The Pickharness Principle

There exists a 14th-century play by a long-dead and long-anonymous individual known only by his (or her, but it was the 14th century, so-) highly aggrandizing epithet, The Wakefield Master. They are called that because they are considered to have authored four plays in the Wakefield Cycle, a series of biblical stories brought to theatre in Medieval England. Obviously these plays are written quite masterfully, otherwise the Wakefield Master would be considered the Wakefield Schlub. In whichever case, I would like to talk about one in particular, The Killing of Abel, which I, when I was at the tender age of 19, read for the first time so as to write what my professor called a “grotesquely long” research paper that annoyed her to no end. Most notably, the Wakefield Master’s Killing of Abel stood out to me because it is the first and only time I have ever encountered my favorite word in the wild.

In The Killing of Abel, the biblical Cain kills the biblical Abel. Simple, sleek, perfect, features my favorite line in any Medieval play (“God can kiss my ass”), but that’s not all there is to it. You see,a brother killing a brother is a climactic action, one preceded by dramatic events, to be sure, but ultimately the Wakefield Master found the narrative as it stood in the Bible boring and without a certain je ne sais quoi (I hope the English master will pardon my use of Fr*nch in this essay). And so the Wakefield Master added a character, a servant to Cain, a biblical digression, a fanfiction character, there to get beneath Cain’s skin and bemoan his descent into mortal sin. This servant is called “BOY” in many publications; however, in the publication of the Wakefield Cycle I happened to have at my university library, he was called something else: Pickharness. At first, thought I, it was just a name, but driven by curiosity, I looked it up.

A pickharness is a term for a medieval scavenger, one who would wait until a battle was over and then steal the armor and weapons off of the dead and dying. Picking their harness, if you will. What a grotesque thing to be. And what a grotesque thing for the Wakefield Master to call the footsman of Cain, as if he is stealing the faith off the corpse of the recently-fallen Abel. And like a suit of armor picked from the corpse of a fallen knight, is it not ill-fitting, stained with blood and stenched with rotting flesh? But is the pickharness not also a hero, an environmentalist—though a self-favoring one—who only recycles what was discarded in the hubristic destruction wrought by man and the passage of time, and skims a couple pennies off the top?

In a world where all words have been written and all thoughts have been thunk, I have adopted the Pickharness Principle into my literary philosophy. I, too, scan a deeply broken, dust-encrusted literary world for any sparkly tokens of glittering pastiche left behind by scavengers who came before me; and I scavenge the corpses of those scavengers, who have in their own time mixed and matched bits and baubles the battlefields they’ve picked clean. My last play mixed Greek myth with classical science fiction with Ukrainian modernism, guys. Classical science fiction draws on Greek myth. Ukrainian modernism is derived from ancient Slavic ritual and weird Europeans doing weird European things. The suit of armor is ill-fitting, riddled with holes from arrows and bullets, but what else was I supposed to do? It’s what I could scavenge, and it’s not like they’re making anything new these days.