A Period Piece

Part III of my Bardic Championship material.

Or: There ain’t no Peace in Period!

What we are searching for here is FACT – if you’re looking for glory, the knights are over on the tourney field.

Up until recently, modern historians were completely unaware that Henry V had originally intended to sing an inspiring song to his troops to motivate them prior to the battle of Agincourt. His musicians practiced night and day for three days before the battle. The damp and their exhaustion, however, caused them all to get sick (most likely with dysentery, which afflicted much of Henry’s army, though sources are vague on the subject). Without music to accompany him, Henry was forced to improvise a speech instead. A manuscript including the song was discovered in the tomb of one of Henry's knights by the noted archeologist Dr. Jones in 1938.

So much is historical fact. But rumors and gossip continue to ascribe the most fantastic events to Dr. Jones’ expedition. The idea that he disturbed a secret lab researching the uses of thiotimoline is of course absurd, and that he destroyed the lab in some feat of heroics is even more so. Equally annoying is the contention that the damage to the portion of the manuscript containing the music was due to gunfire or some sort of ancient booby trap rather than the well-known ravages of time. If research on thiotimoline was in fact being carried out so early, why do none of Dr. Asimov’s (perhaps the greatest expert on thiotimoline in history) papers on the subject discuss it?

We can be grateful to Dr. Jones for not encouraging such nonsense, instead providing a simple, rational, account of his findings. We can also be grateful that he was methodical enough to copy the text of the song from the manuscript before it was further damaged.

We cannot, of course, be sure of the music that was intended to go with the text of the song, but a detailed study of other works composed by the same minstrels leads me to believe that I have constructed a piece that I believe is in keeping with the music of the times, which I will now perform.

References:
1., Jones, I., "Examinations of a Knight's Tomb in France," Archeology Yesterday, Volume 4, Number 2, 1938.
2., Asimov, I., "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline", Journal of Astounding SCIENCEFiction, 1948.
3., Asimov, I., "The Use of Endochronometers in the Analysis of Thiotimoline", Proceedings of the 12th Annual meeting of the American Chronochemical Society, New York, NY, 1959.