Yes, I’m posting. Yes, I vowed to abandon the website to the vicious, uncouth plebs who think it’s cool to abuse people in internetspeak instead of the Queen’s English. So, for all you with the itchy finger over the reply button, STOP – I know I’m a hypocrite, so you don’t need to point that out to me. I KNOW! Two people have already reminded me of what I previous said, as if I had the memory span of a –insert metaphor here-.

Now that I have that disclaimer out of the way, let me get down to business. A lot of people have recently been enquiring about who a certain Walter Plinge is. Well, I’ve been doing some research and this is what I’ve discovered.

The pseudonym Walter Plinge can be traced back to as early as the 12 century AD. Plinge is derived from the latin, plingeum, which means excrement. The middle ages saw the rise of the knight class with a large entourage of servants that assisted in equipping and maintaining the vast resources a knight required to continue his service to both monarch and the papacy. In fact, the historian Grant Malcome said that the average knight needed approximately ten personal retainers. One of the lesser known retainers of a knight is the plinge. A knight stabled many horses for times of war. The problem of having a large quantity of horses was the disposal of the excrement in the stables, the job given to the plinge. The invention of the shovel was centuries away, making the occupation of the plinge a rather messy affair. The plinge were required to pick up the horses dung and deposit it into bags. What they did with these bags is unknown, but the modern historian Dr. Labrug, suggests the bags could have been used in some sort of pagan ritual.

Walter Plinge is perhaps the most famous of this profession. He led the infamous revolt of 1287 in Maldon, where he and hundreds of Plinges protested against working conditions. The protests escalated outside the citadel of Lord Peter Stinger. Peter left the sanctuary of his ebony tower to go down to the Plinges to try and resolve the conflict. It is here on the fateful day of March 12th, that an impetuous plinge by the name of Gregory Ross threw a piece of horse excrement in Stinger’s face, marking the Lord with an unholy stench. Stinger was so outraged by this insolence that he ordered all the plinges to be put to death. He wrote to Pope Innocent the Censor and demanded that all plinge be given the status of heretics. Fearing Stinger’s large arsenal of adjectives, he complied and all of the plinges in England were rounded up, tortured and put to death.

Walter Plinge left a legacy. The term plinge has been modernised to mean “to throw shit at another’s face.” This has been adapted to the Theatre Australia website. Walter Plinge is a pseudonym used for people who wish to post to throw shit at another's face. But little do they know, like their middle age counterparts, in order to throw shit at their opponents, they must first get their hands dirty.

Daniel Kershaw's blog | printer-friendly version | email this blog | 1466 reads