The monks were revolting. That is to say, they were in revolt (although Brother Rancid was, to be fair, a little on the pungent side).
The local head of Callygrafy Servyces, Bishop Retamanger, had recently been tasked with implementing cost saving measures among the scribes under his command. Since that pesky fellow Caxton had appeared on the scene, the demand for hand-illuminated bibles and other notable works – okay, just bibles – had gone through the floor, and the monastery was losing money hand over sandle.
The savings made so far included a reduction in the storage capacity of the wine cellar, principally undertaken with extraordinary enthusiasm by the abbot himself over the course of several months, as well as the rationing of food for the monks by diluting their daily gruel to the official ecclesiastical consistency of “thin”.
But the measure that really irked the scribes was the replacement of the usual stiff goose-feather quills with much more floppy feathers from the underbelly of the Little Bittern. These were lacking almost entirely in rigidity, drooping and flapping around while the monks tried to write, causing numerous mistakes and ruined manuscripts.
The monks had heard of a new-fangled device popular on the continent, a wooden stick with a metal nib attached. These were purported to last for many decades and would thus reduce costs year-on-year while simultaneously avoiding the annual Bittern slaughter.
After a clandestine 2am meeting of the revolting monks – which due to the vow of silence was conducted entirely via hand-drawn caricatures rather like a medieval Zoom session – the head scribe was sent to confront the abbot with a demand that they be provided with these stiffer writing devices. Whilst he was unable to speak to the abbot of course, he presented a note to him with the following text:
Abbot – we can no longer cope with these droopy old-fashioned writing methods, we need the stiffer new devices from the continent. Take away our floppy quills, and…
_ _ _ _ _ / _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ (5, 2, 5, 4)
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