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...Well, if I say it who made it myself: that was one kick-ass Man-Making ceremony. They'll still be talking about that one a hundred years from now.

So I figure you owe me, what, something in the neighborhood of...say...nine cows. Good milch cows, too, mind you, nothing old and milked-out.

A nine-cow coming-of-age ceremony: now there's something you'll be able to tell your grandchildren about.

(“My family paid nine fine milch cows for my man-making,” you'll tell them, and they'll say, “Oh, grandpa, you're such a bull-shitter....”)

Hey, our people's cattle have always been our pride. You know what they say about us, that every word in our language means three things: something good, something bad, and something to do with a cow.

What? What? You can't be serious. You've got to be kidding.

In the Forest of the Hwicce

Place-names have a long memory.

Six surviving place-names in modern Britain preserve the memory of the Hwicce, the original Anglo-Saxon Tribe of Witches, who for some 225 years inhabited a territory in the Cotswolds and Severn Basin of what is now southwestern England: Whichford (Warwickshire), Wichenford, Wychbury Hill, Wyche, and Droitwich (Worcestershire), and Wychwood (Oxfordshire). Unsurprisingly, with one exception, all of them lie within the boundaries of the original Kingdom (or occasionally—witches being witches—Queendom) of the Witches.

Wychwood, the “forest of the Hwicce,” is the anomalous outlier.

Not all witches, of course, are witches. With trees, in particular, you have to be careful. Both the witch elm and witch hazel originally had nothing to do with witches of our sort, but derive instead from yet another Anglo-Saxon root (wice) meaning “bendable, pliable.” (The same root survives in “wicker.”)

Flexible as we may be, though, historical data makes it clear that the witches of Wychwood were originally the H-and-Two-C, and not the No-H-and-One-C, kind.

So how did Hwicce end up in non-Hwicce territory?