Songs from Castle Country

No more the galleries and the marbled halls, 
No more the turrets and the curtain walls, 
No more the gardens and the pretty maids around, 
No more to lie with you on the warm soft ground.

Far from the fields and the smiling sun, 
Where the neverending sky is done, 
No more the comfort of your loving arms around, 
No more to lie with you on the warm soft ground.

Unto the darkness where the way is blind,
Unto the rocky hard and the cold unkind,
Unto the smith that hammers men with it's dull and deadly sound, 
There to find a place to lie on the cold hard ground.

"Castle Country" is my name for a universal medieval setting. Usually the stories I write for Castle Country don't have any magic or mythology. But they do have plenty of deadly combat, jousts, tavern wenches, intrigue, chaste princesses, sieges, more tavern wenches, conspiracies, adulterous queens, ostlers, hunting lodges, falconers, sighing princes, further tavern wenches, huge horses with feet the size of soup-plates, plotting Kings and a whole gamut of priests, monks, hermits, nuns, bishops and occasionally, popes.

Castle Country is an anything goes sort of place - but while you can get away with pretty much anything, you can also have your head randomly lopped off by the next passing Black Knight. It is a nasty, brutish setting which rather intesifies all experiences. It encourages exaggerations of both positive and negative social behaviors, like honor, jealousy, pride, lust, valour, cruelty, virtue. It exacerbates the visceral.

The poem at the top of this post is as much as I can remember from a 20 verse monster that I wrote as a teenager. I wrote it on handmade paper with  a quill. I have no idea where it is now but I suspect that an ex-girlfriend may have it...