A History of the Shambles

Introduction & history

In the new town of Vayham there is a district which is known as the Shambles it has an interesting origin around a century ago after the building of the dye works its builder decided to build a fine house up wind of his works and the adjacent tannery's but on the cheap land outside the then town walls. There followed a period of economic boom forth and the whole area which is now the Newtown grew considerably. In due course the builder of the dye works died and his heirs who had grown even richer from the income form the works amongst other things decided that grand as the stone house was they did not want to live adjacent to what was now a relative slum as the second tannery had been built by this time and workers houses for it and the exiting tannery and growing dye works clustered thickly about them. They moved closer to the north gate where all the other wealthy towns’ folk lived and still live to this day. 

The sold the old house to the Kalamarian engineer who had been bought in by the then Count to deal with the problem of the growing effluent from the Tannery’s and dye works not to mention the water run off from the regular rain. There was a fear that this run off might contaminate the water supplies for the whole town and poison every one. The Engineer lived in the house during the building of the new town drains though the area was not called that then as this was before the walls where built. He continued to live here and use it as a base of operations as he worked in other towns in the region after the drains where built and the wall was extended until he did not return form one of his trips. His staff dispersed when he did not come back and he seemed to have no heirs.

The abandoned house was shortly inhabited by squatters and more squatters’ moved into and built shacks in the houses gardens forming the beginnings of the area now know as the shambles. At some point in the intervening sixty or so years the old house succumbed to neglect and  collapsed, but the ruins where quickly mined for building materials and then over built by more huts and shacks until in the current day no surface trace of the house remains except perhaps a bit of a mound in the middle of the shambles.

The shambles today

The Shambles today is a warren of single story huts sheds and lean-tos’ with no road or even lane penetrating it just an ever changing maze of the narrowest of alleys so as to allow its residents access to their usialy squalid hovels. Life here where the poorest of Vayham’s poor dwell was never easy and its inhabitants where afflicted with near starvation chronic unemployment and poverty even in the best of times with the coming of the goblin troubles and the towns population being more than doubled in a very short time. The wealth refugees displaced the poorer townsfolk form the better lodgings elsewhere in town as  they could now no longer afford inflated rents and the poorer refugees once the poor house was full where forced to find shelter where they could, many so displaced found their way to the Shambles and swelled its population disproportionately. The area which was already over crowded and a breeding spot for disease has become more of one and the occurrence of large and aggressive rats on its alleys at night is becoming more frequent. To make matters worse when the goblin siege started the goblins crude siege engines made the area within a hundred feet of the town wall uninhabitable as the first fire pots caused a severe fire the town militia where hard pressed to deal with and burned down almost a third of the place and only the most daring or desperate have rebuilt in this area  as the goblins are still dropping bags of flints and fire pots over the wall into the area and such rebuilding is even more ramshackle than before being mostly crude tents.