This Kingdom Is Going to Shyt: A Lord Cannot Even Hire an Honest, Loyal Mercenary Army Anymore

Whate’er happened to ye olde tyme mercenaries we all knew and loved?

E’erywhere I look, I seeth ‘round me a Kingdom in decline: The morals of our clergy, who charge more than a dozen Hail Mary’s to repent of a simple sin that a decade ago would have cost but one Our Father; the subservience of our vassals, who increasingly demand “wages” in exchange for their “labour”; the chastity of our womyn, who seem only to be chaste when the fellow they are dealing with is thine truly.

Forsooth, an overlord can no longer e’en put his faith in that one trusted bastion of decent civilization — the mercenary.

Lo! How far the vaunted profession of the hired man-of-arms hath fallen from grace. What a shame it is that our once-esteemed cutthroats can no longer be relied upon to cut only those throats which are specifically defined in their throat-cutting contracts. How it makes me weep to see mine own castle bombarded by the arrows of my hirelings merely because I didn’t “pay them” on tyme and may have occasionally “killed them” “on purpose” “to save money.”

I recall a day when a nobleman with deep pockets and an insatiable bloodlust could rely upon the lowest, most violent bidder to carry out his war plans with integrity. But I fear such chivalrous days of war commerce are past.

If you cannot trust the mercenary army you hired to rape and pillage at your behest in exchange for a hull full of gold and promises of future nepotism, well then, I ask: who can you trust?

It cometh down to a matter of honour. A matter of friendship. A matter of trust. Qualities, I fear, which are all too lacking in today’s mercenary armies.

As a wise bard once sang:

I've lived long enough to have learned
The closer you get to the fire, the more you get burned

I never thought that would happen to us, my mercenary armies and I. For ours hath always been a matter of trust. Yet now here I stand, burned, singed, set to the flame. Perhaps our companionship was merely a lie of the heart, the cold remains of what was once a passionate, principles-based war booty industry.

I doth digress. My faith in ye hath not faltered yet, my trusted soldiers of fortune and fame. I remain hopeful that the mercenaries of the Kingdom will one day return to being the friendly, trustworthy, death-dealing swords-for-hire they once were. And I shall stick to my trebuchets on this,

And I'll walk a way a fool or a king.

In other news:

WHAT A PRUDE! This Squire’s Man-tights Don’t Even Conspicuously Clasp His Asse and Balls

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The number of pedestrians trampled by droves of sheep hath reached an all tyme high. Experts believe this is due largely to a lack of livestock-specific traffick regulations, and the fact that the droves of sheep look like fluffy clouds of wool that you just want to roll around in.

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A bridge hath collapsed into the Grimbriar River. Without further evidence, we’ll be blaming it on trolls.

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The Royal Tobacconist hath warned children under the age of seven to cut back on smoking in an effort to save more leaf for himself.