BEING THE TRUE AND ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE CITY OF
HROFÆSCÆSTRA, NOVVM EBORACVM

Back in the dim and distant, and just before I started writing these damned essays, the city of Rochester, NY was suffering from a severe case of sesquicentenniitis, and to celebrate (if that's the right interpretation of what they were doing) their one hundred and fiftieth year, amongst all the other innumerable murmurings of civic pride, they had a competition for a Rochester song.
In those days I was performing mainly mediæval stuff with Colleen Liggett and with others too embarrassed to be mentioned here, so the lure of the Rochester Song was great---and by a strange co-incidence I had just been working on an old song about Winchester. The rest (with a bit of translation and some damning with faint praise and a potted history of the real---by my standards real---origin myth) is history.
Or not.
Our entry was for some reason not the winning one, however by mysterious, possibly torturous and almost forgotten paths it did lead to my
essays appearing on Simon's Scintillating Sunshine Show on Wednesday mornings at 7:15. Btw the numbers in the titles show their position
in the sequence of the essays, and the date is that of the original air date on WXXI.

During that first year I rewrote and expanded the history so that nine of those Wednesday mornings were subject to the horrors of Hrofæscæstrian History. And since they were spread out in time I absolutely had to repeat chunks, and this had absolutely nothing to do with the laziness of the long distance essayist.
Now read on.

I dare you...