Book: Farmer Giles of ham

You can’t invent excuses for the king, as for neighbors: sheep, arable land, milk or water, you had to saddle a gray mare and set off.

The priest was an educated man and could foresee the future much better than others.

The oaths that he took should have been a heavy burden on his conscience, but - alas - he had no conscience at all.

I am a farmer and I am proud of it, a simple honest person, and honest people, I heard, have a bad time at court.

In those happy times, the capital of this state was located about twenty leagues from Ham, and the court, as a rule, did not pay much attention to what was happening in the backwater province.

He was a slow man, absorbed in his own affairs, his habits had long been established. According to him, his mouth was full of trouble, he constantly cared about his daily bread, or rather about his own convenience and well-being, like his father before him. Garm helped the owner. None of them thought about the big world that stretched beyond their lands, beyond the village, beyond the nearest market.

Time then flowed without any haste or fuss. After all, the vanity has nothing to do with the matter.

Garm did not even speak vulgar Latin, but, like most dogs of that time, he knew how to use the rough common language to bully, show off and flatter. He bullied the beggars and passers-by, who happened to wander into a foreign land, boasted to other dogs, and flattered and sucked up to his master.

Time passed slowly then, and there were fewer people, so most of them were something remarkable.

Because of the addiction of small states to independence on the one hand and the desire of kings to constantly expand their possessions - on the other, many years passed in a frequent change of war and peace, joys and sorrows - this is how the stories of the times of King Arthur tell us about it.

- So knights are mythical creatures, thought the young inexperienced dragons. We always thought so.