The aggregated infowire for the Valley of the River Delte is published by the joint project of the Oswark Parish Advertiser,
et al. by commission from the Delte River Trust, the oversight institution for the valley, with the express purpose of keeping the multinational community updated on the comings and goings of our 90km stretch of waterways and farmland. Tessa Sack, MD of the DRT, and the combined editors of the newspapers of the valleys agreed it might be helpful to first-time readers to have a quick summary of the place before we dive in to the daily grind. We continue our five-part factbook with an abridged history - more detailed information will surely be available soon from the Delte Library Service. In the meantime:
.
Part 2A General History of the Delte Valley
EtymologyTheories pertaining to derivation from the ancient ‘delta’ with the river issuing into the flat marshy Deltemouth Wash at Smite Bay are widely regarded to be convenient but off the mark, overly simplified. ‘Delte’ is probably a derivative of ‘deal’ - first recorded before 900; Middle Anglican verb
delen,
dalen,
dealen “to separate, divide, share, have dealings,” Old Angle
dǣlan (cognate with Saxe
teilen “to divide, share”), derivative of
dǣl “part, portion” (cognate with Saxe
Teil ); Middle Angle noun
del,
dæl,
deal, Old Angle
dǣl; in part derivative of the verb.
Deal is also the Old Anglic
dael meaning 'valley', cognate with the modern Anglican 'dale’, an open valley, usually in an area of low hills, Old Angle
dæl; related to Old Wittish
del, Old Boreal
dalr, Old High Saxe
tal valley.
Early HistoryThe people of the Delte Valley today hold generally to the theory of local inventor, historian and scientist Sir Elm Erelmard (1642-1727), inventor of Ring Theory. Erelmard proposed that the whole world of the Five Pacifics and beyond is not a ‘multiverse’ but a single enormous ringworld structure - in a single universe - constructed by an ancient and absent supercivilisation - The Sculptors (Erelmard called them the Statuarii, to make them sound more interesting) - who subsequently abandoned the structure to autonomous biological evolution, out of which developed the Yuman Bean.
Alternatively, the river valleys of this part of the North Pacific region were formed by glacial action during the last ice age as glacial movement carved out the series of deep valleys, fed by spring waters from the upland plains, we see today - with the Delte being one of the smaller and less dramatically landscaped, it has supported first hunter gatherers and then small agragrian communities since antiquity. The less habitable neighbouring valleys have made the whole region largely inaccessible, serving to isolate the Delte valley communities through early history.
The town of Oswark shows evidence of settlement dating back at least to the stone age with a local hillfort unearthed in the 18th century and a series of barrows and burial sites close to the river. Oest Werke - probably East Fort, is noted on the ancient census of Caeso Betilienus (5th century) close to the his Fl. Dæl which is likely shorthand for the Delte river, although several kilometres downstream of the present town.
At the time of the bureaucracy-obsessed reign of explorer-imperator Vertzingetorix of Ordoiza (9th century), the river fell under a general claim for all the valleys of the region and was settled by, parcelled up, developed and held for Vertzingetorix by a series of administrator commanders beginning with Lier de Argentein. This period saw a regularisation of settlements together with immigration of noble families from the Greater Ordoizan empire, though they found the area largely too parochial for their own tastes, and the locals unmanageable. Documents of the period, preserved in the Oswark Town Museum, contain a predeliction for whining about the intractable Dælts, the weather, the livestock and the poor quality food.
Medieval PeriodWith the decline and eventual collapse of the Holy Zimiamvian Empire (successor to the Greater Zimiamvian Empire) in the 11th century, Delte and the surrounding country became part of an ever-changing landscape of petty kingdoms, traded between or won in battle by a succession of rulers, valley states and distant tribute-taking countries, including Geonor, Gawne, and Screve. Minor skirmishes are recorded in the annals of the valley, which were sometimes celebrated as great historical battles in earlier times but which, with studious research, turn out to be little more than scraps with pitchforks and small dogs.
One such recorded skirmish, the Battle of Lye in 1403 was won by a local aristocrat Baron Aroth, the Duke of Oswark, who defeated the invading King Thorulf of Asgar and began a period of ascendency which led, briefly, to the Kingdom of Delte, as Aroth claimed Asgar - one of the neighbouring valleys - from the defeated Thorulf and then took other valleys in a twelve year campaign. Aroth died of the pox in the city of Smite, on his way home from battle to suppress resistance in the Grebe Valley. He was succeeded by his nephew Athad and his line of Dukes of Oswark (son Anggar, his son Ale and grandson Aroth II), who maintained the Kingdom of Delte a further twenty-eight years before the coming of the ‘Salt Queens’.
Twin sisters and reigning queens of The Salternland, Nyseld and Hatereld, House Quaine, were fearsome rulers of the northern country set on conquering and unifying the querellous valleys under one banner. In 1443, six years into what would be a fifty-year reign of the Salt Queens, their primary general Hagar Sillikorn came into the Delte valley from the north with an overwhelming force of arms, while the sea captain Lady Agny da Relm landed at Deltemouth Wash with a second force, intent on joining Hagar at siege around Oswark - but after a two day march, she found Duke Aroth II had surrendered without combat at Oswark; the Delte valley had quickly fallen without resistance to be absorbed within the grand state of The Salternland, and would remain under the crown of the queens of that country until the coming of the Uncivil Wars in the seventeenth century.
The Uncivil WarsThis has proven to be such a popular subject for amateur historians that there will one day be a whole separate article on the Uncivil Wars (1644-1661).
During the reign of Queen Limnoraea II (The Sharptail) of The Salternland, division arose between the royal household and the treasury over funding for the civilising of uncivil countries - that is to say, Limnoraea’s foreign campaigns to subjugate unruly populations of foreigners; it highlighted greater divisions still in the government Office of Deportment and the influential Royal Society of Lexicographers on matters of the constitution and bills of rights & responsibilities. With Limnoraea The Sharptail pressing her country close to bankruptcy, the Master of Manners Darach Nancollas summoned her to the Office of Deportment, against all precedents. When she did not appear, he immediately commanded parliament to confiscate her ‘Civilising Brigades’ - the standing army and navy of The Salternland - and to stand them down from all aggressions until she agreed to meet with the Office of Deportment and The Treasury to address budgetary and ideological issues. Chief Lexicographer Sir Bercan Rose-Vogue of the Royal Society, her chief advisor, declared the military under her sole command, and to continue about their business. Each commander, each brigade, each ship of war had their own interpretation of matters, and that division led to three periods of civil war across 17 years of discontent.
The Delte Valley, held by Lady Nyske Daldare, Duchess of Oswark, declared early for the Queen but the townsfolk of Oswark were not enamoured of the Duchess, described as ‘a monstrous userer and tyrant’. In one of the first actions of revolution in the valleys, the stoic Garo Tone contravened his order’s natural tranquility to deliver a series of rousing and emotional public speeches in Oswark and subsequently in other towns of the valley, lamenting the stewardship of the Dukes and Duchesses of Oswark, and in particular “that harridan Nyske Daldare”. Sensing the wind of change, Nyske fled to Deltemouth Wash in the spring of 1645 and there made her escape by sea, never to return. Astur Kelchaqua, the Mayor of Oswark and a distant cousin of the Daldare family, denounced the Duchy and with Garo Tone his chief advisor, assumed command of the valley in favour of the Master of Manners, Darach Nancollas, and his ‘grimcaps’ - the so called Grimly Fiendish parliamentarians on the side of reform (and eventually, revolution).
An out-of-the way backwater of The Salternland, the valley of the Delte neverthless saw action through three sieges at Oswark; the naval Battle of Smite Bay, off Deltemouth Sound in 1648; and the infamous assassination of Garo Tone by royalist sympathisers (nicknamed the sharptails for their queen) at the Winter Arms public house in Ughmirren in 1649. Oswark-upon-Delte, and the whole valley, remained steadfastly in support of Darach Nancollas through the whole period of unrest, including the defeat and death of Queen Limnoraea II in 1653, until The Polite Settlement of 1661 and the ushering in of a new constitutional monarchy under Meeda, niece of the late Sharptail, and first of the Penberthy queens of The Saltenland.
The Bél EpoqueThe restoration of the crown in The Salternland, under more favourable terms for the Office of Deportment & The Treasury, was heralded by the coronation of Meeda Penberthy, nearest of favourable descendents of Limnoraea II, beginning a period of peace and quiet and flourishing culture of the Bél Epoque, under a succession of Penberthy Queens - and in particular the Queens for whom the period is named, the Béls: Bél I; II; III; and IV. While the whole of The Salternland enjoyed an extended period of growth and innovation, liberal philosophies and high education that would eventually usher in the great industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for the valleys of Delte and their surrounds, it was also a period in which the autonomous rule which we see today began to develop as an idea under the initial stewardship of Prince Tyrbert, the youngest of seventeen children of the fecund Queen Meeda. Tyrbert Penberthy was granted the valleys as his ward upon reaching adulthood, by his older sister Bél I who by that time had succeeded Meeda in 1677; the young prince came to live amongst the Delts as one of their own in the town of Oswark. In Delte they often refer to the Bél Epoque as Bert’s Epoch.
Key in this early period of the Bél Epoque, during Prince Tyrbert’s residency in Oswark from 1678-1714, was the establishment in the valley of the loose association of great minds who informally called themselves The Looking Glass; including the duke Tyrbert Penberthy himself, the ‘wild shepherdess’ botanist and agriculturalist Emra Kalsay, stoic artist philosopher Tonan Dellor, and polymath inventor, historian and scientist Sir Elm Erelmard (1642-1727), inventor of Ring Theory. Prince Tyrbert and Sir Elm in particular - known as the richest man and the cleverest man respectively ever to live in the valley (not verified) - were formidable in their thinking and building of an independent community in Oswark and all along the Delte, rich in culture and education, materially prosperous and well-organised, and passionate for the advancement of the cause of the Delts. Among the institutions founded during their time were the Statue Maker’s School and the Grammar School in Oswark, the Fiddler School in Deltemouth, the Honrad Hill Observatory, The Stoic Society, The Shepherd's Mutual and the Six Towns Association, which would become, in modern times, the Delte River Trust, the de facto administrative authority of the valley.
Prince Tyrbert himself, whose proper title was the Duke of Oswark, largely abandoned or ignored his ruling Penberthy family in the greater Salternland, barely returning home for the occasional state function, and was a beloved and flamboyant character in Oswark, patron of the arts and sciences, and a lovable but inveterate roué. His official epitaph, on the statue in the Old Market Square in Oswark, describes him as "Friend to all, Father of many." Though he left no official heir to the Duchy, there were many illegitimate candidates, and it is fair to say the standard claim by most of the citizens of the modern Delte valley to be part-descended from Prince Tyrbert probably has more truth to it than even the claimants themselves realise.
Industrial EraIn many ways the Industrial Era was as golden for the Delte Valley as it was dark for The Salternland. As has been proved in many an History or Economics PhD paper, for those at the forefront of the industrial revolution, marvellous. For those looking the other way at the time, oh dear me. (PhD papers are probably more technical than that). The Salternland was very much looking the other way at the time when The Honourable North Pacific Company first docked in it’s ports with the offer of trade and/or subjugation leading to trade. ‘The Company’ would not idly stand by if a nation was either not prepared or not capable of setting up trade agreements - it would simply force through land and infrastructure confiscation, using its not inconsiderable military or ‘security’ resources, infinite funding and highly skilled legal hawks to dismantle state systems in favour of its own. The Salternland, over a period of 50 years, was in suchwise broken up and distributed to shareholders of The Honourable North Pacific Company. Founded as separate entities in the imperial powers of Prudenlund and Marche Noire, with offices all over the North Pacific and registered as one of the oldest corporations in the world in the tax haven of Manamana, The Company was an agent of conquest and imperial ambition. The Salternland ceased to exist under its ravages.
Distant from the centre of The Salternland, the valleys escaped the militarised occupation of The Company but welcomed in the new money, technologies and opportunities of industrialisation, and as such, survived being dismantled by allowing themselves to be simultaneously purchased and paid for. In the Delte Valley, this lead to the industrialisation of the river way, and the commercial exploitation of the key resources in the valley - water and land. In particular, the production of beer for export: and no-one in the valley was going to prevent that, as long as they got their fare share of the product. The Company provided extensive development of the river including the creation of large locks, levelling ponds and canal systems to make the river navigable from Smite Bay all the way up to the high wetland springs, together with industrial manufacturing sites at Marshlock and Oswark. Later adoption of rail and road as the industrial era developed was also largely funded by The Company, and Oswark grew into a thriving industrial town of 80,000 people by 1850; with a large immigrant population to keep up with the demand for labour. Oswark itself became one of the largest and busiest inland ports in the region, while Oswark Ale was established as the fuel of The Company’s empire.
The Honourable North Pacific Company first arrived in the valley at the small fishing port of Deltemouth in 1698, commanded by Captain Sofus Kruse and his merchant ship, a 20-crew cog called The Totem. Captain Kruse rented offices at Deltemouth Port and settled in the town as The Company began a quiet trade with the river community. In 1708 Captain Kruse was elected mayor of the port town as his firm brought prosperity and development to the people of Deltemouth and local surrounds; by the time The Honourable North Pacific Company had imprisoned Queen Philisse in The Salternland for High Treason and inculcated a coup d’état of the government in 1743, they already held five of the Six Towns Association mayoral offices including local man Anhon Chiseller, Mayor of Oswark and Regional Manager of The Company; the construction of the Delte & Smite Canal was underway to allow major shipping onto the upper Delte by avoiding the unnavigable falls of Deltemouth Wash; and everywhere Company money was more than welcome as it paid for the industrial revolution of the valley and the material advancement of its citizens. No-one gave much thought to the fate of The Salternland, in much the way they had never given much thought to any distant rulers who had claimed the valley for themselves.
Modern HistoryThe great strength of The Honourable North Pacific Company almost proved its downfall in the end; with the modernisation of its home country of Prudenlund, The Company found itself in direct competition with the governing classes and threatening to overpower the home nation in much the way it had overpowered countries all across the worlds. Interference in politics, military skirmishes, buying up of national resources - whilst it had always been acceptable for this to happen abroad, at home this could not be allowed. Over a period of two decades at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, politicians sought to limit the strength of the Company; in particular a standing army for a corporation seemed quite contrary to the modernising movements of the day. Both home and abroad, The Honourable North Pacific Company had to do business in a different way - respecting international boundaries; working with, rather than against, sovereign states; making a good honest profit rather than pillaging national coffers. For The Salternland, it was all too little too late - a country of 450 years history was gone for good, replaced by a satellite state, Outer Pruden, which to this day with glorious history almost forgotten exists as little more than a quiet backwater of a distant patron state - much the way Delte had been throughout the history of The Salternland.
For Delte, the instruments for governing the valley were given over by The Company to the successor to the Six Towns Association, the Delte River Trust, in the middle of the twentieth century. By then, 175 years of industrialisation on the river had seen a huge rise in the fortunes and infrastructure of the valley, a peak in the mid-nineteenth century and then first a decline in the use of the river followed by a decline generally in the economics of the valley, as the The Company, being forced into a transition away from colonial governance and into capital venture, discovered that the far-flung arms of its business were no longer such great value for money. They never really had been - but money had been no object. Once it was, the community of the Delte Valley began to feel the pinch as beer, wool, basket weaving and trout farming could not pay its way for the shareholders of the Honourable North Pacific Company. From a peak population of nearly 300,000 people in the valley in 1830, with a large population of migrants from all over The Company’s empire, numbers dropped back to a tenth of that a century later. Industrialisation left behind a contaminated river, a decimated Gargoyle Salmon population, and a small community of locals left to their own devices. In 1951, the governing Six Towns Association which had become the instrument of The Company in ruling over the valley, folded in bankruptcy. A group of its former employees, led by environmental scientist and gifted auto-didact politician Ange Hawser founded the Delte River Trust with the aim of saving the dying river and preserving the dwindling Deltic population.
The latter part of the twentieth and early twenty-first century are marked by two key moments. In 1976, a young bright clerk at The Corn Exchange, which was effectively the Bank of Delte, emigrated to the Isle of Taxhavn to join the Oroboros Cooperative, a shady global markets player. Her name was (and still is, of course) Taitin Deluntte. Today she is known as “the only trillionaire in the valley” - still largely resident in Taxhavn, she has wagered on global futures her whole working life with quite remarkable prescience. Hardly anyone has heard of her, apart from her colleagues in a small secret department at the Oroboros, a few deadly commercial rivals who have tried to hire her, and/or assassinate her on multiple occasions, and the whole of the Delte Valley where she is welcomed on her occasional trips home as the natural successor to Prince Tyrbert - patron of the valley, which she underpins with vast wealth always put at the disposal of the Delte River Trust to which she is appointed Lifetime Non-Executive President.
The second incident, in 1990, was The Honourable North Pacific Company’s final dubious gift to the valley: Great Big Smite Bay Contamination Scandal - which started as the Great Big Smite River Contamination Scandal, and just flowed out from there. A secret fluid time refinery in the next valley along, the Smite Valley, exploded after a mishap with a temporal wrench in the works, causing vast swathes of destruction from ‘retrological induction’. The city of Smite-on-Sea was decimated, and the whole valley remains empty and contaminated with time paradox swamps. The explosion followed years of cover-ups about the state of the refinery and the competance of its operators. It marked the end of The Honourable North Pacific Company, and the beginning of vast financial reparations to the neighbouring valleys - or that is, the one valley that survived almost intact thanks to the climatic and geological good fortunes of the day: it was blowing a gale over the eastern hills of the Delte Valley when the refinery went up; that combined with the natural ‘bauxite shield’ of the hills between the Delte and Smite rivers caused the destructive temporal induction wave to flow in the opposite direction, largely away from the Delte valley. Only the easterly village of Agenness felt any direct effect of the wave - but the resultant contamination of the bay was to close Deltemouth port to the world for eight years, and the fisherfolk of the coast continue to suffer the effects of mild to moderate temporal radiation poisoning from being out in the bay at the time of the disaster. International reparations from the disbursement of the collapsed assets of the Honourable North Pacific Company will provide a very comfortable income to the citizens of the Delte valley for many generations to come.