The watchmen’s post stands scorched and bare, the lamp untrimmed, the bell unswung,
While lords in silken chamber chairs debate what makes a felon young.
The thief walks out with law in hand, his sentence penned in victim’s ink,
And shopmen hide their battered eyes for fear their fate's the same, they think.
The cart is robbed, the mill laid waste, the baker bled of all his store,
Yet none may lift a stave or hand, 'tis hate to guard your neighbour’s door.
The lawman paints his wagon gay and clips a ribbon to his vest,
While looters stroll with laughing mouths and pockets fat with Albion’s best.
For twenty years they dulled the blade and taught the lad to fear the blow,
They taxed the just to feed the rogue and let the sower reap no row.
The law no longer binds the knave but gags the one who speaks of wrong,
And so the ballads fade to whispers where once the cry of truth was strong.
The jester rules the sheriff's post, the thief wears laurels in the square,
The clerks rewrite the Book of Wrongs with feathered ink and perfumed air.
No man may chase, no dame rebuke, no child defend his meagre crust,
Lest some tribunal in the mist declare the bread a breach of trust.
Yet still there burns in farm and forge a wrath no statute may contain,
And every theft that goes untried shall call a reckoning down like rain.
Let constables of oak arise, with oaths as firm as hammered steel,
And grant the shopman’s hand its shield, the farmer’s right to wound and heal.
For Albion is not yet lost, though soft her crown and bent her laws,
The wind still stirs in upland hedge, and flame yet sleeps beneath the gauze.
Let Westminster be warned at last: the folk remember what was sworn,
And in the dusk of justice dead, a fiercer justice shall be born.
(By John Shenton)