Sharpfight Meadow

According to newspaper accounts (which, as we all know, are completely trustworthy and reliable), on September 26th 1449 two dragons met to fight it out in a meadow in the Suffolk village of Great Cornard. The black dragon had come from Kedington Hill in Suffolk whilst the red dragon had flown over from Ballingdon Hill on the nearby Essex borders. For some reason that remains inexplicable to this day, the red dragon won and both beasts returned to their hills. Afterwards the meadow became known as Sharpfight Meadow (I have no idea what it was called before that).

The newspaper accounts offered of explanation for why this battle took place, so I made up the bit about witches and wizards for the sake of shameless embroidery. It may have been a garbled memory of a clash between two rival armies (or sports teams, or boy scouts, or who knows what else) each flying a dragon pennant. The esoterically inclined might consider the dragons to be ancient land guardians and the clash between them may be part of a feud going back to the days of the Iceni and Trinovantes, if not earlier. Maybe an equinoctial punch-up is part of an ongoing tradition, like the various summer-winter fights that appear in folklore and mythology in many parts of the world, annually re-enacted... and in 1449, for some odd reason, people caught  glimpse of it. Or maybe the whole thing is just journalistic licence. Who can say?



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