The leading lights of the village have decided to hold a pageant of local history based on a somewhat vague event, "The Massacre of the Pendon Twelve". But there's a young left wing teacher on the committee who decides to turn it into a rally for proletarian revolution. Committee meetings become symbolic battlefields for conflicting views - the right wing faction being led by the Chairman's conservative wife. The event turns into a violent confrontation between the two extremes, with cataclysmic results. Police intervention brings matters to a relatively quiet conclusion, but already another pageant - Romans versus Britons - seems an attractive possibility.