THE INFAMOUS YEARS

1067 – William the Conqueror grants “ye lands in ye swarde of Macc’s feld to Jean de Normandie, henceforth Sir John de Macclesfield.”

1081 – In an amazing coincidence, John builds his castle at one end of Castle Street – right next to Macc Donald’s.

1086 – The Domesday Book entry reveals Macclesfield to have a population of 12, land for four ploughs, and thirteen alehouses.

1281 – Macc O’Polo walks the Silk Road and makes contact with the outside world. He reaches Buxton (1281), Leek (1282) and China (1283).

1286 – Macc brings home spices; silk; mints; tea; gunpowder and Gordon – an oriental entrepreneur.

1287 – Gordon establishes an emporium on the banks of the local river. It is a place where fighting takes place after the alehouses are drunk dry.

1290 – Gordon begins to sell hot turnips for the crowds that gather to watch the fights.

1301 -Trout is added to the menu. Fish and Nips becomes the local delicacy.

1346 – The local archery team visits Picardy and defeat 20,000 French knights on the field of Crécy. They return with blood-soaked mud from the battlefield, complete with spinal cords, hair and bits of brain. They present this mud to Gordon as a momento of their deeds:

“Behold the soil of Picardy, where many frogs were bashed this day …. and now lieth in their graves.”

1347 – Gordon invents gravy, and begins to market ‘nips and glavy’.

1431 – Joan of Arse burned at the stake. The decision was taken to burn her body as engineers could not dig a hole big enough to bury her.

1484 – Gordon takes advantage of the Wars of the Roses, and gets the contract to clean up the battlefields. His new menu features cold peasant with boiled lice.

1485 – A hungry hunchback is spotted in Gordon’s shouting:

“A horseburger! A horseburger!
My kingdom for a horseburger.”

1523 – Local fat bastard Macc Ear, cultivates an enormous belly.
He eats dried worms, puppies, and even children in his search for greatness.
He travels the world displaying his huge gut: The Macc Ear Belly.
Eventually he becomes rich- proving that the end justifies the means.
He died of obesity in Florence, where locals took to eating his dried worm recipe- and called it Macc Irony.

1564 – Birth of William Shakesbeer- bard of Macclesfield. He writes a series of rude plays and beery ballads: King Beer, Macc Breath, & Toilet and Cressida.

1588 – William has a bastard son with a local trollop called Baggy Anne Hathaway. The boy is known throughout the Shire as Smuttley (for his dirty mind) Mucklad (as he works in a sty). Mucklad pens several sonnets including: My Lady Muck, Hogbashing, Lads from Muck, and I Love Muck.

1603 – Courageous sea dog, Sir Salty Raleigh sails round the world, and returns with a potato, a guitar and twenty Embassy No1.