A MEDIEVAL STORYE    O Canute! -- A Winter's Tale

by Jay Arthur

Once upon a tyme, in days gone bye, there was a king called Canute.
King Canute looked across from his kingdom, which was called Ontayre, and smiled at how successful he was in keeping the peasants in their place.  Working with the noblemen who ran the manufactories of goodes and vittals, Canute had introduced a scheme by which the tithes paid by the common people to the local burgesses were used to cover all the costs of managing the spent boxes, broadsheets and the drinking flasks used for the sugared liquors, which were called poppe. 
"Why," he wondered to himself, "Does not the rest of this land do things in the same way?" In other kingdoms, such as Bretagne Columbie, everyone, nobleman or serf, paid a deposit on the flasks, and in this way, vast numbers of these flasks were returned and did not end up in the large dumps which were appearing outside the city gates. Indeed, other than the Kingdom of  Manitobe, all the other kingdoms, which were called provinces and territories, were using the same system.
The king was a diligent fellow though, and had set up a guild of companies,  which was called CSR: Canute Supporting Recycling. He sent his emissaries across the land to the courts of the other provinces and there they preached the CSR Gospele.
"Look at the progress we have made in Ontayre," they cried, upon which there was much snickering in the land. (People across the land liked to snicker at the Kingdom of Ontayre because they thought their kingdom was the centre of this flat world.)
In Bretagne Columbie, CSR and its emissaries,  Canute's Council of Goodes (and Vittals) Dispensers (CCGD) and the Eastern Prynces in Cahoots (EPIC) had joined a local guild of goodes handlers. Scribes working

for this guild, which held court to all orders of commerce, the burgesses and the common folk, found the deposit system was the best way to recover the used flasks. Also, there were calls from the common folk, led by one Sainte Helene of  Spec,  to place in the new flasks some of recovered materials from flasks which had already been through the market place one time. CSR and its emissaries, CCGD and EPIC, were not in a goode humour after this happening and did remove their chairs from the table, only to return to BC with a new guild, which was called Prynces of the Regale Order (PRO) BC. It was a fine name, and much like a guild from across the seas ,which was called PRO Europa. It was reported by heralds that it was the PRO Europa which was sending to Canute  the legendary (even then, forsoothe!) Greene Dotte.
In the meantyme,  CSR and its emissaries paid visits to the smaller castles in the kingdom of BC and urged them to accept the CSR Gospele and to renounce their dark deposit ways.
Next to the Kingdom of Ontayre, the mainly Gallic tribes of Quebeque had been receiving the emissaries of King Canute for some tyme, and had founded their own guild, which was called Collicky Selektive. T'was aptly named as some of the emissaries had lately been much troubled by the recent actions of the Quebeque burgesses and they were not sure on which side of the table they should be sitting.
While all this attention was being paid to the large kingdoms, the marityme kingdom of New Scotie quietly attained its holy grail (known as the Bigge Fiftye) and had every right to feel smug
---as indeed they did.
In the meantyme, King Canute sat steadfastly in his throne on the shores of the Seas of Sensibility, and commanded the returning flasks to get back.
They didn't.

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