Wroth Silver at Knightlow Hill

On the morning of 11 November, before the sun has fully risen, a ceremony takes place in a field on the road between Coventry and Rugby that is thought to have continued for well over eight hundred years. Representatives of the twenty-five ancient parishes in the Hundred of Knightlow gather at Ryton-on-Dunsmore around a square hollow stone — once the base of a medieval cross — and one by one drop their due of Wroth Silver into the socket as their parish name is called. The amounts are fixed: a few pence each, unchanged since the medieval records were first set.

The penalty for non-payment is remarkable: a hundred times the sum owed in silver coin, or in lieu of that, a white bull with red ears and a red nose. The bull forfeit is so specific and so ancient-sounding that it is thought to encode a very early tradition of livestock render to the lord of the hundred, possibly pre-Norman in origin. Some folklorists have noted that the white bull with red ears closely parallels the fairy cattle of Celtic tradition — the herds that live beneath lakes and emerge at dawn — though this connection may be romantic. The ceremony's lordship now rests with the Dukes of Buccleuch and Queensberry as inheritors of the Montagu lands.

The first written record of the collection dates to 1210, when it amounted to fourteen shillings and a halfpenny, but the assembly is likely older. Local tradition once held it was established by a Saxon king to provide a royal baggage train in time of war. The ceremony ends with breakfast at a local inn, where warm milk and rum — a drink as old as the pennies in the stone — is served by tradition to all who attended.