Siege Warfare

As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has it:

"Well, it came to pass that Ethelbert the Underwired came forth into the lands of the Stikibakplastik and laid waste to all the kitchen utensils he could find in the small outlying villages, hamlets and out-of-town shopping malls of that land. Only then did he lay siege to the castle of his sworn enemy Nigel the Unmemorable."

The castle, known locally as 'That Bloody Great Eyesore on the Hill', was regarded by the experts of the day as impregnable, and deemed well capable of lasting through any possible siege, due to its own internal supply of fresh water, large grain stores and its own integral cornershop and newsagent.

However, Ethelbert was nothing if not a master tactician. He knew that an ordinary siege of such an impregnable fortress would be at best counter-productive. He knew that his army would slowly bleed away as his soldiers left a long siege to 'check if I turned the gas off,' or to 'see if the wife remembered how to set the video' and other such pressing reasons for an immediate return home.

In order to forestall such a long siege, therefore, Ethelbert the Underwired had ordered his siege engineers to produce many new engines of war to his own design. Amongst these new siege engines was the now infamous Telephone Directory Lobber, a huge catapult that needed over twenty soldiers to operate it, that could lob as many as two telephone directories at once deep into the heart of the castle, causing severe loss of life and damage to the structure of the castle and the buildings inside it.

However, the Stikibakplastik defenders were equal to this, as the telephone directories hurtled earthwards inside the castle they sent out squads of soldiers to catch the directories in green boxes and bins, which they later put out for recycling, thereby rendering Ethelbert's plan useless.

Next, Ethelbert's engineers constructed the hyper-deadly Wossname, a siege machine without equal in its sheer destructiveness, at least until the invention of the Town Planner in the 1960s.

The Wossname with its crew of thirty-two could produce, at a rate of 200 a day, enough new rules and regulations, government directives and initiatives, to paralyse completely a small city by forcing all its officials to comply with so many - often-contradictory - new regulations that normal life became impossible for the citizens.

So, after only a week of being deluged with new rules and regulations the Stikibakplastik had to sue for peace, and so - after magnanimously putting Nigel the Unmemorable and all his family to the sword - Ethelbert the Underwired became the new Lord of the Stikibakplastik.

However, the Pope was outraged by the use of the Wossname, feeling that the making of arbitrary and often contradictory petty new rules and regulations should be the sole prerogative of the church. So, Pope Nancy XXIII.5 issued a Papal Bullshit declaring the Wossname illegal. Consequently such a device was not seen again in Christendom until one was secretly built from Ethelbert's original plans by the, then, EEC (later the EU) in the late 20th Century.