that it was characterised by the first sustained efforts to dominate the Bagmolian mortices, thus foreclosing all fenwicks south of the ancient Dredhubbel Ramp. The fenwicks had long been susceptible to infiltration and pilfering by roving bands from the north; and despite the harsh laws enacted under Fickelgrab, which specified that anyone found guilty of "fiddlynge, fibrillatynge, fondlynge, or in any another wise fossickynge" the mortices or their wards should be forced to run the bungo-hurley before having his ears scuppered in boiling mole-fat, no detectable improvement had taken place. It was left to Fickelgrab's successor, Waddeltweeze the Whimsical, to subject the mortices to direct control by authorising his representative, the ruthless and irascible Hippingfudget, as Lord High Headbanger and Fossicker-in-fidelity by appointment to Waddeltweeze alone, to take whatever measures were found necessary to subdue the pillockry and prevent any further maceration. Hippingfudget, whose heraldic arms notoriously depicted a hessian caltrop, on a field azure, biting the fess of a sable, and whose bloodthirsty moustache was a byword for apprehension from Calkinduglet to Warbling-on-the-Becks, was nevertheless almost totally dominated by his wife, Lady Pharyngia, who was reputed to wear live bats under her girdles and on at least one occasion had locked her husband out of the bathroom in the presence of guests. It was probably on Pharyngia's suggestion that Hippingfudget essayed the risky and ultimately only partially successful traversing of the flitcrofts by way of cross-tippling the local barneys and damping the Dredhubbel, which resulted in a slight cessation of local cradocks but not enough of an improvement to satisfy the increasingly impatient Waddeltweeze. Angered at his lack of success and humiliated by his wife's continuing public slights, which included considerable noise in the mornings and sometimes extended to barking in church, Hippingfudget subjected whole tracts of the mortices to drastic uncials.