LITTLE WITTERING-ON-MARSH — The Guild of Authentic Yeomanry voted 11-2 Tuesday to expel a 14-year member who checked his smartphone eleven times during the society’s annual Black Death pageant, concluding a six-week tribunal that also touched on Wi-Fi, bubonic realism, and the vacant post of town crier.

The member, Desmond Pellow, 52, a regional insurance claims adjuster who portrayed “Peasant Number Four, Coughing,” told the tribunal he was merely confirming that the plague scene was unrealistic.

“Nobody in 1348 was dying without a signal,” Pellow testified. “If you’re going to die of pestilence, you do it with at least two bars. I was checking for bars.”

The tribunal, convened in the St. Aldhelm’s church hall and chaired by Guild Seneschal Marjorie Thwaite-Boyce, rejected this defense in a 41-page ruling. It found that the absence of a Wi-Fi signal in the 14th century was “not an inaccuracy but, rather, the entire point.”

“The plague was authentic,” the ruling states. “The signal was the anachronism. Mr. Pellow was not correcting history. He was checking his fantasy football.”

Pellow confirmed he had been checking his fantasy football.

The dispute reportedly began when Pellow, during a mock quarantine, was seen holding his phone aloft near the duck pond. Witnesses said he was attempting to locate what he called “the good corner of the green.” The Guild’s Registrar of Period Conduct, Alasdair Venn-Hobday, testified that this “broke the spell of the Middle Ages for at least three children and a goat.”

“We do not ask much of our members. Be dirty, be wretched, and be dead by Act Two. He was none of these things and also had a ringtone.”

That statement came from Dr. Philippa Crouch-Lamont, the Guild’s Honorary Lecturer in Peasant Posture at the Little Wittering Institute for Applied Mud. She added that Pellow’s phone case, which read “Keep Calm and Carry On,” was “a double anachronism, since it is both modern and sensible.”

The tribunal then took up a related grievance. Pellow had also been the leading candidate for town crier, after the previous crier retired when his voice “went full Georgian.” Critics argued that a man who stares at a phone cannot be trusted to announce the news. Pellow’s supporters countered that he was the only applicant who could read the news off a phone.

The post will go to Hugh Strand, 71, who has agreed to cry only in approved medieval topics, including grain, heresy, and “the weather, but worse.” His first proclamation, delivered Wednesday, announced that Pellow “is hereby cast out, and also the car park is full.”

Pellow said he plans to appeal to the Guild’s Court of Higher Mud, although he admitted the filing deadline was already posted online and he was unsure how to reach the court without a signal.

“I’ll send a raven,” he said. “That’s what the Guild would want. Though I checked, and they don’t have a ‘Reply All.’”

The Guild’s next event, a reenactment of the invention of the Wi-Fi router, has been postponed indefinitely.