When, inexorably, they would collide and combine, the outlook was stormy. It was a time of frightening portents. In the royal hunting preserve of Cannock Forest, a herd of deer had been discovered with a terrible disorder of the bowels. The wildest of the rumours claimed the deer had fled halfway across the country and thrown themselves into the sea at the mouth of the River Severn. A two-headed, eight-legged animal had been born and, although nobody was entirely sure what sort of animal it was, or where this abomination had occurred, everyone accepted it as a sign of nature’s – and, far more importantly, God’s – extreme distress at the ways of the world. The moon had been observed coloured deep red, as if bathed in blood; a sure sign, if ever there was one, of strife. War, or at least some terrible disaster, it was generally agreed, must surely be coming … In a small Kentish village a dozen miles up from the coast, an elderly woman was basking in sudden notoriety. Some said she was a witch; others that she was just plain daft.
