In the days before Banality overtook the land, England was covered in ancient and mysterious forests that played home to beings of all kinds. Inanimae spirits dwelt in rivers, stones, trees; the fae dwelt in hollow hills or mushroom rings, and achieved a manner of balance with mortals.
No one remembers very clearly what that time was like, with the Mists clouding the inner eye so thickly. Albion knew the rule of a High King, but sidhe politics of the time were not like they are today, with strict hierarchies, bureaucracy, and petty squabbling. Sidhe lords and ladies were the sovereign rulers within their realms, which formed a patchwork across the land. Commoners dwelt in their courts, or in the wilds between, rubbing shoulders with humans, helping them or tricking them according to their nature.
The horrors of the Shattering came like an icy wind even for those fae born from dreams of horror. The causes of it are vague, and no doubt complex; it might have been in part the Black Death, which slaughtered untold numbers of mortals and caused them to turn on anyone and everyone in a search for something to blame, or it might have been a shift in the ways that the learned men of the world thought. All that anyone can agree on for sure is that the growing inhospitality of the world drove many fae to seek refuge in Arcadia. Paths to that land, though, were few and jealously guarded. Those with power -- that is, the sidhe -- were able to leave first, bringing with them their most trusted retainers and allies. Those without power were left behind to freeze.
Aside from the loss of the nobility, Albion suffered another grievous injury during the Shattering. Three mystical springs form the foundation points of the Isle of the Mighty: the Tuath Clas Cu in Caledonia, the Llyn Brianne in Cymru, and the Albion Pool. The one known path to the Albion Pool was sealed and hidden during the Shattering, but this did not prevent the gradual deaths during the following centuries of the seven sacred trees which surrounded it.
When the trods to Arcadia closed, most Kithain reacted with shock and disbelief. One troll, however, held faith. Philip Tallaxe, a mighty troll sworn to the nobles of House Gwydion, promised the demoralized commoners that their rulers had not deserted them. The sidhe did not take their responsibilities lightly, he assured those left behind; they would return, and bring their subjects to a place of safety. They would not abandon so many Kithain to the Autumn World, where the winds of Banality were blowing ever colder.
Legends have distorted what he did then. The closest tale is that he took up a station on a rock to the west of London, where his footprints and the butt of his axe may still be seen; in truth, this stone was the entrance to a pocket realm which was the first location of the Honorable Order of Arcadians, which Tallaxe led. This spot is remembered as "Trollwatch Rock;" the Trollwatch name has been given to a number of other landmarks as well, including St. Paul's Cathedral. The confusion may result in part from rumours deliberately spread.
Stories conflict equally about what happened to him, too. According to some versions, a year and a day after the trods closed, when no sidhe had returned to rescue their people, a mob of angry commoners tore Tallaxe to pieces. Other versions say the Banality of realizing he was wrong killed Tallaxe, or that he died of heartbreak. Banality did strike him down eventually, as it does all fae, but he returned more than once, under different names, to go on leading the Order in their search for Arcadia. Though few recognized him as such when the time came -- and indeed, he himself may not have known -- he was the troll Jasper who led commoner rebels against the sidhe when they returned in 1969. Though they had returned, as he predicted, the centuries which passed in the interim turned him against his erstwhile rulers.
Much as with Britain after the Roman legions pulled out, Albion suffered a Dark Age following the Shattering. In a relatively short time, virtually all of the rulers of the land were gone, and they left chaos in their wake.
Not all of the sidhe left. Many members of the martial House Scathach stayed behind, not following their kin to Arcadia, and soon organized themselves in a secret network to try and stabilize fae society. Isolated individuals of other Houses also did not depart. When the Changeling Way was adopted, though, these other sidhe refused to participate, and so with time all of them succumbed to Banality and were never seen again. In the meantime, most of Albion fell piecemeal under the sway of commoner warlords who ruled through might and fear.
Fae historians generally agree that one of the factors which led to the restoration of order in Albion was the alliance of Seelie and Unseelie fae, a cessation (or at least reduction) of their hostilities in the face of the greater threat of Banality. Certainly the conflicts between those two groups wasn't eradicated, but it became far more possible to find Seelie and Unseelie fae working and even living together, rather than maintaining separate Courts.
During this time, the Honorable Order of Arcadians persisted in trying to find routes to the fae homeland even after the trods had closed, and at first they had many supporters. By two centuries after the Shattering, however, their lack of success led to the disbanding of the Order.
This period also saw the death of the first of the sacred trees, though few fae knew to recognize it as such. With the passing of Geoffrey Chaucer, the last of England's bardic poets, the hazel, the tree of poetic wisdom, lost its power in the world. However, the destruction of Chaucer's last poetic work fueled the creation of the Web of London, an interconnected set of balefires within city walls that helped buffer the area against Banality for quite some time.
During the fifteenth century, there was an extended period of near-unification in Albion, under the cyclical rule of a pair of ghille dhu brothers. One ruled from the summer solstice to the winter as the Oak King, the other from winter to summer as the Holly King. According to legend, each had as his consort a beautiful and ageless kubera, though scholars dispute this, citing the Sessiles' lack of concern with such fleshly activity. Though outlying areas of Albion were not so much under the control of these two monarchs, there was greater peace than had been known since the Shattering.
The growth of urban areas and the conquering of England's great forests led to the decline and demise of these two kings. Tragic ballads still sung today tell of the Krofting of the kubera queens, and how their royal lovers pined away after their loss. Traditions of cyclical rule still persisted in many areas, though, with local rulers calling themselves the Oak and Holly Kings or Lords; this practice did not truly die out until the eighteenth century.
This period also saw an expansion of sea trade and exploration, culminating in Columbus' discovery of the New World. Sir Ruadh mac Rigdonn Noíchéle, a Daireann captain searching for Arcadia, disappeared during this time. In truth, his fate was that he reached his goal, finding the island of Hy-Brazil in the western seas, which held a gate to Arcadia. It was closed in his wake, however, signaling the death of alder, the second of the seven trees to perish.
The early Tudor period saw the disintegration of fae politics into squabbling factions all fighting over scraps of power. While one warlord after another took his brief place in the sun, though, down in the shadows, something else grew.
The sluagh woman Invidiana solidified her influence in the City of the Tower, then declared herself the Queen of the Onyx Court shortly after Elizabeth Tudor came to power in the mortal realm. From humble beginnings as yet another upstart London regime, the Onyx Court rapidly gained dominion over more or less the entirety of Albion. Through deceit, blackmail, and other forms of intrigue, plus an unparalleled ability to play mortal and fae politics off each other, Invidiana made herself a ruler as powerful as Elizabeth, while her court became a dark mirror to the glittering beauty of the English royal court above. From a freehold buried deep in the catacombs beneath London, Invidiana held power for decades.
But Invidiana's immortality came, not from the Onyx Hall (which Invidiana, under the name Suspiria, had helped create in 1549), but from an infernal pact which heralded the death of the sacred apple tree. That pact was broken in a raid on the Onyx Hall in 1589, after which Invidiana vanished. In her wake, the sluagh Ifarren Vidar, lord of the District of Books, tried to establish himself as the King of the Onyx Court, but he was assassinated on the following Samhain night, and with his death, the gathered power and influence fragmented once more.
Between the mid-seventeenth century and the Resurgence, no fae successfully achieved the backing of the Dreaming in calling himself the King of Albion. Some claimed the title, but it was an empty one, without force.
The last king of Albion prior to Belinus Grann was a troll named Dallin Cynefrid. Though he did not have control over the entirety of the land, he was recognized as the king of Albion from 1637-1651. His fall from power came without warning, as the Dreaming ceased to acknowledge him or any other fae as king of the land. Most attributed this to the execution of the mortal king Charles I in 1649 by a coalition of Puritan and Parliamentary forces; this led to eleven years of "the Commonwealth," an English government without a king, but the final blow did not come until two years later, when the previous king's son, Charles II, fled the battlefield at Worcester, hiding from his enemies in an oak tree before leaving England for France. That action was the death of oak, the tree of kingship.
When his power faded at last, Dallin declared a great quest to heal this wound to the Dreaming, promising any boon in his power to grant to the individual who restored kingship to its place. Many fae took up this challenge, some questing for a year or more, but without exception they failed. The spirit of kingship was not restored, but rather freed to die, on Samhain Night that year, when it was taken from the Wild Hunt.
Dallin's fall was the end of Albion as a political unit until the sidhe came back in the Resurgence. From then on, though the name of Albion was still spoken, in practice it devolved into the regional lands that comprise the Fiefdoms today.
On September 2nd, 1666, a fire began in Pudding Lane, in the house of Thomas Farynor, baker to King Charles II. It raged until September 5th, and by the time it was done, five-sixths of the City within the walls had burned to the ground, and areas outside were destroyed as well. Officially only 16 people died in the fire, but that does not account for an unknown number of poor people who were caught by the flames, their remains never found.
From a chimerical standpoint, the solimond who dwelt in the baker's oven set alight some nearby firewood after Farynor retired for the night. The terrible, uncontrolled growth of the fire was powered not only by the combustible materials of many of London's medieval-era buildings, but by the balefires the solimond consumed in its rampage -- six of the seven from the Web of London. Within the city walls, the only balefire to survive was the White Tower. The spread of the fire was checked in part by the assistance of the Thames River ondine, who helped prevent the flames from reaching Southwark. Fae also cooperated to halt the fire at the City walls (with incomplete success), and to defeat the solimond, grown hideously powerful on the Glamour of the balefires. Dallin Cynefrid, formerly King of Albion, died in combat against the solimond. A chimerical statue was erected in his honor where the solimond broke through the western walls of the City; it shows him standing with his axe raised, a serpent of flame continually twining around his body.
Following the fire, reconstruction began in London, much of it directed by the architect Christopher Wren, who designed the new St. Paul's Cathedral, among other structures. The one major saving grace of the fire was that it put an end to the Great Plague, an outbreak that had been wreaking havoc in London for years. It also created opportunities to fix many things seen as "problems" in London; some of them were successful, such as rebuilding the embankments of the Thames, but others were not, like the attempts to clean up the noisome and dark River Fleet.
The solimond was imprisoned following the fire, but the difficulty of maintaining its prison caused the fae involved to search for another solution. In 1682, with the assistance of the mortal Sir Isaac Newton, they successfully transferred the solimond's spirit to a comet then visible in the sky, thereby exiling him from the world.
Edmond Halley's calculations in 1705, however, linked a series of comets together as the same comet, and predicted its return in 1758, unwittingly assuring that the solimond would be back. Certain fae began trying to prepare for its return, with limited success. In 1752, knowing they were running out of time, they solicited the help of the nockers of the Albion Temporal Experimentation Society, who harvested the eleven days lost by every man, woman, and child in England when the calendar switched from Julian to Gregorian. This time was stored in a room beneath the Society building, and preparations continued in that space, which lay outside the normal time stream. Many fae aged themselves terribly in that room, searching for a way to handle the solimond's return.
The eventual solution required the participation of virtually every fae in the City. Once the solimond descended once more to earth, he took up residence in the balefire of the White Tower. Through the operation of an enormous ritual, they were able to force him out of the balefire and into a human body, which was then killed in a battle on the River Thames, ending the threat of the solimond forever, and finalizing the death of the holly tree.
If the fae could have fled to Arcadia during the early nineteenth century as the sidhe had during the Shattering, they would have. The Industrial Revolution brought a pervasive, grinding, soul-destroying Banality to the world, as the clean air and rural life known for centuries beforehand gave way to sixteen-hour workdays and clouds of polluting smoke.
The Industrial Revolution began in the northwestern part of England, the western part of what at the time were called the Woollen Fields. The three cities of Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool were the heart of its birth, and came to be called the Iron Triangle, a locus of Banality that killed or drove away virtually every fae in the region. In the early days, nockers and other mechanically-minded fae saw great potential in the technological changes taking place, but dreams of gadgetry or social improvement soon died under the inexorable wheels of Banal factory processes that pounded the Glamour out of land and inhabitant alike.
The marks of this time period are still seen today, not only in the industrialized life England and other countries exhibit, but in the land where it began. The Woollen Fields are now known as the Fiefdom of Smoke, and the area encompassing the Iron Triangle, the County of the Machine, is a twisted wasteland barely even supporting nightmare chimera.
During the early part of the nineteenth century, the chief opposition to Banality and industrialization came from the artistic movement known as Romanticism, which left its marks in literature, poetry, music, and art. The City of the Tower exemplified this conflict; for several decades, control of the City wavered back and forth between two rival factions, the Captains of Industry and the Poetic Hearts, who championed different views of what the future of the fae would be. No single fae was established as the ruler of the Tower, and even the coalitions which seized power for short periods of time were unstable and shifting. The end of the Romantic movement was marked by the death of the willow, the tree of poetic madness and inspiration.
The Goblin Market, buried in the sewers of Camden, flourished during this period of unrest. Without any centralized leader to keep it in check, this "capital" of the city's underground bought and sold anything and everything, no matter how dark or vile. Its excesses were finally curbed during the Saints' Day Raid of 1829, which took place the day after Samhain, when an organized force of fae descended into the sewers to take down the slavers who operated in the market. The ensuing battle left many fae dead, both chimerically and mortally, but it was accounted a victory for the fae who lead the raid, as it slowed down the operations of the market for years to come.
On the eve of World War I, the Lord of the Tower was a troll grump named Aldon Highpeak. As Britain went to the aid of France, he relinquished his position in favor of joining up with the army. As his successor, he named the young troll wilder Edgar Whitestone. Shortly thereafter, Highpeak returned to England, having lost both his legs to shrapnel. He ended his days in an asylum in Kent, where he lost his fae self and committed suicide.
In light of Lord Highpeak's fate, Lord Whitestone made a controversial decree forbidding his subjects to serve in the army. Many trolls and other fae criticized his decision, but he defended it on the grounds of the Escheat, stating that the war was too formidable a force of Banality, and too likely to destroy any fae who came in contact with it. Only the loyalty of his aldermen, and the assistance of the shadowy figure known as Master Black, kept Lord Whitestone in power during this time.
The horrors of this war, with the incredible loss of life among the young men of England and the resulting trauma on the young women and those who had not gone to fight, signaled the death of birch, the tree of youthful innocence and beauty.
After the war ended, it soon became apparent that Lord Whitestone possessed the gift of Faerie Eternity. He was still the ruler of the city when the second world war began, and many fae wondered if he would renew his decree of a few decades earlier. To the surprise of many, he instead joined up, leaving the City temporarily in the control of his aldermen. This new war, he stated, did not pose the same degree of hazard to fae souls, and therefore he would do his duty. Whitestone served briefly in the Royal Army, but was honorably discharged when a land mine damaged his vision and hearing on one side. He returned to the City, defused the incipient coup his absence had sparked, and resumed his position as Lord of the Tower, which he kept until the Resurgence.
Immediately following the Resurgence, though there was conflict, nothing in Albion even approached the ferocity of the Accordance War across the sea. Mortal England was still a society that believed deeply in "good breeding," and so many commoners accepted the return of the sidhe with philosophical resignation, and in some places, honest joy.
Which is not to say that Albion escaped all troubles. The worst conflicts with commoners came in the north and the south. In the Heatherlands of northern England, the "Heather Lads" were under the nominal command of a troll wilder named Jasper (formerly Philip Tallaxe), who despised the sidhe for having failed their responsibilities during the Shattering. This group of commoners staged raids and other annoyances as the sidhe were attempting to take control of the Heatherlands. They met with a small amount of early success, but ensured their own annihilation when they killed Countess Ferrima Allarn ap Fiona a few months after the Resurgence. A nocker wilder was later heard to protest that it was an accident, that the grenade was only supposed to cause smoke, not an explosion, but the damage had been done. Her husband, Count Tharlin Allarn ap Fiona, killed Jasper, severely punished the other war leaders, and scattered the remnants of the Heather Lads, thereby becoming the first Prince of Heather.
Another death led to serious strife down on the Chalk Coast. Lord Basher the Brilliant, a satyr wilder who until the Resurgence had been the ruler of that area, flat-out refused to hand his lands over to the sidhe. His people mounted a much more effective resistance than their kindred to the north, which might be why, in 1970, Lord Basher died of a chimerical poison no one could cure, and did not return to life. His lover, the eshu Zama Sarifa, lost many freeholds to the sidhe immediately afterward, but he capitalized very effectively on the anger many commoners felt in the wake of Basher's assassination. "Basher's Boys" were never formally defeated, though there certainly was a point at which it was clear the sidhe had control of the Chalklands; they still live on today as a subversive commoner organization.
Other, smaller-scale conflicts broke out and were quelled throughout Albion, but the remainder of the substantial battles were in fact fought between the sidhe themselves. With Albion so deeply changed during the Interregnum, freeholds and other important resources were far more scarce than the sidhe had expected them to be, and there were not enough to go around. No few nobles fought each other, in their determination to ensure that they would not be left out in the cold. Others looked to even grander prizes, and fought for rulership over the various regions of the land, or even Albion itself.
Claiming the throne proved surprisingly difficult. The sidhe were immediately disgusted with the pettiness and insignificance of the mortal royal family, but it took them a little longer to realize the effect that pettiness and insignifance had on Albion. Declaring oneself king was easy enough; achieving any real amount of power or respect was much harder. The year following the Resurgence saw over a dozen royal claimants among the sidhe, none of whom were king or queen in anything more than name. This list slowly narrowed itself down to four real contenders, who struggled amongst themselves for nearly two more years, before Belinus Grann ap Gwydion won out, with support from some of the nobles who had established themselves as Princes of various regions. He confirmed the remainder in their posts, took their oaths of fealty, installed his own daughter as the Princess of Roses, and retreated to a freehold in the County of the Circle from which he still rules today.
For more detail on the Resurgence handover of power, see "A Guide to Albion."
Samhain 2002 saw the arrival of more sidhe from Arcadia. The most prominent of the Second Resurgence Houses in Albion was the Aesin, though their numbers were even stronger across the North Sea in Scandinavia. A noticeable number of Daireann and Arcadian Scathach also appeared in Albion; Varich were less common, and most of the Beaumayn who came to the island decamped almost immediately to France.
In the four years since the Second Resurgence, some of the new nobles have managed to achieve holdings and other forms of power, but most have not been able to climb very far. The most powerful of their number is Grettir Audunsson Aesna, Count of the Wall, who rules a substantial stretch of land along Hadrian's Wall in the Fiefdom of Heather. One of the Daireann, Naoise Ragallach of the Black Arrows, has also been gathering a substantial following, but though ranked as a duke, he lacks the land and therefore the power base of Count Grettir.
Political stability in Albion at the moment is somewhat precarious, in part because King Belinus' daughter is wed to a commoner count. It would infuriate the sidhe if he were to be succeeded by Princess Shiel and Edgar Whitestone, but it would infuriate the commoners if Belinus annulled the reportedly unconsummated marriage between the two. A few rumours say that Belinus has been searching for a bride himself, to get a new heir and bypass Shiel entirely.
Of course, it all may be a moot point soon enough, with the fomori overrunning Ireland next door. Prince Perceval Young of Tears, Princess Melessa Arian of Mist, and Prince Wellan of Hollows are all preparing defenses, in cooperation with some of the nobility in Cymru (Wales) and Caledonia (Scotland). Paranoia has overtaken many of Albion's fae. Reports of attacks are cropping up all over the land, most of them probably false alarms, and forges are turning out weapons at a ferocious rate. Some Unseelie nockers have taken to marketing "fomori detectors" and other bogus devices, although local rulers are trying to crack down on these charlatans. Tales continue to come in from around the world, of horrors in Asia, Satan in America, widespread warfare in the Dreaming.
In short -- it's the end of the world, and they know it.