"Mad John" - the quest for the Pale Engrailed
A fantasy puzzle by "Oneighty" - distorted from a local legend

It was a fine spring evening as Robin came home to Tynedale.  Two days before, he had left his home in Denver, Colorado in his quest to find the ancient truth of the “pale engrailed”.  Although he had never set foot in Northumberland until this afternoon, he had a compelling sense of deja vu. He recalled the words of a John Denver song about a man “coming home to a place he’d never been before”.  And today, Robin Lankin was coming home to Tynedale for the first time in his life. 

When Robin was a young boy, his grandfather told him fireside stories of an English knight called Sir John Lankin.  Sir John was a tall, elegant, heroic character who rescued distressed ladies on the days when he wasn’t busy wrestling with dragons. According to Grandpa,  the Lankin family were direct descendents of Sir John, who was also known as “Long Lonkin".  Grandpa had visited libraries and archives during a business visit to Britain in 1977 and discovered that the family name was sometimes spelt “Lonkin” or “Lamkin”. It seems that Sir John eventually rescued one distressed Lady too many and fell out of favour with the local Duke.  He was stripped of his knighthood and became known as “mad John”.  Worse still, he was wrongly accused as a thief and a murderer.  Minstrels amused their patrons by singing nasty songs about him.  Poor “mad John” went into hiding and buried the family silver, each piece decorated with the family shield "pale engrailed". One day, said Grandpa, the Lankin family would return and re-discover their family treasure. 

Grandpa had been a radio engineer and was the first person in Colorado to build his own digital computer at home; way back in the seventies. When Grandpa died last year, Robin inherited two linen chests filled to their brims with antique computer bits. Now Robin didn’t have much use for dot-matrix printers and 8 inch floppy disk drives, so he donated the collection to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Two months later, Robin received an e-mail from Sophie Neville, the museum’s curator of technology.  Please could Mr Lankin call at the museum office in Colorado Boulevard?  Sophie Neville had something very important to show him.  

Sophie and Robin gazed at the old computer printout that Sophie had found in the bottom of one of Grandpa’s linen chests.  It was printed on a large page with sprocket holes down the side; Sophie said it was called continuous stationery; the techies called it "holey paper".  Here, printed on the light green stripes in a mixture of monospaced type and chunky “graphic text” was Grandpa’s cryptic message from the grave …
 

What was hidden in Grandpa’s message?   Web references:

Long Lonkin:  www.prudhoe.org/heritage/ages2.htm
Long Lankin: http://pacificcoast.net/~patkinson/lank.htm
Lamkin: http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/lamkin.htm
Denver Museum of Nature & Science:  www.dmns.org
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This fantasy puzzle is for amusement only and is adapted for www.prudhoe.org from an ancient legend.
Robin Lankin and Sophie Neville are fictional characters with no previous references or convictions.