HOLLOW PLACES
An Unusual History of Land and Legend
Christopher Hadley

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Christopher Hadley 2019

Cover illustration by Joe McLaren

Christopher Hadley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008319472

Ebook Edition © August 2019 ISBN: 9780008319519

Version: 2019-06-28

Dedication

To my dad Harry Raymond Hadley, and in loving memory of my mum Joan Mary Hadley, a born storyteller

Epigraph

Dummling set to work, and cut down the tree; and when it fell, he found in a hollow under the roots a goose with feathers of pure gold.

—‘The Golden Goose’ in German Popular Stories, collected by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, from oral tradition, London, 1823

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Part I: Tree

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Part II: Stone

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Part III: Story

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Part IV: Name

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Part V: Last Things

Chapter 33

Chronology and select textual history

Notes

List of illustrations

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

THE SHONKS EPITAPH, BRENT PELHAM. — I should be grateful for information regarding the epitaph on O. Piers Shonks in Brent Pelham Church, Hertfordshire. The tomb of this worthy lies in a recess cut into the north wall of the church and bears the following inscription in Latin (I quote from memory):—

Tantum fama manet Cadmi Sanctique Georgi Postuma; tempus edax ossa sepulchra vorat.

Hoc tamen in muro tutus qui perdidit anguem Invito positus Daemone Shonkus erat.

There is also a neat rhyming translation in English which I cannot recall.

Who was Shonks? What is the point in the reference to Cadmus and St. George (in itself a curious conjunction of names)? What is the significance of ‘who destroyed the snake’ (the Devil?) as applied to Shonks? What is the point of ‘invito Daemone’?

I understand that a field in the village still bears the name ‘Shonks’ field.’

D. C. THOMPSON.

Notes and Queries, 1932

In the High Middle Ages, on the Hertfordshire–Essex border, a remarkable tomb was carved out of grey-black marble to cover the bones of an English hero whom legend calls Piers Shonks. For centuries, tales about dragons, giants and the devil have gathered around the tomb and spread into the surrounding countryside. How and why that happened is the subject of this book: it is both a historical detective story and a meditation on memory, belief, the stories we used to tell – and why they still matter.

Part I

Tree

I begin on the edge of Great Pepsells field on a cold winter’s morning in the early nineteenth century.

LITHETH AND LESTENETH AND HERKENETH ARIGHT

She was the oldest living thing thereabouts.

Alone, on the wide plateau between the rivers Ash and Quin, the old yew tree had stood since time out of mind and beyond the memory of man.

Did old Master Lawrence think of her great age when he tested the cold edge of his felling axe that winter’s morning? He would have known that bringing her down was going to be an ’umbuggin job, but he had no idea how things would turn out; that before the day was over he and his axe would become part of a story already ages old. Two hundred years hence, people would still be talking about the yew in Great Pepsells field, of the day she fell and of what the woodcutters found in her roots.

For some twenty years now she had stood alone: resolute but incongruous in that heavy-clay field where tracks and parishes met; her evergreen boughs prey to lightning, the knots and sinews of her trunk rivened by wind and hail. She had once marked the northernmost boundary of a wood, but the acres of ash and maple had been grubbed up in the years between Trafalgar and the death of Old Boney.

Perhaps the landowner, or his steward, had left her standing for her grandeur. Generations must have paused to admire her or sheltered beneath her thick crown. Children, dallying on their way to gather brushwood or flints or rushes, would have carved their names in her bark and picked her blood-red arils – breakfasting on the bitter flesh and spitting the poisonous seeds to the ground.

The tree stood in the village of Furneux Pelham, 500 yards from the parish boundary. Half a mile further east across the level fields rose the tower and Hertfordshire spike of St Mary the Virgin in Brent Pelham. That the church was the only building in sight is not incidental, nor was the presence of yet another parish boundary just 200 yards to the west along the widening ditch: strange things happen where three parishes meet.

There she grew in this remote spot near the Hertfordshire–Essex border, within five or six feet of where a Roman road lay beneath the soil of the field. (Did her shadow once fall on the Eagle of the Ninth?) Trees of that age – like the famous churchyard yews at Tandridge and Crowhurst in Surrey – have many textures: on one face she might be red and hairy and corded, a trunk of immense ropes twisted into terrible strength, yet on another, bleached and moth-eaten, misshapen like driftwood. From certain angles, in certain lights, vermicular, flayed, mutating.

She had grown into a storybook tree, long before she became part of a story.

They say that she had ‘split open, as such trees do, with extreme old age’. A great wound. Split enough and large enough to have a stile and steps set in her trunk. The Reverend Soames, pursuing rumours of piglets or turnips (one in every ten was his), might easily follow the track across Pipsels Mead and Nether Rackets, through the great tree into Pepsells, and on through Long Croft or Lady Pightle towards Johns a Pelham Farm.

Was she as prodigious as the yew at Crowhurst with its small door set in its hollow trunk? Or more wonderful still? Like the greatest of all surviving British yews at Fortingall in Perthshire. Once fifty-six feet round there was plenty of space between her trunks through which to lead a horse and cart. Today, both trees are thought to have taken seed in the reign of the Emperor Augustus.

Was the Pepsells yew already centuries old when Peola gave his name to Peola’s-ham, the homestead that became Pelham? Did the militia enter the village butts with longbows from her boughs? Did a Saxon, a Roman, a scout from the Trinovantes tribe 2,000 years ago take his bearings from her? Generations pass while some trees stand, and old families last not three oaks. Nor one yew.

Master Lawrence, the woodcutter, was unlikely to think of these things. He would have thought of village stories. Perhaps of poor Widow Bowcock stabbed to death in the fields thereabouts in the last century, or the handles of grubbing axes broken in the heavy ground when clearing the roots from Ten Acres Field to make way for barley; of tall tales told by old men as they coppiced the hornbeam to make charcoal on a morning such as that one; tales about the black tomb in the church wall and the man called Shonks who sleeps in it, about his winged dogs, the monster they killed and the immense double-jointed finger bones that gave Mr Morris so much trouble.

Master Lawrence heard from the pulpit on the first day of Lent that cursed be he who removeth his neighbour’s landmark. He may have fretted that his first job that winter’s morning was to bring down such a singular tree. A landmark, which they of old time have set. Might he pay more heed to an old wife’s ‘no-good-will-come-of-it’? Perhaps there was little room in such a life for superstition. I think he pulled his stockings up to meet his breeches in the light of the hearth and rush-light and thought that his business was no one else’s concern, turning his mind instead to how hard the ground was that morning – yet not as hard as yew wood from which he might fashion axle pins or mill cogs. A practical man who kept his concerns to himself. After the event, I don’t suppose he would have had much truck with foolish enquiries about a morning’s work.

Gone, the merry morris din

Gone, the song of Gamelyn.

And yet years later he would talk about the ordeal of felling that tree – and the ‘girt hole underneath it, underneath its roots, a girt cave like’ – and in this way the simple woodcutter became as important to this story as the stonemason had 800 years earlier, no less important than the map-maker, the fundamentalist, the poet and all those who are caught in its weave.

It is the early 1830s: a time of great change. The sailor King William IV is on the throne, a young Charles Dickens has begun writing under the pen name Boz, Charles Darwin is on board HMS Beagle, and in a Hertfordshire village Master Thomas Lawrence and a gang of farm labourers are about to find a dragon’s lair beneath the roots of a tree.

1

The Reader will rather excuse an unsuccessful Attempt to clear up the Truth where so little Light is to be had, than giving Things up for nursery Tales to save the Pains of Inquiry.

—Nathaniel Salmon, The History of Hertfordshire, 1728

I like to know where dragons once lurked and where the local fairies baked their loaves, where wolves were trapped and suicides buried, who cast the church bells, which side the Lord of the Manor took in the Civil War and which modern surnames were found in the first parish register (and which in the records of the assize). I am with Walter Scott, who was ‘but half satisfied with the most beautiful scenery if he could not connect it with some local legend’. To map a place and to know its stories is to belong, to find companionship with the living and the dead, to time-travel on every visit to the Brewery Tap or the Black Horse. Sometimes you spot something – a burial mound, a scratch dial in the church porch – and then set out to find its story. Other times you hear a story and go in search of it in the landscape, or the archive or someone’s memories, and that is how my journey to Great Pepsells field and the spot where Master Lawrence felled a yew tree began.

I first encountered the name Shonks some years ago on the Pelhams’ website. Piers Shonks, a local hero, was buried in a tomb in the wall of the church in Brent Pelham. Apparently, he was a giant who had slain a dragon that once had its lair under a yew tree in a field called Great Pepsells. As one rustic supposedly said, ‘Sir, it’s one of the rummiest stories I ever heard, like, that ’ere story of old Piercy Shonkey, and if I hadn’t see the place in the wall with my own eyes I wouldn’t believe nothing about it.’

To know Shonks is to wander the margins of history: the margins of the Bayeux Tapestry where strange creatures gather, the margins of ancient woodland where hollow trees hide secrets, of eighteenth-century manuscripts where antiquaries have scribbled clues to the identity of folk heroes. It is to encounter the many other folk legends we find around the country: stories about dragons and giants and devils, avenging spirits and outlaws, which all have their echoes in the legend of Piers Shonks. It is to rediscover a world where the community was in part defined by its collective memory, by its pride in its past, and a story its members had passed down through the generations: to wrestle with their superstition, what they really believed and what that tells us about them, their priorities and their needs (and about us too for that matter, how we are different and how very much still like them).

To know Piers Shonks is to sit shivering in a church in Georgian England sketching the dragon on his tomb, to stand atop its tower triangulating the Elizabethan countryside, and to confront the zealous Mr Dowsing and his thugs looting the brasses and smashing the masonry during the Civil War. It is to ask why Churchwarden Morris could not sleep at night, and how long bones last in a crypt, and where a medieval stonemason found his inspiration. It is to wonder what a thirteenth-century tomb is doing in the wall of a fourteenth-century church, who is really inside it, and why he was immortalised by generations of storytellers.

At first, and for many months, to know Piers Shonks was to wonder that less than 200 years ago some farm labourers supposedly uncovered a cave under a tree in a field where a centuries-old folk legend said that a dragon had lived. Did they really? Surely not. This is where people usually wrinkle their brow. ‘You’re writing a children’s book?’ they ask.

No, it’s a history book, a historical detective story … People generally look confused at this and then venture: ‘Oh, it’s a novel.’

It’s non-fiction, I explain.

‘But no one really found a dragon’s lair under a tree.’

Maybe not, I concede, but they believed they did.

‘They didn’t really.’

I think they did.

‘Really?’

This book began with that question, and in trying to answer it I discovered things even more puzzling, things that eventually brought home to me the importance and the power of the folk legends we used to tell and why they still matter. The story of Piers Shonks is not the legend that changed the world, it did not forge the nation or launch a thousand ships. It is an obscure tale, of small importance, but it has endured: the survivor of an 800-year battle between storytellers and those who would mock or silence them. Shonks’ story stands for all those thousands of forgotten tales that used to belong to every village.

This rumour of a tree that once housed a dragon caught my imagination, as the tree itself must have bewitched those farm labourers. It took root and grew, putting out feelers, tapping the furthest horizons of my mind, where the magical and mysterious lay buried, becoming a solitary and crooked shape in a field far away from a winding road, both sinister and oddly pleasing. Perhaps frightening and anatomical in silhouette, with claws like the tree at the bend by Jack’s Bridge as you enter the village at dusk, but much larger and more substantial: Girth enourmous like the Yardley Oak in Cowper’s poem, with ‘moss cushion’d root / Upheav’d above the soil, and sides emboss’d / With prominent wens globose’, a shatter’d veteran, hollow-trunk’d, embowell’d, and with excoriate forks deform. Cowper, the great Hertfordshire poet of nature, has appropriated all the right adjectives for the job.

I hoped, rather ridiculously, that I could somehow identify the tree on old maps. An early estate map of the Pelhams has lovely water-coloured woods and springs of trees with shadows pooling to the east, but no individual trees. The Ordnance Survey followed the same convention, so that the sun is always setting in nineteenth-century mapscapes, but whereas the earlier maps showed trees merely to indicate the presence of woodland, the second half of the nineteenth century saw the arrival of OS maps so detailed that they showed every non-woodland tree in fields or hedgerows that was more than thirty feet from another tree. Oliver Rackham, the historian of the countryside, estimated that nationwide the surveyors plotted some twenty-three million individual trees, and many are still there to be found.

While single trees were marked on the published maps, single tree stumps might be plotted on the original boundary sketch maps because they were meres marking the beginning and end of a hedge that the farmer had uprooted half a century before. I once spent an enjoyable hour searching for the vestiges of the ‘Hornbeam Stub’ that marked a stretch of boundary between Furneux Pelham and Great Hormead. My search was in vain, as it was for the yew tree. Sadly, as I later learned, Master Lawrence’s axe had struck the yew some forty years before the first large-scale sheets of north-east Hertfordshire. Still the looking was almost as rewarding as the finding would have been.

The tree was just the start. I was soon fascinated by the tomb in the wall, the inscription above it, and other places associated with the hero: Shonks Garden, his wood, and his moat. At first, I kept coming across intriguing references to Piers Shonks when I was looking for something else: in old newspapers and county histories, guidebooks and letters. He was even in the old Post Office directories: at Brent Pelham in 1862 with its reported 1,601 acres and population of 286, I read that in the church ‘In the north wall of the nave there is a curious monument to the memory of one Piers O’Shonkes, the legendary slayer of dragons’.

Ever since the Elizabethan map-maker John Norden passed through Brent Pelham and found the place name and Shonks’ tomb the only things worth noting down, people had been trying to get to the bottom of the legends attached to that curious monument. In the words of the eighteenth-century antiquary and tombstone enthusiast Richard Gough – pretending to disapprove – the tomb had long ‘furnished matter for vulgar tradition, and puzzled former antiquaries’.

Folklorists collect things. Fully paid-up folklorists might collect legends associated with a place, such as those who compiled the Folklore Society’s classic county series. Others focus on a theme such as the folklore of plants, some collect fairy-lore, playground chants or dances.

For my part, I found myself simply collecting the legend of Piers Shonks; that is instead of just happening upon accounts of the legend, at some point I started hunting for them. In the preface to his Italian Folktales, Italo Calvino describes perfectly what this is like, the sometimes obsessional searching, his feeling that some ‘essential, mysterious element lying in the ocean depths must be salvaged to ensure the survival of the race’. At the same time, he knew that there was a risk of disappearing into the deep. ‘I was gradually possessed by a kind of mania, an insatiable hunger for more and more versions and variants. Collating, categorizing, comparing became a fever.’

As I spent ever more time in the company of Shonks, I liked to seize on anything that helped me to justify it, not least the notion that along the way I would learn a thing or two about something worth knowing about. In her 1914 The Handbook of Folk-Lore, Charlotte Sophia Burne suggests that studying ‘folk-lore’ will advance the study of ethnology, history, economics, politics, sociology and psychology. There are certainly worse ways to get your bearings in an English village than to study its old stories, examine its tombs and dig up its potsherds. The father of antiquaries, Joseph Strutt, wrote that the study of such things ‘brings to light many important matters which (without the study) would yet be buried in oblivion, and explains and illustrates such dark passages as would otherwise be quite unknown’.

That sounds like a suitably gothic enough reason for us to go in search of Piers Shonks. And where better to start than at the house that Shonks built?

2

And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.

—A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 5, Scene 1

On a summer’s afternoon in the early years of the twentieth century, a group of Edwardian gentlemen processed through a field of close scrub in Brent Pelham like men who had lost something important. The ground was unremarkable, broken and tumbled down to woodland, but was bound by wide and now stagnal ditches dug with great effort some seven or eight centuries earlier to fashion a moat. The members of the East Hertfordshire Archaeological Society were searching for signs of a half-remembered house that had once stood there, but I hope that some among them were looking for something more, hoping to catch sight of a great rumour in its infancy, to detect, in a broken blade of grass perhaps, the long-ago path Piers Shonks took on the day legend says he bested a dragon.

See you the dimpled track that runs,

All hollow through the wheat?

O that was where they hauled the guns

That smote King Philip’s fleet.

Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Puck’s Song’ didn’t appear in print until the following year, but the archaeological imagination it embodies was no doubt at work that summer’s day in 1905 as those men tried to find something hidden beneath tussock and root that would carry them back to the distant past.

A local newspaper report of the day’s excursion called it ‘a moated site of some two and a half acres across upon which once stood the castle of the celebrated Piers Shonks, the slayer of the Pelham Dragon’. The castle (if not the dragon and its slayer) was a fiction. Most moats that trench the countryside are not the stuff of medieval sieges, but are homestead moats built around new farms and manor houses in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by men ostentatiously proclaiming their independent status and their membership of the knightly class – or their aspirations to it. They were especially popular on the boulder clay of East Anglia. Oliver Rackham has written that anyone who has dug as much as a posthole in the clay will be in awe of the labour that went into excavating an entire moat, so people must have had a good reason to do it. They may have served a practical purpose as fishponds, or as a ready water supply for putting out fires, or for drainage or sewerage, and they must have offered some degree of deterrence to passing robbers and rapists, the notorious trailbastons – vagabonds with big sticks – of the period, but many historians agree that moats were first and foremost a status symbol.

William Blyth Gerish, the man who had organised the trip that afternoon, was careful to call the vanished building a house and not a castle. To the Elizabethans, the moated site had been plain old Shonkes. It was by then an ‘ancient and decayed place’. Known as Shonkes Barn in the eighteenth century, it was said it would soon ‘lose its name in all likelyhood with its substance, which is in a very tottering condition’. The prediction proved partly true. Thomas Hollingworth’s beautiful Georgian estate map of Beeches Farm in green and yellow watercolours shows a neat four-sided moat identified in the key simply as Nursery & Moat, the building forgotten and seemingly the hero’s name as well, but all is not lost: the adjacent fields are labelled Shonks Farmyard and Shonks Hoppett. Some forty years later, a new survey showed that the moat had been extended and gained an extra enclosure; it was now The Hoppits & Shonks Garden. Shonks played on people’s minds and their superstitions in those parts: writing at Clifton School in Bristol in 1872, one pretentious schoolboy from near the Pelhams noted that by night Shonks Garden is ‘studiously avoided by the simple villagers’. Other locals were less easily spooked, treasuring the moated old pasture, not only for its association with their hero, but also for its early summer carpet of narcissus, the double white jonquil.

The earliest large-scale Ordnance Survey map has it as Shonk’s Moat (in the gothic typeface reserved for antiquities) and clearly shows a double moat arrangement forming two islands. By 1905, when the archaeological society visited, a fishpond remained, and the arms of the moat were mostly dry. The only clues that there had once been a building were the traces of foundations, which still dimpled the turf.

A photograph, perhaps taken earlier that day, shows William Gerish standing behind the Brent Pelham stocks and whipping post, looking younger than his forty-one years, his face framed by a neat dagger-shaped beard and a straw boater. A bank clerk by day, the indefatigable Mr Gerish is best characterised by pointing to his magnum opus, Monumental Inscriptions, for which he trawled the churches and graveyards of Hertfordshire recording some 70,000 inscriptions on strips of paper that he and his wife pasted into thirteen volumes in alphabetical order– a pursuit that was said to have destroyed his health and contributed to his premature death at the age of fifty-six.

Gerish was part of what became known as the nationwide folklore revival, avidly collecting local stories and publishing them in one shilling pamphlets. It was one of these that Gerish read to his fellow archaeological society members that Thursday afternoon in July 1905. It was called A Hertfordshire St George, or the story of Piers Shonks and the Pelham Dragon. While he had chosen for his stage the countryside where Shonks once lived, Gerish’s pamphlet paid greater attention to the home of his adversary. In fact, Gerish’s chief claim to originality is his treatment of the yew tree, its felling and the dragon’s lair beneath it. He had first written about the incident in an article for Folklore three years earlier; written about a ‘terrible dragon kennelled under a yew tree which stood between what were afterwards two fields called Great and Little Pepsells’, adding the surprising news that the tree had been chopped down some years before and the dragon’s cave found in its roots. Gerish’s papers in the Hertfordshire Archives reveal the original source for this story to be a series of letters in the Hertfordshire Mercury from some fifteen years earlier. A correspondent identified only as D.E. set the ball rolling with a query published in late February 1888:

Brent Pelham: There is a man buried under the foundation on the north side of Brent Pelham Church of the name of Shonks. Can any of the readers of the Mercury give the reason why he was buried there, and also the date of the year he was buried? —D.E.

The year 1888 was a good one for enquiring about bones. On 23 January, the remains of a skeleton were discovered in a stone coffin in the eastern crypt of Canterbury Cathedral that some would claim were the lost relics of St Thomas Becket. The story broke in The Times early in February, sparking a series of letters to the editor and a controversy that has lasted to the present day. I cannot help but wonder if D.E., whoever he or she was, thought to question the identity of Shonks because of the excitement over Becket’s bones.

There were several replies: quoting the various county historians on the matter, describing the tomb and giving versions of the inscription over it. Between them, the authors of each letter managed to encompass most of the traditions: here was Shonks the Lord of the Manor who supposedly died in 1086, Shonks the giant who got the better of a rival, Shonks the dragon-slayer, and Shonks who cheated the devil. But the most interesting letter by far ran in the paper on 17 March, and came from a local vicar with a name like a hardwearing fabric; he was the alliterated Reverend Woolmore Wigram, and what he had to say would change the centuries-old folk legend for ever.

3

On what occasions are stories told? Is there a story-telling season? Do particular stories belong to particular occasions? For what purposes are they told? For instruction or warning, or simply for amusement?

—Charlotte Sophia Burne, The Handbook of Folk-Lore, 1914

In a letter written towards the end of his life, Reverend Woolmore Wigram recalled that the story of the dragon’s lair found under a yew tree belonged to a particular occasion in the 1860s; to one of his traditional tithe luncheons. This was the annual meeting when the parson and the farmers agreed – or more likely disagreed – on the tax due to the church. Traditionally held in Brent Pelham on the second Friday in December, there could hardly be a more apt occasion to discuss the old stories. Tithes were part and parcel of the customs of the village. Onerous, contentious and unedifying, tithes are an entertaining way to glimpse the lives of the folk, their personalities, their world and their preoccupations.

Though familiar themes crop up everywhere, ancient tithing customs were particular to each parish. Today they read like magic potions: toad under cold stone, days and nights has forty-one, could well be the vicar’s due at Lammastide. As well as the joy of otherness and unfamiliar words to justify time spent with tithe records, they are also especially instructive for anyone chasing old stories. They challenge us to unravel them, to reveal lost ways of making sense of the world and to shed light on the long-forgotten machinations of the stock characters of village life: impecunious parsons, resentful husbandmen and bombastic squires.

Tithes were organic and multi-layered, built out of cunning millers and higglers’ horses, village personalities, stolen land, ancient disputes, forgotten farming practices and lost ways of life. While farmers and most tithe payers of the past would be delighted to know of their utter obliteration, we are right to be anxious that something has been lost with their passing, and we should treasure the traces we have left. In this they are like local legends: Piers Shonks has fought many battles but none more important than the battle between memory and forgetting.

In about 1902 Wigram wrote to Gerish, ‘I will send you another time the legend of O. Piers Shonks; as I heard it from the Inhabitants, at my Tithe Audits when the good folk used to pay their 1/6 or 2/ worth of tithe (quite punctually) and sit down to cold beef bread & cheese & conversation; and give me all the folk-lore.’

Was it simply that the luncheon was held at the Yew Tree Inn, a popular village meeting place since the middle of the previous century, and Wigram asked about village yews and one story led to another? Perhaps someone was talking about the tithes due on mature timber in the old days when his neighbour mentioned what was found under the oldest of all trees in those parts, back when Reverend Soames was vicar and busy writing his books instead of earning his tithes, back when churchwarden Morris was farming the tithes in Brent Pelham and making himself very unpopular? A story to impress or entertain the new vicar. ‘Are dragon’s eggs tithable, Reverend?’ somebody quipped.

Woolmore Wigram became vicar of both Brent and Furneux Pelham in 1864 and held the post for twelve years. In his early thirties when he arrived, Wigram was a mutton-chopped and muscular Christian, a founding member of the Alpine Club. Just two years before he arrived in the Pelhams, he had braved storms that had turned his hair white with icicles and driven frozen spicules into his face as he made the first successful ascent of the White Tooth, La Dent Blanche, near Zermatt. At over 14,000 feet, it was considered one of the hardest climbs in the Alps. How would he occupy himself in countryside that was pleasantly undulating but with no discernible peaks? Perhaps he might turn his hand to more scholarly pursuits, to folklore and local history.

The clergy had gradually been replacing the squire as the keepers of parish history. An early local history manual urged clergymen to collect field names and look into the parish chest to find accounts from the Overseers of the Poor so they could write the history of ordinary people. Wigram was one of the more enlightened local historians, someone who would not restrict himself to title deeds and the genealogies of those in the Big House. He also cared about the folk and their customs: what they remembered and what they valued.

Tithes are almost as alien to most of us today as dragons, but baffling customs, grumbling farmers and greedy vicars added piquancy to life in your average village. For centuries tithes were paid in kind – in other words, the tithe on piglets was paid in piglets. As endless legal cases testified, what was owed to the church was often cause for much debate: at times desperate clergy, eager to increase their incomes, had been known to claim that stones in a field were subject to tithe. Others were said to have demanded tithe on the ‘germins’ or shoots growing from the roots of felled trees (although these anecdotes, told against the church, have the ring of the apocryphal, or at least exceptional, about them). In 1727, Alexander Pope in his description of a fictional parish clerk’s memoirs jokes that there are ‘seventy chapters containing an exact detail of the Law-suits of the Parson and his Parishioners concerning tythes, and near an hundred pages left blank, with an earnest desire that the history might be compleated by any of his successors, in whose time these suits should be ended’.

There were two main types of tithe: great and small. Great tithes were paid on the produce of the land – grain, hay, fruit, timber – and these usually went to the rector, who in the Pelhams, owing to a shady deal done in 1160, was the Treasurer of St Paul’s Cathedral. After the dissolution of the monasteries in Henry VIII’s reign, some third of all great tithes in the country ended up in the hands of lay rectors, who had nothing to do with the church. Once tithes could be bought and sold like any other property, the moral and religious argument for paying them became increasingly hard to make.

The small tithes were paid on those things resulting from the produce of the land – pigs, chickens, milk, cheese, eggs, fatting beasts, geese and bees. In the Pelhams, by custom, the small tithes also included potatoes, turnips, clover, herbs and aftermouth (grass from the second mowing). These were paid to the rector’s representative on the ground, the vicar, who was wise to keep detailed accounts and records of parish customs. In the 1730s, the vicar of Furneux with Brent Pelham, Reverend Charles Wheatly, did just that. On 4 May 1732, Wheatly visited the aptly named Farmer Pigg to claim his tithe of seven lambs. By this date, he would normally accept a cash payment, but the two men were unable to agree on a price. Wheatly set down what happened in his account book: ‘[Mr Pigg] had 75 lambs, offered 3 s. a piece for my seven: But I refused it & drew them out in kind … I took one Ram, 5 Ewes & one Weather [sic]: & in lieu of the tithe of the remaining 5 lambs, I took a lame infirm one.’

Other parishioners paid with a fat goose on Lammas Day, in honey or wax or bushels of apples. Tithe eggs were due in Lent: two for every hen and three for every cock, ‘whether they be fowls ducks or turkeys’ according to custom. Some paid by work: a William Keene settled his tithe by ‘making the hay of the Close’. Among the more unusual forms of payment were brass ‘nozels’, pricked bricks or bottles of tent – a low-alcohol Spanish wine used for the sacrament.

The tithe customs had been written down at much the same time as the first references to the exploits of Piers Shonks. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, William Bishop, the vicar of Brent Pelham, sued Richard Dalton for seven years’ worth of tithes on the underwood, that is the smaller woodland trees that were used for fuel or to make poles or fences and such like. Dalton, however, knew the customs of his village, which included such arcane and impenetrable rules as: ‘If a lamb was sold with its Damme between Lady Day and St George’s Day the tithe for every lamb would be 4 d.’ Another dictated that not all the underwood in the Pelhams was tithable; they were usually paid on coppice wood, lopped wood and wood from springs and hedgerows, but they were not paid on any underwood that was used to repair hedges and fences. And so Dalton won the case, and all the customs that were confirmed and written down at the time would still be guiding the villagers and confusing the vicar when Master Lawrence felled the yew tree centuries later.

Tithes, like old stories, were under threat in the early nineteenth century. They were gradually monetised, stripped of their interest, homogenised and made intangible. The traditions that went with them would soon fade from memory. Over the years, clergy and tithe farmers found it increasingly tiresome to keep track of all the ringes of wood and bushels and pecks of barley. The counting, weighing, transport, storage and use of tithes in kind could be costly and burdensome. It distracted incumbents from less worldly concerns and it was in most people’s interest to convert tithes to regular cash payments. This had happened in many places in a piecemeal way since the Middle Ages, and by the eighteenth century many tithe owners agreed on fixed sums known as compositions. For a while, some agreed a fixed sum, but still settled their bill in kind. Like Richard Hagger who paid his annual 3s. 6d. in honey and apples.

By the 1830s, it was observed that no tithe had been collected in kind in living memory. Wrested from tradition, they would eventually be easier to do away with. Throughout the early years of the nineteenth century, there was growing agitation nationally to reform the system. Tithes were accused of being a tax on industry and land improvement and caused particular resentment among the growing ranks of non-conformists, who did not see why they should be financing the Church of England. As agricultural methods changed, it became ever harder to decide whether something was tithable and in what way. Turnips might be tithable, but then again not, it depended on whether they were grown to feed animals or people. How about partridges? Acorns? Charcoal?

When Master Lawrence felled the yew tree, the last days of the old tithe system had come, but vestiges of it lingered on, and traditions such as tithe luncheons were still around thirty years later, when two members of his family played a prominent role at them. The brothers Thomas and James Lawrence were variously master carpenters, constables, sub-postmasters, grocers, innkeepers and, for many years, parish clerks in both Furneux and Brent Pelham. One or both of them were also good storytellers.

Before his death in 1907, the then Canon Wigram, casting his mind back some forty years to his tithe luncheons, wrote two letters to W. B. Gerish about Shonks that provide several clues to the identity of the man who told him about the yew tree. His informant was a Master Lawrence, who was not only related to the woodcutter, but also remembered the tree. This Lawrence worked at the post office and was also his parish clerk, which should narrow things down, but describes both Thomas in Furneux and his brother James in Brent Pelham. Perhaps both regaled Wigram with village history, but in Wigram’s last known letter to Gerish, written in July 1905, which he begins by saying he has already told Gerish everything he can about Shonks, we learn that it was Thomas Lawrence who told Wigram old stories about the village, and so he emerges as the prime candidate for tale-spinner-in-chief.

What Wigram didn’t learn about the yew tree at the tithe luncheon he must have found out later through conversations with Thomas, facts he finally set down on paper in February 1888 when he wrote to the Hertfordshire Mercury, replying to D.E.’s question about Piers Shonks’ tomb. His letter concluded with the following story:

In subsequent ages the yew tree was cut down by a labourer well known to my informant, the parish clerk. The man began his work in the morning, but left it at breakfast time, and on his return found that the old tree had fallen, collapsing into a large cavity underneath its roots. That such cavities have been found in other cases under old yew trees I have been told. Whether this one was simply enlarged by the dragon for his own convenience, or whether it was wholly dug out by that creature’s claws, there is no evidence to show.

This is the earliest account of the felling of the tree. Was Wigram preserving custom or creating it? If true, it posed some fascinating questions. Was the cavity visible before the tree came down? Had it played a role in the origin of the legend, or at least in the tradition that the dragon lived under a tree in that field? Many of the written accounts said that the dragon had lived in Great Pepsells field, others said it had lived under a yew tree in the field. Had tradition always associated the dragon with that particular tree and, more to the point, had Master Lawrence known that when he set his axe to its roots?

4

The Variety of Wonders caused some Suspition of the Truth of his Relations; but all things that seem improbable are not impossible, and the ignorance of the Reader does oftentimes weaken the Truth of the Author …

—Henry Chauncy, The Historical Antiquities of Hertfordshire, 1700

Folk legends, with their origins buried deep in the past, owe much to unseen forces; they are crafted gradually like limestone pillars on the seashore, eroded imperceptibly to their present shape by sea and wind and rain. For a time at least, they might resemble something recognisable: a witch’s face in profile, say, or a giant’s fist. Can we say what the rock originally looked like or what other shapes it has taken over thousands of years? Occasionally, however, it changes in a moment – when a storm sweeps away a large chunk – and the cause of the new shape can be discovered by listening to the old people or turning up the water-damaged logbook of a ship.

The shifting themes and motifs in the different versions of the Shonks legend made it clear that his story had changed many times over the centuries. Oral accounts must have morphed in the telling, and then, once people started writing them down, they could not resist dreaming up a detail or two of their own; eventually the oral tradition became a garbled version of early written accounts and vice versa. Old motifs were embellished by an eager storyteller, others borrowed, new emphases were made, traditions were misconstrued, meanings were forgotten and re-remembered back to front, small details were tacked on to add colour.

Was it possible to say where the detail t hat the dragon lived in a yew tree in Great Pepsells field had come from? Had it been there from the beginning? How was it passed down through the generations? Who first wrote it down? It was not mentioned by the cartographer John Norden in 1598, nor by the county historian Nathaniel Salmon, who was very taken with the legend in the early eighteenth century, nor even by Edward Brayley, who wrote at length on the tomb in his Beauties of England and Wales in 1808. In over twenty accounts of the legend by locals, antiquaries and journalists written before Wigram set down his version, not one mentioned the tree or the fields.

It is not impossible that an oral tradition about Pepsells had been overlooked by all these early chroniclers, but it is unlikely when every other element of the legend that we will meet in this book had found its way onto the page. By the early nineteenth century there were vague references to where the dragon lived. An account published in 1827 mentioned a location for the battle between Shonks and the dragon that took place on somewhere called Shonks’ Hill, which villagers still pointed out at the time. In 1865, the same year that Woolmore Wigram became vicar, Frances Wilson wrote to The Reliquary (A Depository for Precious Relics Legendary, Biographical and Historical, Illustrative of the Habits, Customs and Pursuits of our Forefathers). She had grown up in neighbouring Little Chishill, the daughter of the village blacksmith, and for the first time, in print at least, she associated the dragon’s lair with a tree, mentioning in passing that the beast occupied a tree in a meadow. But not one text in the first two hundred and ninety years of written accounts mentioned Great or Little Pepsells field, or a yew tree, until Wigram wrote his letter to the Hertfordshire Mercury. Anyone reading it in 1888, or since, would assume that the location of the dragon’s lair was part of the tradition before the men chopped down the yew. Subsequent accounts take Wigram at face value and name the field as if it had been a key part of the story long before the labourers uncovered the cavity beneath the tree. The woodcutters’ belief in the dragon’s cave became entwined with the story in such a way that the cave appears to have always been part of the tradition, but the textual evidence was clear: it was simply Wigram’s narrative conceit. The felling of the tree, especially Wigram’s account of that day years later, was a storm that in an instant changed the limestone pillar. I love W. G. Hoskins’ axiom that most things in the landscape are older than we think, but it is not always true, even of trees and fields and dragons’ lairs, but especially not the stories we tell about them.

In his famous essay ‘On the Cannibals’, Montaigne wrote that he would rather have a story from a plain ignorant fellow than an educated one:

for your better-bred sort of men are much more curious in their observation, ’tis true, and discover a great deal more; but then they gloss upon it, and to give the greater weight to what they deliver, and allure your belief, they cannot forbear a little to alter the story; they never represent things to you simply as they are, but rather as they appeared to them, or as they would have them appear to you, and to gain the reputation of men of judgement, and the better to induce your faith, are willing to help out the business with something more than is really true, of their own invention.

Wigram could not forbear to gloss and help out the business, but we should be glad of it, glad he played the storyteller. Wigram enriched the legend from the moment he responded to that newspaper query in 1888. Contrast that with the reaction of his contemporary John Edwin Cussans who had already called the stories about Shonks’ tomb ‘absurd traditions’ in his History of Hertfordshire. In 1888, the so-called ‘laughing historian’ followed the correspondence in the newspaper and then waded in with his own ex cathedra pronouncement. After trying to pour cold water on another Hertfordshire tradition, he added a spiteful coda: ‘I forebore to address you on the discussion which has recently taken place in your columns on the subject of Shonk’s tomb, as I thought I had sufficiently demolished the ridiculous tradition in my account of Furneaux [sic] Pelham.’ We will run into others like him, who boast of demolishing things and are proud of their own dragon-slaying and giant-killing exploits. Give us the Wigrams any day, even if they cannot resist tinkering.

‘If stories remain undisturbed they die of neglect,’ writes Philip Pullman, and Italo Calvino said something similar when he justified his own tampering with Italian folk tales with a Tuscan proverb: ‘The tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it.’ That is not to say anything goes. The wrong kind of change destroys more than it creates: you have to be true to the fact that people used to believe folk legends were true.

It was a clever bit of storytelling by the vicar, but we would not be happy if he had just made up the yew tree, the fields and the felling. We would feel cheated. As the folklorist Jacqueline Simpson has pointed out, we want a reason to say of our dragons and their slayings, ‘there was something in it after all’.

The realisation of Wigram’s conceit not only provided an unusually detailed instance of a folk legend metamorphosing – and perhaps a model for how other parts of the legend had been seeded or transformed – it completely changed the nature of my curiosity. I no longer had to wrestle with what it meant to find a cave under a tree that according to tradition grew over a dragon’s lair, because that was back to front: the tradition did not begin until the day the tree was felled. But the question remaining is even more curious: why on finding a cavity under a tree in a field with no previous connection to the legend did those nineteenth-century labourers think of the dragon that Shonks slew?

This hints at much about folk legends and their status within communities as recently as the 1830s. Stories about dragons and their holes are assumed to have medieval origins, conjured by medieval minds as they conjured up other strange creatures to populate bestiaries, adorn the edges of manuscripts and support the corbel tables of churches, but nineteenth-century agricultural labourers? Was the legend so powerful and so ubiquitous in the Pelhams that when uneducated farm workers found an unexpected cavity under a yew tree they immediately turned to the legend of a dragon-slayer for an explanation?

That such wonders hid in the fields and spinneys of the English countryside so recently is a delight, as well as a reminder that folk legends differed from folk tales – that were never believed and told only for entertainment – by the evidence in the real world as well as in the story: the hilltop, the gravestone, the tree that sages can point at and say: ‘You can still see it today’. It proves the legend.

I was first attracted to Shonks’ story by the yew tree in a named field. Finding such survivals, tangible evidence for stories and folk legends, is psychologically very appealing. At the beginning of Albion, her compendium of English folk legends, the folklorist Jennifer Westwood quotes Walter de la Mare: ‘Who would not treasure a fragment of Noah’s Ark, a lock of Absalom’s hair, Prester John’s thumb-ring, Scheherazade’s night lamp, a glove of Caesar’s or one of King Alfred’s burnt cakes?’

Such wonders have been called mnemonic bridges that help us connect with the past. It is the reason people have venerated fragments of the cross, or followed in the footsteps of Caesar and Alexander. It is the attraction of the perennial plot device in children’s stories where the young hero or heroine awakes in bed thinking they dreamed it all, only to find the golden coin in their dressing-gown pocket, proving they had really been there. Coleridge once imagined a dream about Paradise where he was given flowers and awoke to find them beside him, and Hans Christian Andersen knew the power of objects that crossed the boundary between fantasy and reality when at the end of his little story ‘The Princess and the Pea’ he wrote: ‘The pea was exhibited in the royal museum; and you can go there and see it, if it hasn’t been stolen. Now that was a real story!’

Objects that locate legends in a real landscape possess some archetypal magic. Some place the story in a distant, fantastical past, while others root it in the everyday. Some tales explain oddly shaped hills and standing stones by the antics of immense dragons, giants or the devil, but a yew tree in a field has the commonplace about it, the evidence is on a more human scale. There was a real tree, chopped down by real people, in a field with a name. It was important for the legend. Such things can be the reason stories prevail. Yet here was a strange instance of that rule because the yew did not ensure the survival of the legend by providing a regular, visible reminder of that story, since on the very day it became part of that story someone removed it from the landscape. It was an artefact, both in the sense that its significance lay in the workmanship of the woodcutters and in the sense that its place in the story was a remnant of the storytelling process. In spite of this, it undoubtedly helped to perpetuate the tale and did so largely thanks to Wigram’s rhetorical device.

The Shonks legend had the moat named for him and a mysterious tomb, and now it had a magical tree on the edge of Great Pepsells field as well.

5

Field names and Folk-lore are naturally classed together; both alike speak to us of the lives and customs of our forefathers; of creeds and cults, long since abandoned, but still surviving, though unrecognised, to these modern days.

—U. B. Chisenhale-Marsh, 1906

In the late 1930s, the English Place-Name Society asked schoolchildren to save the names of England’s fields before they were lost and forgotten for ever. In the fourteenth year of her forty-four-year reign as headmistress of Furneux Pelham School, Miss Evelyn Prior heard the call to arms and sent her pupils out to interview the farmers and field hands. The parish magazine for March 1937 records that: ‘With the aid of the school children and an Ordnance map and a few other helpers, and at the request of the County Council, Miss Prior, the headmistress of our school has drawn up a list of the names of all the fields of the parish.’

Did they find Great and Little Pepsells?

These names situate the yew in the real world, and evoke a bygone landscape. As with tithe customs, field names once again bring us into the territory of collective memories and tradition. The folklore collector Charlotte Burne said that all such ‘trifling relics’ were important for the study of social history: local sayings, rhymes, even the bell-jingles (the words that the different peals of church bells are supposed to ‘say’). ‘They reflect the rural life of past generations, with its anxieties, its trivialities, its intimate familiarity with Nature, and its strong local preoccupations.’ They helped make us what we are.

In Reverend Wigram’s day, the countryside was not numbered by bureaucrats but named by, and for, the people who worked it. Our landscapes and sense of the spaces around us were richer and more highly developed than today, or at least that is what the names would suggest. Today field names can help us recover that landscape from the blandscapes of modernity and to see our world with fresh eyes. Every parcel of cultivated land in the country had a name – more often than not one that can tell us something interesting about the land and put us in touch with the past.

It has been said that place names are linguistic fossils containing within them extinct words; they are often dense with information. They carry echoes of the dead, how they worked the land, their hopes and struggles, and the stories they told each other.

In many places, the fields themselves have disappeared. The London Borough of Ealing is not somewhere you naturally associate with the countryside, but it is the subject of the first of the English Place-Name Society’s series of Field-Name Studies written in 1976. Here beneath the pavements and Victorian villas are forgotten pastures that remember the names of local men known to have been on an early fourteenth-century list of the local militia. Other names will tell you where those men and their descendants built a dovecote, a menagerie, or ice house, where they quarried clay, farmed rabbits, or struggled to make crops grow in a stony field.

John Field, the aptly named historian and taxonomist of English field names, arranged them into useful categories. There are names that describe the shape of a field (Harps), its wild plants (Cockerels), the productivity of the land (Smallops), or long-lost buildings (Duffers). Its size (Pightle or Thousand Acres), how it was farmed (Lammas Meadow), and industrial uses (Brick Kiln Meadow). He came up with twenty-six types in all.

The meanings, as you have probably noticed, are not always self-explanatory, although Harps is easy: it should be a triangular-shaped field. Cockerels on the other hand is a false friend. Field names can morph in a process that gradually transforms a strange-sounding word into something familiar that seems to fit – philologists call this ‘popular etymology’. So Cockerels was originally Cocklers – from the weed corn cockle – and nothing to do with male chickens. Similar forces tinker with our folk tales and our urban myths, and in such ways dragons are sometimes born and giants set free to stalk the land. A well-known instance of popular etymology is Gravesend; there is one in Kent and another on the border of the Pelhams, and no doubt elsewhere. A friend told me recently that the local Gravesend was named for the plague victims who were buried there in the seventeenth century; she suspected this because Gravesend in Kent was apparently so-called because the London dead were washed down the Thames and ended up there, where they were buried. It is a good story, but a quick check of the place-name dictionaries tells us that both places were so-called centuries before the plague, before the Black Death even, and probably owed their monikers to local landowners called Graves.

Some field names have simply become mumbles of the original: how does Smallops tell us about the productivity of the land? For Smallops read Small Hopes. The meaning of Duffers has also been submerged in the argot of the agricultural labourer. For Duffers read Dovecote. Other names are made from obsolete words: a pightle is a small field, while a croat or croft is a small piece of land often attached to a house and usually enclosed. Thousand Acres is, of course, usually a very small field. If we ask why Lammas Meadow tells us something about how a field was farmed we can find an answer rich with history between Lamb Pits and Lamp Acre: ‘“Meadow lands used for grazing after 1 August”. The hay harvest occupied the time between 24 June and Lammas, when the fences were removed and the reapers turned their attention to the corn. The cattle were meanwhile allowed to graze on the aftermath. Loaves made from the new wheat were taken to the church at this time for a blessing and a thanksgiving – hence the name hlāfmæsse, “loaf festival”.’

Sometimes the name is the only surface remnant of a field’s claim to fame. There is no brick kiln to be seen in Brick Kiln Mead. Names can also help identify mysterious features still visible in the landscape. Aerial photographs reveal two circular mounds in a large field – ancient burial mounds perhaps? It is more likely they are remnants of a medieval coney, or rabbit, farm because it is remembered as The Warren. Other commonplaces of the medieval past live on only in the name: in the south-east corner of Furneux Pelham is Woolpits, which perhaps means ‘land near a wolf pit’. Although others have argued that rumours of wolves, like those of dragons, might just as easily refer to metaphorical beasts.

Field names remind me of Entish, the language of Tolkien’s giant tree shepherds, in which ‘real names tell you the story of the things they belong to’, but words in Entish were impossibly long agglomerations of meaning, so I suppose field names are in some ways the opposite: they contain much in a very small space, like poetry. Treebeard, the leader of the Ents declares that hill is ‘a hasty word for a thing that has stood here ever since this part of the world was shaped’, but Margaret Gelling counted some forty different words for a hill in Old English; after all, the Saxons needed to know one type of hill from the other when giving directions. The word hill may be lost somewhere in the name of the fields we are hunting for: Pepsells. The name is not in the field-name dictionaries, but some forty miles away, on the Bedfordshire border, there is a Pepsal End Farm with various spellings recorded, including in 1564 ‘Pepsel’. The meaning is ‘Pyppe’s Hill’ from the Anglo-Saxon personal name Pyppa, suggesting a very venerable field name indeed. Did Pyppa till the earth with Payn of Paynards – perhaps the oldest surviving field name in those parts – and with Peola, who gave his name to Pelham in the early days of the Anglo-Saxon migration? It is fun to think so, but it does not help us find the field we are looking for, a field where some once thought a dragon took up residence.

The schoolchildren did a wonderful job of collecting the names for Miss Prior and posterity. Across Hertfordshire as a whole, the operation was a great success. Two luminaries of the English Place-Name Society, Allen Mawer and Sir Frank Stenton, wrote: ‘We have been able in this county, possibly with more success than in any other that we have hitherto attempted, to get a lively picture of the field-names as they still survive and through the help of the schoolmasters and mistresses and their scholars we have again and again been able to obtain information which has been invaluable in throwing light upon the history of these names.’

The procedure was copied all over England and some of the information was used in lists in the early county volumes. The complete lists and maps were safely stored at University College London; safe until disaster struck in September 1940 when bombs fell from the sky. All the records were destroyed and the small number of names not already in print were lost along with their locations.

Fortunately, there are maps of Brent and Furneux Pelham rolled up in the Furneux church chest that are almost certainly the result of Miss Prior’s exertions. They are brittle and yellow: the parish boundary in red; the roads and woodland in green; the river, the field boundaries and their names marked in dark blue ink. The crossings-out, illegible pencil notes and childlike handwriting add to their charm.

Carefully unrolling the maps for the first time, I eagerly skimmed them in search of Pepsells, but could not see the name. I worked systematically from field to field following the names from Furneux Pelham church through Alldick and Little Pasture to the field boundary between Shooting Hills and Brick Kiln Meadow. I kept the pond on my left through Copy and skirted the ruins in Johns Pelham Park, emerging in Long Croat. Into Brent Pelham through St Patricks Hill, Chalky Field and Broadley Shot, my eye passed over 300 distinct field names: poetry like Moat Duffers, Malting Meadow and Mile Post Field, Ashey and Dumplings and Hitch. There were meads and leys, crofts, croats, pightles, springs and shots. Pepsells, great or small, was nowhere. Looking at that map for the first time, I began to entertain an idea that had not even occurred to me until that moment: what if Woolmore Wigram had just made the whole thing up? Maybe there never were a Great and Little Pepsells, no credulous labourers, no venerable yew set with a stile, not even a dragon’s lair.

6

It is distinctly remembered by the old inhabitants of these parishes that at the time the boundaries used to be trod a great deal of amusement was occasioned by the party always dragging with a rope one man through the ponds situated upon the heath.

—Thomas Bray, Meresman for Furneux Pelham

—John Cork, Meresman and Overseer of Albury Ordnance Survey Boundary Remark Book, 1875

In my mind’s eye I can see Major Barclay, tall and rangy, with very fine wind-blown hair, standing up to his knees in flood water one summer morning, trying to unblock the ditches on the Roman road by Chamberlains Moat and recalling the number of oyster shells found there when it was last dredged; on the tile-strewn platform at St John’s Pelham Moat on a summer’s evening explaining how a boy who went to his school started the First World War by insulting the Kaiser; or on Shonks’ Moat, leaning against an old oak tree which he calls Shonks: ‘There’s him himself,’ he says smiling. ‘He’s impressive close up, isn’t he?’

Ted Barclay has been fascinated by Shonks since his childhood when his grandfather Maurice told him stories about the hero. He is the current custodian of Beeches Manor and of all the Brent Pelham moats. In fact, he has owned much of Brent Pelham since the 1860s, or rather his family has, but Ted has the totally disarming habit of talking about the distant past as if recalling his own part in it. Casting his mind back perhaps to the day in 1905 when his great-grandfather played host to W. B. Gerish and the East Hertfordshire Archaeological Society, playing the immortal Comte de St Germain: ‘Hmmm. I told Shonks to stay at home that day there were dragons abroad.’

On the mezzanine stairs in his library are carvings taken from a staircase that was originally made for Brent Pelham Hall in the late seventeenth century. On the inside of the balusters, the head of Shonks’ dragon snarls with sabretooth fangs; on the outside, it bares its teeth in a demonic grin, breathing flames of foliage – opposites that nicely reflect the Barclays’ longstanding relationship to the story, which is both tongue-in-cheek and entirely in earnest. Ted’s father, Captain Charles Barclay, adopted a stray Irish wolfhound in the 1960s, which was promptly named Shonks. The three-foot-high beast proceeded to menace the neighbourhood, chasing cars, stealing food from kitchens and pulling clothes from washing lines, earning him immortality in Frank Sheardown’s book, The Working Longdog, in which Shonks the Dog’s most notorious exploit was to remove a dish of rice pudding from inside an oven: ‘How he did it, no one was able to tell, but did it he did and duly delivered the empty pot back home.’ The stuff of village legend.

The library is a recent addition to Beeches. The house was built in the seventeenth century and is dominated by nine exceedingly tall octagonal chimneys, with windows set in the stacks at the gable ends. The west wing is oddly stunted in contrast to the east, because six rooms were haunted and had to be demolished.

Ted pulled a small slipcase from the shelves and unfolded an old cloth-backed 25-inch Ordnance Survey map onto the carpet. It had been coloured and annotated over the years to show the extent of the Barclays’ Brent Pelham estate. Joseph Gurney Barclay, the banker and prominent Quaker, bought the manor of Brent Pelham in the middle of the nineteenth century and over time the family expanded their holdings, so the Barclays owned a fair portion of farmland in Furneux Pelham too. Surveying his domain, Ted traced a long finger across fields, across Nether Rackets, High Field and Lady Pightle.

He was looking for dragons and eventually tapped his finger on an irregularly shaped field defined by two blocks of ancient woodland: Great Hormead Park at the south-western corner and Patricks Wood on the eastern edge. It was labelled St Patricks Hill on the 1930s school map, but Ted was sure: this was Great Pepsells. After all, the land had been part of the Barclay estate for over a hundred years. It is in Furneux Pelham, bounded by Brent Pelham to the east and Great Hormead to the west.

If Ted was right, Woolmore Wigram may well have been telling the truth after all. There was certainly plenty of room for a dragon’s lair in the field, one of the largest in the Pelhams. Ted recalled that it had been the longest run of the steam plough, and during the Second World War the farmers filled it with old machinery to stop enemy planes landing. (Patricks Wood still concealed the rusting carcasses.)

Just so there could be no doubt, Ted produced an old notebook marked: Fields in Brent and Furneux Pelham: Owner-Occupiers-Area 1784. It was an eighteenth-century tithe book that had once belonged to a Robert Comyns, and inked into the columns of the first page were the fields owned by the Lord of the Manor in Furneux. There was no Great or Little Pepsells, but there were Pipsels and Pepsels in company with Nether Rackets, High Field and Lady Pightle, locating them just where Ted said they ought to be.

Great Pepsells was not the only field I discovered that day in Beeches. Next to the library in the old gunroom, hung a Victorian copy of ‘The Field of Cloth of Gold’. The original print was once famous for its vastness and for the man-hours expended to make it cover twelve square feet of plaster with so many tents and Tudor courtiers. Completed in 1773, it was the largest print ever made. The painter Edward Edwards spent 160 days at Windsor Castle copying the original oil for James Basire the Elder, who then took another two years to engrave the copper plate. Four hundred copies were pressed onto bespoke sheets of paper made for the occasion by the great paper-maker James Whatman in a sheet-size still known as Antiquarian. It was a print as ambitious as the event it commemorated.

It depicts the extraordinary pageant held in June 1520 when Henry VIII and the French King Francis I tried to outdo each other for excess and machismo in the Pale of Calais. Here was an endlessly diverting blend of historical detail, make-believe and mythmaking. Here were hundreds of richly costumed courtiers and halberdiers parading through a Barnum and Bailey landscape constructed specially for the occasion. The two larger-than-life kings embrace in a Big Top as knights gallop through the lists behind them, and men drink claret from fountains.

The Society of Antiquaries valued such paintings as historical documents, and scholars tried to tease out the factual from the fabulous – no easy task when the facts were so extraordinary anyway and the fabulous might symbolise much that was real. Take the statues of the three dragon-slayers on Henry’s extraordinary temporary palace. The showy Renaissance edifice was richly decorated with figures, but when Sydney Anglo published a detailed examination of the painting in the 1960s, he ruled that the dragon-slayers were figments of the painter’s imagination.

Another, much larger dragon, a magnificent, bearded wyvern, is painted in the sky above Calais. Whereas it is uncertain whether the painter portrayed the dragons on the gate accurately, presumably we can say with some confidence that there was no real dragon at the event, although chroniclers did write of one screaming through the sky above the crowd as Cardinal Wolsey sang the Corpus Christi mass. Historians cannot agree what this was. Some say that there was a ‘Flying Dragon’ firework display, others that it was perhaps a kite in the shape of a salamander released prematurely during the service. Whatever it was, it must have been a strange omen to some sixteenth-century minds. Today, the airborne dragon stands for the spirit of the piece: the myth and history, the real and the make-believe side by side. It stands as a cipher for all the fabulous but true features of the occasion, because ambitious as the painting and its print are, they cannot hold a torch to the real event.

There were not hundreds of soldiers, gentry and nobility, but over ten thousand. Their clothes were so fine that one French eyewitness said noblemen were walking around with their estates on their back because they had mortgaged their lands to finance the cloth. The temporary palace contained five thousand square feet of the finest glass ever made. A fountain ran with claret, but if you preferred beer, the English had brought 14,000 gallons with them – presumably to wash down their other rations: 9,000 plaice, 8,000 whiting, 4,000 sole, 3,000 crayfish, 700 conger eels, 300 oxen, 2,000 chickens, 1,200 capons, 2,000 sheep and over 300 heron. As Melvyn Bragg said when his BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time tackled the occasion, ‘The fun is in the detail.’ And that great dragon in the sky stands for the detail that the picture, for all its intricacy, can only hint at.

Encountering that print during my quest for Great Pepsells was serendipitous: with its associations, its mysteries, its vivid historical detail, its poetic licence, its riddles, its unwitting challenge to find out just how much history it contained, and, of course, its dragons.

7

It is not down in any map; true places never are.

—Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851

Ancient yews stand few and far between. Did one really straddle the boundary of Great and Little Pepsells until the early nineteenth century? A four-foot by three-foot oblong of greying parchment lies unfolded on the chart table at the Hertfordshire Archives, held flat by weighted leather snakes to reveal a jigsaw puzzle of Furneux Pelham’s fields. The 1836 Act of Parliament that did away with tithes had the wonderful side effect of creating remarkable encyclopedic maps and surveys, covering some 80 per cent of English parishes. Every field within the parish bounds is there, numbered and surveyed at six chains, or 132 yards, to every inch, some enclosed shortly before the map was made, neat and geometrical, others with edges softened by time and use, squashed polygons, their boundaries meandering and dog-legged to attest to their antiquity. The odd large field bears a dotted line intersected by S-marks to tie fields together that were not then enclosed, but considered separate. Thin yellow roads run east to west and north to south partitioning the village. Along them, in two or three places, buildings cluster in plan: red for homes and grey for all the others, the church indicated by a cross, the windmill a small crude X on a stick. There are avenues of trees, blocks of woodland, ponds and the River Ash roughly bisecting the map.

It was surveyed a hundred years before Miss Prior’s school map, and whereas her students had found some 300 field names, the tithe maps for Brent and Furneux Pelham list over 400. Some names had swapped fields over time: Handpost Field is on the other side of the road – perhaps the handpost moved, or more likely the children or the surveyors made a mistake. Many changed their names, becoming more poetic, like Moat Duffers, which was originally Dove House Field, or less so, like Violets Meadow, which was once the much lovelier Fylets. The field identified as Great Pepsells by Ted Barclay, but St Patricks Hill by the school map, is five separate fields on the tithe: ancient enclosures amalgamated by Victorian landowners. On the western boundary, no. 7 is simply Spring, and no. 8 the self-explanatory eleven-acre field called Ten Acres. On the eastern edge is no. 10 Wood Field, and part of no. 12, the delightful Lady Pightle. There, in the middle, is no. 9, Pepsels and directly to the north is field no. 5, known then as Pipsels Mead.

Strikingly, a track is marked on the tithe map crossing the intersection of Pepsels, Nether Rackets, Pipsels Mead and Ten Acres fields. This track might have passed straight through the stile in the yew tree. The track – a tunnel of dashed lines on the map – goes no further, as if it led to something no longer there. The countryside is marked with these strange paths to nowhere, or rather paths to the past.

The good Reverend Wigram had not made up the names of Great and Little Pepsells after all, so perhaps no one had invented the tree either. The boundary between them was a real place and you could visit it still. There may even be something in the rest of the tale, if once again we allow the logic of that rustic who would not have believed a word of Shonks’ tale if he hadn’t seen the place in the wall with his own eyes. There was certainly a field, so we might as well believe that there was a tree, but what was an ancient yew of all trees doing growing there astride a track in the middle of nowhere?

A single yew alone outside a churchyard is a great rarity – with or without a dragon’s lair. Of the 311 ancient yews known in Britain, very few are not – and have never been – associated with a known church or religious site, and an ancient yew growing anywhere at all is an unfamiliar sight in the countryside around the Pelhams: there are none in Cambridgeshire, Essex or Bedfordshire, and just two surviving ancient yews known in Hertfordshire – both in churchyards. There are a further seven veteran yews in the county – that is trees between 500 and 1,200 years old according to the latest classification by the Ancient Yew Group – but they are all linked to a church.

The nearest non-churchyard yew is a lone veteran growing in Hatfield Forest some sixteen miles away. Although Oliver Rackham insisted that it was only 230 years old, ‘and should be remembered by anyone who supposes that big yews must always be of fabulous age’. Recent analysis by an arborist suggests that the tree is much older and has a smaller circumference than you’d expect because it has spent much of its life in the shade. Perched on the edge of the decoy lake, sloughing off the bark of its many-corded bole, it conceals the mysterious cavities of ancient yew. Its existence gives us some confidence that our yew is within the geographical distribution of these curious trees.

Nearer to the Pelhams, a remarkable specimen lingers in the churchyard of St James the Great, in Thorley, near Bishop’s Stortford. Ringed by precarious gravestones, the main trunk appears to be made from many closely packed smaller trunks, like the product of black fairy magic, an impenetrable palisade of thick stakes imprisoning some secret. A terrible secret: the tree has been hollowed out by arson, its innards gone, and what remains is dreadfully tormented and charcoaled. Yet still it lives and grows and puts out new leaves. Yews are extraordinary trees. In the church is a certificate, from when the Conservation Foundation ran its Yew Tree Campaign in the 1980s, attesting that the tree is 1,000 years old. Ancient yews are now defined as those over 800 years old, with no upper age limit, but determining the age of yews is about as controversial as botany gets. Tim Hills of the Ancient Yew Group writes that the science has moved on a lot since those certificates were awarded based on the ideas of Allen Meredith in his influential The Sacred Yew. Regardless of its age, the yew at Thorley is rightly something to be revered.

Robert Blair in his eighteenth-century poem ‘The Grave’ calls the yew a cheerless, unsocial plant that loves to spend its time in the midst of skulls and coffins. Illustrating the poem, William Blake depicted the tree’s only merriment as ghosts and shades performing their mystic dance around the trunk under a wan moon, but in his watercolour the tree is at the centre, it is evergreen and blue, not dull, but bright in contrast to the pale spectres encircling it; a tree, like the burned-out Thorley yew, that defies death.

There are many theories as to why yews are found in churchyards, ranging from the prosaic (useful shelter from the storm) to the poetic (yews were symbolic of the journey to the underworld). The church guidebook to St James the Great lists other reasons: as a symbol of immortality, to stop villagers allowing their cattle to stray into the graveyard (its leaves are poisonous), or because Edward I decreed that yews be planted to protect churches from storms. Wherever they grow, it is generally assumed that their siting has some significance, if only because they must have been preserved from the needs of longbow production for some special reason (by the late sixteenth century, Europe had been almost completely denuded of yew wood). Although others have argued that they were planted in churchyards precisely because they were needed for longbow production and they would be protected from livestock. John Brand, the eighteenth-century compiler of superstitions thought this was nonsense, approving instead of Sir Thomas Browne’s conjecture ‘that the planting of yew trees, in Churchyards, seems to derive its origin from the ancient funeral rites, in which, from its perpetual verdure, it was used as an emblem of the resurrection’. Yews are not accidental trees, they mark things, they remember things: wells or springs, boundaries, lost settlements, meeting places, pagan religious sites or perhaps even the burial places of people who dropped dead along a pilgrimage route. What did the Pelham tree mark on its lonely boundary between two fields?

Was it originally planted to mark the site of an early Christian saint’s cells? In about 940 the Welsh King Hywel Dda threatened a fine of sixty sheep for felling yews associated with saints. Or did people gather around the yew long ago? Surviving lone trees may have been moot trees – meeting trees – like the Ankerwycke Yew at Runnymede where King John might have signed Magna Carta, and Henry VIII was said to have met Anne Boleyn for the first time. From Anglo-Saxon times until the modern period many southern and Midlands counties were divided into Hundreds, which took their names from the original moots or meeting places of the Hundred Court. Such places were often marked by a significant tree or stone. The Pelhams were in the Edwinstree Hundred – literally Edwin’s Tree – and early records indicate that the meeting place was somewhere in the Pelhams. Place-name historians have guessed that Meeting Field housed the tree, although that name appears for the first time in the late nineteenth century. Great Pepsells was much closer to the centre of the Hundred, bounded by three parishes and fed by ancient paths and trackways. Was Edwin’s Tree a venerable old yew? One early medieval source links Edwin’s Tree to woodland, and woodland may hide the reason for a lone Hertfordshire yew and that track to nowhere.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, villagers across Essex and Hertfordshire were warned not to be startled by strange lights on the horizon. The engineers of the Ordnance Survey were at large, hauling Ramsden’s immense horse-drawn theodolite from village to village, along with their 100-foot steel chains, twenty-foot high white flags, and their brand-new draught-proof white lights. This was the earliest of the surveys made some eighty years before the large-scale 25-inch with its individual trees. The maps would be plotted at just 1 inch to the mile, but it was a revolution in cartography.

There are remarkable preliminary pencil drawings, made at a larger scale than the published sheets. The fields seem to stand out from the paper in relief, like anatomical specimens in cross section, finely hachured to look more like a coral reef than rural Hertfordshire. Zoom in and the map covering Great Pepsells is heavily shadowed as if seen through storm clouds, the gathering clouds of the Peninsular War perhaps, which hurried the surveyor’s hand. The field boundaries, which would disappear from the published version, are clearly drawn in, and the house and settlements picked out brightly in red ink. Right in the centre of the drawing between the little red dots labelled Johns Pelham and Lily End is Hormead Park Wood, the woodland that adjoins the south-west corner of Great Pepsells. But it is much larger on the 1 inch than it is today. Instead of the tidy rectangle of later maps, the wood meanders across the fields of Furneux Pelham drawing a shape far more typical of an original ancient woodland boundary.

But were these early small-scale maps accurate? They were surveyed in two parts. First the large-scale trigonometry was completed, and then a second survey filled in the resulting triangles with fields and roads, rivers and hills: this was the interior or topographical survey. Map historians write that the very first OS sheets of Kent had been plotted at the end of the eighteenth century to the exacting standards of the pioneering military map-maker William Roy, who insisted that ‘The boundaries of forests, woods, heaths, commons or morasses, are to be distinctly surveyed, and in the enclosed part of the country at the hedge, and other boundaries of fields are to be carefully laid down.’ It was a slow and expensive process, so when they came to do Essex, the chief surveyors were told to make it faster and cheaper, but in the end they only sacrificed the exact shape of fields. So while the 1804 sheets might not be as detailed as the later large-scale maps, it was a proper military survey, and the towns, villages, rivers and hills were plotted accurately. As were the woods, because they could provide cover for ambushes – a French invasion was still feared when the surveyors were at work.

Assured of the map’s accuracy, I laid a copy over later maps, and found that where a finger of the wood points to its northernmost edge, it precisely matches the shape of the boundary between Great and Little Pepsells. (I use italics in an effort to convey the excitement I felt at this discovery. It was as if I had unearthed a fragment of an ancient cuneiform clay tablet and found it joined up perfectly with another found years before to reveal the location of Noah’s ark.) Was it an echo of the northernmost tree-line of Great Hormead Park Wood? Did an ancient yew tree once mark this boundary? Yews, as well as other trees, had been used as meres or boundary markers since Anglo-Saxon times. And there was that telltale path that the yew had straddled, hence the stile in its split trunk, a path terminating at a tree that is no longer there.

There is a later map, one of the last private county maps made before the OS swept all before it: Mr Bryant’s 1822 map reveals that sometime between then and the start of the century, the section of Hormead Park projecting into Furneux Pelham was grubbed up, or, in the terms of the Lord of the Manor’s tenancy agreement for the land, the timber was felled, cut down, stocked up, peeled, hewn, sawn, worked out, made up and carried away. Why was the Yew left untouched?

The same military zeal that saw the birth of the Ordnance Survey saw the felling of thousands of trees not for timber for ships or for the war effort as is sometimes said, but simply because corn prices went through the roof. The militaristic language used to describe the campaigns against Napoleon were used to describe the agricultural revolution against the inefficient use of land. ‘Let us not be satisfied with the liberation of Egypt or the subjugation of Malta,’ wrote the first President of the Board of Agriculture, in 1803. ‘Let us subdue Finchley Common; let us conquer Hounslow Heath, let us compel Epping Forest to submit to the yoke of improvement.’

The transformation of the ancient clay or heavy-lands of Eastern England from medieval bullock fattening into intensive arable is now recognised as one of the key stages of the agricultural revolution. Arable land in the Pelhams increased by 130 acres in the half-century after 1784, but pasture fell by only three. It was woodland and hedgerow that gave way to the plough. Hertfordshire was one of the counties with the least waste – or uncultivated land – as so much of it had already been enclosed and cultivated in the Middle Ages; little wonder then that farmers were grubbing up trees and not just scrub when corn prices were so high. ‘What immense quantities of timber have fallen before the axe and mattock to make way for corn,’ wrote one observer in 1801.

If you are felling and grubbing up fifteen acres of trees, felling them by hand and digging up the roots, when you get to an ancient yew, perhaps some thirty foot or more in circumference, magnificent and stately and – more importantly – notoriously hard to chop down, you might well leave it standing, along with its stile that allowed people on the track from the north to clamber into the woodland.

It was not only a mere but also a shelter. The presence of these evergreens in churchyards and elsewhere is often said to be because of the shelter they offer. Deer have been spotted sheltering under a yew at Ashridge Park, in Hertfordshire, and there are yews on the banks of John of Gaunt’s deer park at King’s Somborne, probably dating from when the deer park was set out in the thirteenth century. Of course, they can shelter more than game. An ancient yew at Leeds Castle in Kent was lived in by gypsies in 1833, and the hollow Boarhunt yew in Hampshire reputedly housed a family for a whole winter.

‘I know of no part of England more beautiful in its stile than Hertfordshire,’ wrote Sir John Parnell in 1769. Here the ancient fields were bordered by ancient hedgerows that were practically small strips of woodland. In an 1837 article lamenting the fall of an ancient yew in a hurricane, one eulogist wrote: ‘There are few objects of nature presenting more real interest to the mind, or richer points of beauty to the eye, than a noble aged tree; and at times these glories of the forest become associated, either from intrinsic character or local situation, with our best and purest feelings.’ We know that folk, and not just poets, loved trees. In Matilda Betham-Edwards’ novel about rural Suffolk in the 1840s, The Lord of the Harvest, Kara Sage the wife of the farm headman finds companionship in a magnificent elm. She ‘never tired of gazing at that ancient tree’. But we are told that in her love of nature she was ‘unlike her neighbours’. Still, she was not alone in literature: Thomas Hardy’s eponymous Woodlanders Marty South and Giles Winterborne were also said to be rare in their ‘level of intelligent intercourse with Nature’, when they knew by a glance at a trunk if a tree’s ‘heart were sound, or tainted with incipient decay; and by the state of its upper twigs the stratum that had been reached by its roots’.

Even if we doubt that in such a practical age someone left the tree standing simply for its grandeur, we cannot doubt the effect such a tree might have had on the superstitious – that fear may have stopped their axes. At Old Oswestry Hillfort in Shropshire, the countryside has been stripped of trees except for a single old yew. ‘It was probably spared because of a superstition about felling yews or because yews are very hard and so difficult to fell,’ suggests one Shropshire natural historian. In his 1896 article ‘Folk-Lore in Essex and Herts’, U. B. Chisenhale-Marsh wrote that ‘All about our own neighbourhood it is very customary, in clipping hedges, to leave small bushes or twigs standing at intervals, originally, no doubt, to keep away the evil spirits, or as propitiation to those that were cut away.’ What better way to appease the spirits of the vanished woodland than to leave them the sanctuary of an ancient yew, to watch, and wait, and guard the secret at its roots for a few years more?

8

Many writers at different times have engaged passionately by proxy in the fairy world. Most of the accounts of encounters in fairyland report incidents and adventures that occurred to someone else. This is the terrain of anecdote, ghost sightings, and old wives’ tales, of oral tradition, hearsay, superstition, and shaggy dog stories: once upon a time and far away among another people …

—Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time, 2014

‘Except for their gravestones and their children, they left nothing identifiable behind them,’ wrote historians George Rudé and Eric Hobsbawm of the nineteenth-century agricultural labourer, ‘for the marvellous surface of the British landscape, the work of their ploughs, spades and shears and the beasts they looked after bears no signature or mark such as the masons left on cathedrals.’ They are right that the traces are few, but the fields themselves carried names and sometimes they were the names of men who had worked them and, if the land bore names, so I expect did the men’s tools, their initials cut plainly into hafts alongside the initials of their fathers who swung them at other trees on other mornings. Did the yew tree itself also bear their names? One historian has noted that boundary trees ‘were deeply scored with carved and ever enlarging parish initials, from which the ivy was regularly stripped’. Did local men carve their names into the trunk of the yew as plainly as they did into the stone window jambs and leadwork of the Pelham churches? Even if they did, the tree is long gone, the tools are lost, and the field names are slipping from memory. Where now can we find Master Lawrence the carpenter and the labourers who believed in dragons?

In October 1904 the Hertfordshire historian Robert Andrews went to Anstey, a village next to Brent Pelham, chasing the legend of a secret tunnel, a blind fiddler and the devil. ‘The tenant of the little house at Cave Gate near Anstey was digging upon the premises held by him and found that the tool he was using suddenly sunk into the ground almost throwing him down,’ wrote Andrews. This tenant was old Thomas Skinner and he had found the entrance to a tunnel in the chalk. Skinner was a carpenter who had ‘passed his early years in the near neighbourhood’ and had recently retired to Cave Gate, ‘where he can, if he chooses, smoke his pipe under one of the most magnificent trees in Hertfordshire’. Perhaps it was while sitting under this tree talking to his guest about local folklore that he mentioned that in his boyhood his family had taken loppings from an ancient yew tree felled on the boundary of Great Pepsells field.

This was a tantalising reference. Not only did it place the felling of the tree in Thomas Skinner’s boyhood in the 1830s – tallying with the map and other evidence – but the Skinner family were agricultural labourers who just happened to share a house in Brent Pelham with another labourer, Thomas Lawrence, the cousin of the carpenter William Lawrence whose sons would one day become Wigram’s parish clerks. I would never know for sure, and it did not really matter, but I was unlikely to do better than to send these men to fell the tree one winter’s day in 1834.

Like many agricultural labourers in the early nineteenth century, the Skinners awoke in a single room in a house shared with another family. There was scant light on a winter’s morning and a ceiling open to the rough rafters did little to keep the place warm. If a labourer’s wife were house-proud, he would take his breakfast sitting on a chair varnished with homemade beer, and there might be bread with dripping washed down with ‘tea’ (made from burned toast), or perhaps ‘coffee’ (made from burned toast). Many labourers spent half their week’s wages on bread, but could not settle the baker’s bill until they had killed their pig at the end of the year. These are the generalisations of the historian, but the 1830s were not a happy time for agricultural labourers, especially in the winter months when trees were traditionally felled. Winter was also the time for job creation schemes (or as the historians of the rural poor, the Hammonds, put it in their inimical and depressing way, ‘Degrading and repulsive work was invented for those whom the farmer would not or could not employ’). One economic historian has estimated that 17 per cent of agricultural labourers were out of work in winter in the early 1830s. They would get poor relief, but it also meant that labourers could find themselves shared out between farmers who would find them things to do. The winter of 1834 was particularly bad, because the harvest had failed. ‘I am fearful we shall experience much difficulty this Winter in finding employment for the Poor,’ wrote a prominent Essex land agent, in a letter to his client, insisting they must reduce the burden of tithe payments that year.

Across the country, and especially in the south, large numbers of agricultural labourers had been turned into paupers by a system that saw the rate-payers, who were also their employers, agree to pay or subsidise their wages through the poor rate. The money they took home each week was linked to the size of their family and the price of a loaf of bread. There were many variations to this system. In some villages, labourers were auctioned weekly to the highest bidders. One Nathan Driver explained to the Select Committee on the Poor Laws how things worked in Furneux Pelham. There were some ninety agricultural labourers in a parish of 2,500 acres, which according to Mr Driver meant there were eighteen labourers too many. The solution was to put the names of all ninety labourers in a hat and share them out between the farms in Furneux Pelham – according to their size – on a daily basis. The farmers would then have to find something for them to do – chopping down a tree, for example.

Twenty-five children were born in the Pelhams in 1834, to a thatcher, a shoemaker, two yeoman farmers and twenty-one agricultural labourers. At the beginning of the 1830s, 62 per cent of men over twenty in the three Pelhams were agricultural labourers, a little higher than the Hertfordshire average and nearly three times the national one. By then considerably more families earned their living in England from trade, manufacturing or handicrafts, than worked on the land, but still agricultural labourers made up the single largest occupation group – some 745,000 of them. Most of us have more agricultural labourers in our family tree than any other ancestors. ‘Agricultural labourer’ does not necessarily tell the whole story. In the column marked ‘Occupation’ on the 1841 Census, the enumerators would have written the diminutive ‘Ag Lab’ ad nauseam, so it is disappointing that they didn’t relieve the boredom by being more precise. Where were the ploughmen, the carters, the hedgers, the headmen, the woodcutters and the common taskers? It has been said that there were hierarchies among farm workers as intricate as that among the gentility.

It is impossible to consider this period without turning to the campaigning journalist and chronicler of the pains and pleasures of rural life William Cobbett. On one of his ‘rural rides’ around England in the 1820s he encountered a group of women labourers in ‘such an assemblage of rags as I never before saw’. And of labourers near Cricklade: ‘Their dwellings are little better than pig-beds and their looks indicate that their food is not nearly equal to that of a pig. Their wretched hovels are stuck upon little bits of ground on the road side … It seems as if they had been swept off the fields by a hurricane, and had dropped and found shelter under the banks on the road side! Yesterday morning was a sharp frost; and this had set the poor creatures to digging up their little plats of potatoes. In my whole life I never saw human wretchedness equal to this; no, not even amongst the free negroes in America.’

Accommodation for these people was notoriously bad: ‘The majority of the cottages that exist in rural parishes,’ wrote the Reverend James Fraser in the late 1860s, ‘are deficient in almost every requisite that should constitute a home for a Christian family in a civilized community.’

Labourers in the Pelhams were probably not living on roots and sorrel, nor had they – in the words of Lord Carnarvon – been reduced to a plight more abject than that of any race in Europe. Housing may also have been better than mud and straw hovels found elsewhere. Over forty new houses were built in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, which might suggest a benevolent land-owning class, but the population of the villages increased as well, so the ratio of families to houses barely changed. In the early 1830s, some 228 families shared 177 homes.

The Reverend Fraser disapproved of such cramped conditions, adding that, ‘it is impossible to exaggerate the ill effects of such a state of things in every aspect – physical, social, economical, moral, intellectual’. What did such an existence do to their minds? Did it make them more or less likely to see holes and think of dragons?

Reading contemporary accounts of agricultural labourers, we are told that they are not just ill-paid and ill-fed and ill-clothed but also unimaginative, ill-educated, ignorant, illogical and brutish. ‘They seem scarcely to know any other enjoyments than such as is common to them, and to the brute beasts which have no understanding … So very far are they below their fellow men in mental culture,’ wrote John Eddowes in his 1854 The Agricultural Labourer as He Really Is. This is the cruel stereotype that christened every Ag Lab ‘Hodge’ and gave him an awkward gait, ungainly manners, a slow wit and an indecipherable patois. Another observer described the limited horizons of such a labourer: ‘Like so many of his friends, he had never been out of a ten-mile radius; he had never even climbed to the top of yonder great round hill.’ And there were said to be rustics who lived within ten miles of the sea but had never seen it. They were ‘intellectual cataleptics’, interested only in food and shelter, according to one mid-century journalist.

In one of his characteristically oblique and brilliant studies, the historian Keith Snell set out to uncover whether this really was all that the labourer wanted by scouring letters home from emigrants. Several themes stood out. They valued their families, wanted to be free from the overseer of the poor, craved secure work and better treatment by those offering it, and they demonstrated a marked interest in their environment – in the land and the livestock.

This only tells us about those who could write, but it gets around the famous reticence of the labourer, the mysterious barrier of ‘Ay, ay’, ‘may be’, ‘likely enough’ that greeted any enquiry, and contemporary observers attributed to stupidity.

Labourers were not alone, their employers were not celebrated for their conversational skills: In his Professional Excursions around Hertfordshire published in 1843, the auctioneer Wolley Simpson gives a wonderful description of a farmer which reads like the children’s game where you have to avoid saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

Q. The Land you hold of the Marquis, is very good is it not Mr. Thornton?

A. It ai’nt bad Sir.

Q. The Timber I understand in this neigh-bourhood is very thriving.

A. Why I’ve seen worse Sir.

Q. You have an abundance of chalk too which is an advantage?

A. We don’t object to it Sir.

Q. You are likewise conveniently situated for markets?

A. Why we don’t complain Sir.

Q. You are plentifully supplied with fruit if I may judge from your Orchards?

A. Pretty middling for that Sir.

Q. Corn is at a fair price now for you?

A. It be’nt a bit too high Sir.

Q. The Canals must facilitate the convey-ance of produce considerably?

A. They are better than bad roads to be sure Sir.

And so on in the same vein. Simpson concludes that ‘evasion had become habitual, and I believe it to be a principle in rural education’.

Did village schools teach anything else besides?

The traditional way to measure literacy is to count the number of people who could sign their name on marriage licences and other documents. Although the method has its detractors, it is still a useful ready reckoner. In 1834, two marriages in the Pelhams involved agricultural labourers. All made their mark, with the exception of one witness, sixty-five-year-old Mary Bayford. This is not surprising as not all their employers could write: in the previous year the farmer and Vestry (local council) member John Hardy made his mark in the Overseers accounts.

There had been a charity school in Furneux Pelham since 1756 thanks to a bequest by the widow of the Reverend Charles Wheatly to provide a proper master to teach eight poor boys and girls to read and write. In an 1816 report to the parliamentary Select Committee somebody observed of the Pelhams: ‘The poor have not sufficient means of education; but the minister concludes they must be desirous of possessing them.’ By 1833, there was a schoolmaster and mistress looking after twenty-one boys and girls, but even with the existence of a school and the growing attendance figures, there were no guarantees that children would turn up regularly. In January 1854, the Hertfordshire school inspector wrote: ‘In country parishes boys are employed from three to five months in the year after the age of seven, and they are withdrawn from school altogether between ten and eleven. I believe that at present there are scarcely any children of agricultural labourers above that age in regular attendance at schools in my district.’

While the gentry endowed and managed the schools, their tenant farmers were less than enthusiastic, insisting that workers brought their children to the fields with them. Many, if not most, parents could not afford to forfeit the extra pennies the children would bring home. A survey of over 500 labouring families in East Anglia in the 1830s found that only about half the income of an average family came from the husband’s day-work. Nearly 80,000 children were permanently employed as agricultural labourers in the middle of the century. At least 5,500 of these were between the ages of five and nine. At harvest time classrooms would be empty.

They could be kept off at short notice for reasons that would baffle us, writes Pamela Horn: ‘Sometimes a strong wind would loose branches and twigs, and children would be kept from school to collect this additional winter firing.’ In the winter months, hard-pressed parents needed their children to earn extra money picking stones, rat-catching or beating for the squire’s shooting parties. These jobs not only kept them from the classroom, they provided them with little alternative stimulation. Common occupations such as bird scaring were an isolating and literally mind-numbing activity. Children would be on their own from dawn to dusk, because it was thought they wouldn’t work as hard if they had someone to talk to; as one chronicler of rural life in Norfolk observed, farmers thought that ‘One boy is a boy, two boys is half a boy, and three boys is no boys at all.’

If children did get past the classroom door, what did the schools teach them? The gentry might have been eager to do their duty and help provide an education to the agricultural workers, but their idea of what constituted that education was not ours. Needlework, cleaning and the catechism were often the extent of it. In the 1840s, girls were taught such rigorous academic subjects as the ‘art of getting up linen’ – but only as a reward if they showed good conduct and industry.

At the first school inspection of Furneux Pelham, in February 1845, seventy-one children turned up for the examination. There were nearly three times as many girls as boys, and just over half were older than ten. Twenty-four were, ‘Able to read a Verse in the Gospels without blundering’, twenty-six girls were ‘Working sums in the Simple Rules’, but only two boys; not one child had advanced to ‘Sums in the Compound Rules’ or the even loftier ‘Working Sums in Proportion and the Higher Rules’.

One school inspector a few years later lamented that children’s copy books rendered a dull study duller: ‘For of what use can it be to copy ten and twelve times over such crackjaw words as these: “Zumiologist”, “Xenodochium” …? Or such pompous moral phrases as “Study universal rectitude”?’

Pamela Horn gives examples of long-winded sums from the period designed perhaps to keep children occupied: ‘What will the thatching of the following stacks cost at 10 d. per square foot, the first was 36 feet by 27, the second 42 by 34, the third 38 by 24, and the fourth 47 by 39?’ The Hertfordshire diarist John Carrington set his son similar problems that might have proved useful to old Master Lawrence: ‘I desire to know how much timber there is in 24-foot long and 24-inches girt.’ Beneath the sum Carrington observed that a six-hundred-year-old oak fell down in Oxford in June 1789, ‘the girt of the oak was 21 feet 9 inches, height 71 feet 8 inches. Cubic contents 754 feet … luckily did no damage.’ Perhaps a functional education at least.

This is a picture of sorts, of the men who went to fell that tree, of their education – or lack of – their cares and their material circumstances. It does not get us very much closer to understanding why they thought they had found a dragon’s lair. Perhaps I am going about this back to front because the best way to get at the mental life of a nineteenth-century rural labourer is to take at face value the stories they told. The cultural historian Robert Darnton writes in his essay ‘Peasants Tell Tales’, that folk tales are one of the few points of entry into the mental world of peasants in the past, and the recurring motifs in early tales can shed light on the preoccupations of the people who told them – such as the tensions caused by the lack of food for all the family members and the preponderance of step-mothers with children of their own, in a world where it was fairly commonplace to lose a partner to illness or childbirth. While I have been asking what the life and education of an Ag Lab can tell us about the story, I might better have asked what the story can tell us about the life of an Ag Lab. They believed that dragons once lived in holes beneath yew trees. That may well be the most interesting thing we will ever know about them.

A postscript: I like to think that whatever happened that morning coloured the life of Thomas Skinner, that his encounter as a child with Piers Shonks and dragon’s holes gifted him a curious mind and a life in search of other hollow places. Writing in 1926, a local historian in Anstey recalled in passing an old Gentleman Skinner who had found the entrance to the Blind Fiddler’s tunnel and who ‘took the greatest interest in antiquarian researches’.

9

To break a branch was deemed a sin,

A bad-luck job for neighbours,

For fire, sickness, or the like

Would mar their honest labours.

—from a ballad written after the illicit felling of a tree in 1824

Master Lawrence and the others were walking into a story when they stepped out of their doors that still winter morning. Imagine the carpenter’s yard as a tree’s graveyard, boards and off-cuts and shavings of timber memorialising particular oaks or elms taken from woodland and hedgerows. Imagine gates and window frames that Lawrence remembered as branches, and entire cruck-frames that had once grown in Hormead Park Wood. ‘The quality of a tree was remembered to the last fragment after the bulk of the log had been used,’ wrote Walter Rose in The Village Carpenter. ‘In any carpenter’s yard there are piles of oddments – small pieces left over from many trees – but though they are all mixed up, it is usually remembered from which tree each piece was cut.’

Soon there would be loppings of a yew in Lawrence’s yard.

At that hour, women would be fetching water in buckets hanging from yokes, carters were securing the traces to horses while young boys baited them. Old timers might already be warming themselves at the furnace in James Funston’s Smithy. A man could speak freely there without being held to his word.

The track to the tree led south, following the boundary between Church Hill Field and Broadley Shot. Small children with chilblains hobble along in hard boots – off to pick flints or clean turnips. From the northern edge of Chalky Field it was little more than half a mile south and then west to Patricks Wood, and beyond the hornbeams lay Great and Little Pepsells where the labourers could set down their stoneware jars and their shovels and axes.

The spot was oddly remote. It is the landscape of M. R. James’s ghost story ‘A Neighbour’s Landmark’ that is one minute picturesque, the next, with the changing of the light, bleak, frightening and vulnerable to supernature. Imagine this spot on a grey winter’s morning setting your axe to a village landmark and the only building in view is the tower of the church within whose walls an ancient legend sleeps. Marked by a small triangle where three fields meet, hemmed by three parish boundaries and two dark blocks of woodland, it was the kind of place where gallows once stood, or gibbets swung – places where suicides and strangers were buried. Yews are known to have been used as hanging trees. Such knowledge might well have worked upon the minds of those men that morning. W. B. Gerish is good on this, writing of an older time, of the medieval winter when ‘The spirit world was abroad, riding in every gale, hiding in the early and late darkness of evening among the shadows of the farmhouse, of the rickyard, of the misty meadows, of the dark-some wood. Ghosts – we talk about ghosts, but our ancestors lived with them from All Hallows to Candlemas.’

R. M. Healey in his Shell Guide to Hertfordshire is generous about the countryside thereabouts, finding in it Samuel Palmer’s elegiac landscape paintings, better Palmer’s dark etchings from his final years after he had grown angry at the plight of the agricultural labourer.

In the right weather, the wrong weather, the view belongs in the old nurse’s tale that troubled Jane Eyre’s imagination, making her think of Thomas Bewick’s engraving of a ‘black horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows’. But so would many such views in England: the historian John Lowerson has written about the ‘popular sense of an eternal cosmic battle between good and evil that is being fought out in an essentially rural English context’. Our yew site is a place as good as any for such battles, for stories, for putting ideas in men’s heads about dragons and their slayers. Was it the place as much as the belief that a dragon once stalked those parts that would soon make them think they’d found a dragon’s lair?

Farm labourers worked from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the winter. Six shillings a week was a usual wage, but felling timber was paid by the load: one shilling for fifty cubic feet. You can do the working out. John Carrington’s oak we met in the last chapter would have earned them fifteen shillings. Was it blood money enough? Were they superstitious about their task that day? No doubt there were those who thought that chopping down a yew brought bad luck. Plant lore is thick with injunctions against bringing down trees. The folklorist Jeremy Harte, writing about the Isle of Man, tells of the seemingly lonely places where ‘locals know about the elder trees that should never be touched, not since the farmer hacked them back, and hanged himself in the barn that night’. But Harte is writing about fairies, and it is thorn trees and elders, not yews, that must be left alone. But a yew was also a sacred tree to many: ‘A bed in hell is prepared for him / Who cut the tree about thine ears.’ Did the men have sentiments similar to this final couplet from an old rhyme about the Yew Tree Well in Easter Ross, Scotland? A chill warning to those wielding an axe. The Yew of Ross in Ireland had to be prayed down by St Laserian because its wood was wanted, but no one dared fell it. Recall King Hywel Dda’s tenth-century prohibition on felling yews associated with saints. Do similar injunctions survive far and wide in the collective memory? When the Victorian archaeologist Augustus Pitt-Rivers removed an old yew from a prehistoric burial mound in Dorset, the locals were not happy, even though Pitt-Rivers said the tree was dead: ‘I afterwards learned that the people of the neighbourhood attached some interest to it, and it has since been replaced.’

John Aubrey relates the fate of the men who felled an oak in 1657 and in passing recalls the wife and son of an earl who died after he had an oak grove removed. These tales linger and still give pause for thought today to the sensitive and cautious: Harte writes, ‘When we find that the N18 from Limerick to Ennis curves to go around a fairy thorn, we admire the knowledge of Eddie Lenihan, who campaigned to save the tree, as well as the prudence of the County Surveyor who knew of the risk involved in damaging it.’

Still, the Lawrences and the Skinners had their work to do, and so they savaged the roots of the great tree. Specifically the roots, I think. There is an engraving by Turner in his Liber Studiorum called ‘Hedging and Ditching’. Two men are in a ditch in the ground fetching down a tree, not neatly chopping it down, but seeming to lever it out of the ground with pickaxes. A woman in a bonnet with a shawl over her shoulder walks by looking on. This is no rural idyll. The drawing has something in common with First World War art, with the pencil lines that suggest mud and stones, the thin leafless trees in the hedge, shredded of the fullness of trees. Grubbing up is an evocative expression. It is an unpleasant image, total and annihilating: trees torn violently from the soil. I think of Ted Hughes’ Whale-Wort torn out by the roots and flung into the sea when he just wanted to sleep. It is the slow deliberate painstaking act of men with hand tools. Those in Turner’s sketch might be doing hard labour; they look a bad lot, like pirates or smugglers – Turner was on the coast at East Sussex, so maybe they were.

Forget a neat V-shaped wedge incised with an axe prior to sawing. Dynamite and perhaps club hammers would make more sense than a copybook felling. An ancient yew with its hollows and split trunks and the irregular sprawl of its weary branches mocks the surgical approach. H. Rider Haggard, the author of the adventure stories She and King Solomon’s Mines, gives the best and most plausible description of how the tree was felled in his A Farmer’s Year: Being His Commonplace Book for 1898. He writes that there are two ways of felling a tree:

one the careless and slovenly chopping off of the tree above the level of the ground, the other its scientific ‘rooting’. In rooting at timber, the soil is first removed from about the foot of the bole with any suitable instrument till the great roots are discovered branching this way and that. Then the woodsmen begin upon these with their mattocks, which sink with a dull thud into the soft and sappy fibre.

This was known as grub-felling in East Anglia and was the common method for bringing down timber trees in that part of the country.

By Wigram’s account, Lawrence and the other men had an uncommon amount of trouble with those roots. Perhaps their hearts were not in it, or something held back the full strength of their axe strokes. Did one of them stroke the scaly bark that yews can slough off to get rid of infections? Did it rattle under their fingers and the sap begin to run blood red? Fred Hageneder in his Yew: A History tells us that the yew is the only European tree that can bleed red sap. A feat that is scientifically unexplained, he says. The yew at Nevern in Wales is notorious for bleeding the blood of those buried in its churchyard. A bleeding tree might have given those men – any men – second thoughts. Or did the texture of its bark look like scales from a picture book dragon? In Ulverton, his extraordinary record of a fictional village across time, Adam Thorpe channels an old carpenter in an inn in 1803 regaling a visitor with his memories. He recalls the time the master carpenter chose an oak by smell, seasoned it for two years, then made a lid for the church font. ‘Atween you an’ I, though, I can spot a dragon in them patterns. I reckons as how there were a dragon in that tree. He’ll avenge hisself one day.’ Is this a brilliant bit of invention or does Thorpe know of a folk tradition among carpenters about dragons in trees?

They kept at it, but the tree would not yield. Yet is thy root sincere, sound as the rock, / A quarry of stout spurs and knotted fangs, / Which crook’d into a thousand whimsies, clasp / The stubborn soil, and hold thee still erect.

Eventually, they took a break. ‘It was very hard work to get it down. The men had been at work all the morning, and went away to dinner,’ wrote Wigram. In one of his later letters he put the story into the mouth of a local: ‘They do say Sir, that the men could not get that yew Tree down. And at last they all went away to breakfast.’

It was an ’umbuggin job to remove such a tree. Why take so much effort to bring her down? Maybe someone wanted the timber. John Aubrey recalls the churchyard yew of his childhood in the 1630s, ‘a fair and spreading ewe-tree … The clarke lop’t it to make money of it to some bowyer or fletcher’. The lopping killed it.

Walter Rose gives us clues as to what would be going through a carpenter’s mind as he stood in front of the tree, writing that when his father looked at trees he saw what could be made of them: ‘In a stumpy butt, with large branches spreading off not far from the base, he would see four large gate posts, the spread of the branches to form the portion that would go into the ground.’ Another would be large enough to split down the centre and quarter-up for coffin boards, or for rails or the slats of a field gate. He might have been calculating how much useful timber was in the Pelham yew. How much marquetry. How many writing slopes or clock cases were latent in the bole. More likely, Lawrence was counting how many poles could be sold to bodgers for the bows and hoops of the Windsor chairs made in vast quantities back then, with the very best given backs of yew.

‘A post of yew will outlast a post of iron,’ noted one naturalist in the 1830s. The Furneux Pelham Smock mill was modernised in those years, perhaps the year the tree came down, after James Seabrook the Younger bought the mill from his father and paid off the mortgage on it. Yew was excellent wood for cogs and pins, and its branches would yield fine barrel hoops for the fledgling brewing enterprise at Furneux Pelham Hall. The wood’s waterproof qualities made it a favourite for buckets and palings. It had other uses besides, known to country folk: lengths of it were traditionally used for dowsing. It was also said that if you held a switch of yew in your hand while cursing your enemy they would not hear you.

No doubt some wanted the old tree down not because they valued its timber but simply because they did not want it in the landscape. They wanted it down, just as the doctor wanted rid of the elm in Hardy’s The Woodlanders, because it oppressed Marty South’s father as he lay on his deathbed. It is finally felled – by dead of night, but ‘Little good it did poor old South, who was dead the next day from the shock of the tree’s disappearance.’

The agricultural improvers detested the space taken up, and even the shadows cast, by hedgerow trees. Surprisingly to us, even those who loved the landscape may have wanted the old yew gone. Pollards, which often marked the boundaries of fields, were seen as ugly and had been under attack since the late eighteenth century – an old yew might be viewed with similar disdain by some. ‘Not only were outgrown hedges tamed and excess trees removed. In many places hedges were grubbed out altogether … The grubbing of hedges was especially common in the high farming period after c.1830,’ writes the historian of the East Anglian landscape Tom Williamson. Our tree was probably in the way of planting, or blocked a new drainage ditch. The Ancient Tree Forum publish a pamphlet for farmers on how to care for ancient and veteran trees. It contains a terrible map showing all the hedgerow trees that have disappeared from a single fifty-acre parcel in North Yorkshire since the middle of the nineteenth century, each standing tree a little green icon representing a surviving pollard or standard ash, beech, oak or sycamore. There are some fifty of them, but they are outnumbered nearly three to one by a mass of red ‘X’s in a circle representing a lost tree.

Little Pepsells was listed as pasture in 1837, and while it is unlikely that an old yew would ever drop enough leaves to poison stock, horses tied to yews have been known to die from grazing on them. Might the squire or his tenant farmer have taken a disliking to the tree for some such reason, or did they just need to invent winter work for men sent to them under the old Poor Laws? Remember that according to the Hammonds, ‘degrading and repulsive work was invented for those whom the farmer would not or could not employ’.

What we do know is that this was not the only yew that disappeared from the landscape in the early nineteenth century.

In 1848 one archaeological journal lamented that yews were ‘so reduced in number as to seem like the last of a once flourishing and noble race, mourning in their own decay over the magnificence of the past, and the desolation of the present’. In 1539, John Leland had counted thirty-nine yews at Strata Florida in Wales; they are the only ones he mentions in his famous itinerary around the British Isles. Three hundred years later, only three of the famous yews were still standing. There is an engraving and article from Gardener’s Chronicle in May 1874 with a description of the largest tree that is not unlike that of the Pelham yew in Wigram’s letter: it ‘was divided into two parts, leaving a passage through it, this was 22 ft in girth’. Beneath one of the three survivors was the traditional resting place of the fourteenth-century Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym. It too disappeared after 1874, possibly during an archaeological dig of the Cistercian abbey at the end of the nineteenth century.

It is loathsome to think that our tree was felled indifferently, because it was in the way, or to give unemployed labourers something to do to earn their gallon loaf, but whatever their reason, it had to come down. On their return from breakfast, the sight that greeted them must have been something of a surprise. Was their approach a cautious one? Where they had wrestled with the tree half an hour before, there was now a large hole, a cavern even, and the tree had fallen into it. ‘When they came back, that yew Tree had fallen down of itself; and when they looked, there was a girt hole right underneath it, underneath its roots, a girt cave like.’ This in the words of the rustic voice Wigram used in his final account to W. B. Gerish. His 1888 letter to the Hertfordshire Observer is less picturesque but more dramatic: ‘On his return [he] found that the old tree had fallen, collapsing into a large cavity underneath its roots.’

Until I read about grub felling, I simply could not understand how a half-felled tree had fallen into a hole, but if most of the roots had been severed and there was a cavity under the yew, it would have been suspended by a few stubborn roots that eventually surrendered their charge to the hollow in the earth. After visiting several ancient yews, I could believe that one might collapse in on itself. The weight distribution is uneven as the heart rots away leaving heavy outer trunks and branches, twisted and over-balanced as the branches trail along the ground. The roots, severed and weakened as they would have been by the men’s exertions, must have given way while they were at breakfast. At least that’s the explanation needed to understand the 1888 version in which the tree falls into a large hole. The later version could be interpreted differently: the tree simply fell over and left a large cavity where the roots had been, but surely these countrymen were used to the holes left by trees that came down in this way, and would not need a supernatural explanation for the cavity.

‘It’s not unknown for voids to develop under very old trees,’ wrote Wigram. It is certainly true that a cavern, or at least a hole, could have formed in the chalk under the shallow clay where the tree grew – it is not unusual for sink holes to form from erosion where the bedrock is limestone – and the weight of a tree no longer held steady by its roots could have brought in the ceiling of the cavity. It is not the only Pelham story of a cavity opening up in the chalk. Less than a mile to the east, on the other side of the Ash Valley, there is a tale recorded in the 1930s that the first church in the Pelhams was destroyed by Vikings or Pharisees (the local word for fairies) or, more prosaically, it collapsed into a hole that opened up beneath it.

She was down. ‘It is done,’ wrote Rider Haggard of another tree in another place.

A change has come over the landscape; the space that for generations has been filled with leafy branches is now white and empty air. I know of no more melancholy sight – indeed, to this day I detest seeing a tree felled; it always reminds me of the sudden and violent death of a man. I fancy it must be the age of timbers that inspires us with this respect and sympathy, which we do not feel for a sapling or a flower.

Ancient trees have personalities and attract stories; it is hard not to think that this was an event in the life of the village. A crowd must have gathered that morning, if not to watch the iniquitous act, then to see the cavity. We know the Skinner family kept loppings, which hints at the value of the highly prized wood. No doubt, other villagers kept pieces as well if they could – to make spoons and knife handles. Peter Kalm, an eighteenth-century Scandinavian traveller, left an account of a tree he saw chopped down in Hertfordshire, describing the surprising number of people on the scene, wanting the leaves and roots and twigs for fuel or to make baskets. I imagine a host of villagers turning up that day. Nothing of that prized wood would be wasted. John Aubrey’s fair and spreading ewe-tree furnished him and the other schoolboys with nutt-crackers and scoopes to pull the flesh out of their apples. These would make fine souvenirs from a dragon’s lair.

I have often wondered what was made of the yew. If anything has survived. I have started to keep an eye on the local antique auctions, hoping to find a Windsor chair from the right period. I know what I am looking for. The wood mustn’t be too dark. The seat needs to be elm and shaped like the flagstones of a castle staircase, as if worn by years of use. And it has to be a stick back, no splat, with two hoops of yew, one for the back and one for the elbows, burnished to a rich honey, the tight grain bewitching and warm, taken from a tree with a dragon in its story. I’ll know it when I see it.

10

Saint Augustine saith, that Dragons doe abide in deep Caves and hollow places of the earth, and the some-times when they perceive moistnes in the ayre, they come out of theyr holes, and beating the ayre with their wings, as it were with the strokes of Oares, they forsake the earth and flie aloft

—Edward Topsell, The Historie of Serpents, 1608

In the rocks of Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv, rest the last bones of the dragon that Perseus slew to save Andromeda. The skulls of similar monsters litter the Sivalik hills in Northern India, and on Turkey’s Aegean coast the remains of fabulous creatures, which stalked the myths of Heracles, weather from the cliffs to astonish passing travellers.

Heracles’ victory against the Monster of Troy is depicted most dramatically on an ancient Greek krater, or vase, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Here is the beast peppered with arrows by the hero as he rescues the Trojan princess Hesione. It is a very peculiar monster: just a head, white and skeletal, but to the modern eye it is impossible to mistake what we are looking at – a fossilised skull of a prehistoric creature projecting from a rocky outcrop; it is a two-and-a-half thousand-year-old black-figure masterpiece of palaeontology.

The vase appears on the cover of Adrienne Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters, a compelling account of fossil finds in antiquity, which argues that dragons, griffins, cyclops and many other nightmares from the ancient world were inspired by the remains of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. Mayor amasses accounts and archaeological evidence of encounters with giant bones in antiquity, alongside known fossil sites today, which dovetail neatly with the places where the legends of particular monsters first appeared.

In the first century CE, Apollonius of Tyana claimed to have seen dragon skulls in India where today we know the skulls of prehistoric giraffes, elephants and crocodiles are found in the famous Sivalik fossil beds. The Roman naturalist Aelian recorded the discovery of giant bones on the island of Chios following a forest fire and noted that the locals decided they must be the bones of a dragon: ‘From these gigantic bones the villagers were able to observe how immense and awful the monster was when it was alive.’ As for the dragons at Jaffa, biblical Joppa, a story from Ancient Rome tells how the consul Marcus Aemilius Scaurus held victory celebrations during which he paraded an immense skeleton found at Joppa, where tradition said the Greek hero Perseus rescued Andromeda from the dragon. One version of that myth even says that Perseus turned the monster to stone – petrified it, fossilised it perhaps?

W. B. Gerish entertained similar ideas about the origin of the Shonks’ legend. Had those rustics in the Pelhams found some dinosaur fossils under the yew tree? He wrote to the Geological Survey enquiring about a dinosaur find and asked Herbert Andrews, the son of his friend and collaborator Robert Andrews, to walk across the road from his desk at the V&A to find out about the Cetiosaurus on display at the Natural History Museum. The younger Andrews kindly wrote back describing the dinosaur, which had been pulled from the Oxford Clay near Peterborough, but at the end of the letter cautioned, ‘I don’t think it is possible to see in him the Herts dragon.’

But Gerish wasn’t to be put off; he had been collecting cuttings about fossil finds. One about an Ichthyosaurus found in Peterborough reveals what he was thinking: ‘The preying habits of this hungry flesh-eater, with its wide mouth and long jaws so well armed with serviceable teeth, bring to mind the fabled dragons of the ancients and may well be possibly the origin of these myths.’

Was Shonks’ dragon a Cetiosaurus, an Ichthyosaurus, or something else entirely, wondered Gerish. He wasn’t alone in conflating dragons with dinosaurs. In one of his box files there is a tiny newspaper advertisement for a book with a humdinger of a title: The Book of the Great Sea Dragons: Extinct Monsters of the Ancient Earth. The author, Thomas Hawkins, was an unpopular and eccentric collector, amassing fossils in Devon at about the same time the dragon’s lair in Great Pepsells was discovered. Hawkins believed his fossils were the remains of the giant creatures created by God in Genesis 1:21, the Geodolim Tanonim. Where most translators render this as the ‘Great Whales’, Hawkins argued for the far more exciting Great Dragons. In fact most of the dinosaur and ancient reptile fossils illustrated in his book are labelled as dragons (it was published the year before Richard Owen invented the word ‘dinosaur’): ‘Dragon from Lyme Regis. Discovered in 1835’, ‘Head of a Dragon from a village near Bristol’, ‘Dragon Plesiosaurus, from Street, Discovered in 1831’.

These scant remains of Gerish’s fossil research were his attempt to build on an idea that had struck him as early as 1901 when he published his first Hertfordshire St George article in the journal Folklore: ‘As to the dragon, fossil remains of extinct animals have often been found in the clay-pits of Hertfordshire, none of which, however, are of so recent a date as the medieval period. But the story may be very much older, dating possibly even from prehistoric times, and thus handed down from father to son it has become connected in the usual materialistic way with the monumental slab.’

This is oddly muddled. Gerish is not just thinking about the origins of dragon legends in general, but instead seems to have thought that a Cetiosaurus or other dinosaur was slain in prehistory by an impossibly early inhabitant of Brent Pelham and the story was passed down through the ages in the collective memory.

In the hierarchy of reasons Lawrence and the men may have had for presuming they had found a dragon’s lair, number one would be because they found the remains of a real-life dragon. Number two would be something that they mistook for a dragon: large bones? We can be fairly certain that neither of these were in the hole. What other traces of an imagined dragon might have been revealed by the woodcutters’ exertions? Earth scorched black by dragon fire, claw marks, treasure? How about a Roman mosaic of a dragon?

The idea of digging up something out of the ordinary would not have been alien to the men who knew that from time to time dull lumps of metal were pulled from the soil and could be turned into shillings and even pounds: a fabulous golden torque was found nearby a few years before, and some time in the 1830s labourers land-ditching unearthed a skeleton and a Bronze-Age founder’s hoard. It is tempting to surmise that the woodcutters’ attitudes to holes in the ground were conditioned by the fact that such treasure had been discovered in neighbouring fields. Treasure might even suggest the presence of guardian dragons, although the great folklorist and British dragon expert Jacqueline Simpson has pointed out that legends of dragons who guard treasure and those involving a dragon-slayer are not found together in England.

There was nothing in the hole, but in the same way that the Romans who found the fossils in Jappa assumed they had stumbled upon the remains of Perseus, those labourers’ thoughts turned to Shonks because he was their text. There are two explanations for the part fossils played in the formation of monster stories in antiquity: either they started the stories, or the stories of monsters and heroes existed before the fossils were found, but those finds were explained in terms of the stories, and then in time the stories were modified by the finds. Perhaps the monsters took on the guise of the fossils: mammoths begat cyclops, Protoceratops – griffins, and Giraffokeryx launched a thousand dragons.

We know the story of Shonks and the dragon existed before the hole was found. There were no fossils, but superstition, the ancient yew, the dark winter’s morning in a remote spot, and that great rent in the ground – together they were enough to suggest an extraordinary explanation.

It causes us moderns problems when the world of make-believe meets the everyday. We sometimes find it hard to imagine that people really thought these things: that dragons nested in a field. Weren’t they just messing around? Ted Barclay stands in the vestry of Brent Pelham Church holding the remains of an old weather vane and declaring that it is one of Shonks’ arrows. He is having a bit of fun. He does not really believe what he is saying – at least I hope not – but I am convinced those men did believe what they were saying. They believed it, because Shonks was the villagers’ key text, the key to their cosmology. The historian Ruth Richardson has cautioned that to make sense of the past, ‘we must come to terms with our own hostility to superstition’. It had been barely a century since an old woman in Brent Pelham was arrested on suspicion of witchcraft.

The writer Charles Nicholl has argued that Antonio Pigafetta, who chronicled Magellan’s voyages, saw giants in Argentina because he expected to see giants. Why? Because he had read outlandish travellers’ tales about them. In the same way Master Lawrence and the others would have expected to see a dragon’s lair because they had grown up with the story of Shonks’ and seen the dragon carved on his tomb.

We can hardly blame uneducated labourers for seizing upon the stories they knew best when scholars made similar mistakes, defaulting to Homer and the Bible to explain the world. When elephant bones were found with a flint hand-axe by the River Thames, some pointed to the Bible and said it dated from the Flood, whereas classicists thought the Romans brought the elephant to London in the first century CE and it had died in a battle with an axe-wielding Briton. (In fact, the axe is from a period when elephants roamed the Gray’s Inn Road, some 350,000 years ago.) Ask a nineteenth-century labourer from the Pelhams who slew a dragon and they would answer Shonks and not St Michael or St George.

An incident in 1833 attests to how closely the Pelhams were associated with the Shonks legend. The Country Press for Saturday 20 April 1833 contained a case of local excitement from the Petty Sessions at Bishop’s Stortford: ‘for it seemed as if the whole Pelham population had come to town. This arose from a “set-too” amongst the fair amazons of that village, whose pugnacious propensities have been handed down ever since the memorable year of 1086, when Hun, who first tempted, was vanquished by O’ Piers Shonks.’

Unfortunately no other record of this tantalising case has survived, but while it might be too large a claim to say that the Shonks legend was ubiquitous in that place, in those times, he was probably never that far from Pelham minds.

Or had something put them in mind of Shonks that morning?

Was something else going on that made those men eager to find evidence for the legend? Had someone questioned it and mocked the stories? In the 1840s, John Walker Ord interviewed a Mr Marr about the legend of Scaw the serpent-killer in Handale, North Yorkshire. Later Ord would write, ‘Of course we could not gainsay these facts, especially as they were recited with a determination that rendered argument dangerous.’ Challenging a legend had always been risky. In Bodmin in 1113 when a visiting French canon was foolish enough to scoff at the notion that King Arthur still lived he caused a riot. In Brittany at that time, it was said to be unsafe to assert in a public place that Arthur was dead: ‘Hardly will you escape unscathed without being whelmed by the curses or crushed by the stones of your hearers,’ reported Alain de Lille in the twelfth-century Prophetia Anglicana. If it wasn’t dangerous to scoff, it was certainly foolish, and still is – who is to say that the ‘set-too’ among the Amazons of the Pelhams was not because someone was foolish enough to suggest that Shonks did not slay a dragon.

In The Handbook of Folk-Lore, Charlotte Burne cautions the folklore collector to conceal incredulity and amusement and to suppress their smiles when encountering local beliefs and customs. Was the Reverend Soames a little too mirthful about Shonks, and vocal about it too? On the other hand, he may have been sour-faced and prayed the yew down. As the author of the History of the Reformation of the Church of England he would have known that the palming ceremony on Palm Sunday was banned in 1569, yet it continued for centuries on hilltops and in remote corners. The yew was a popular substitute for palm leaves. When Soames preached against Catholic-leaning innovations, did he also try to dispossess his flock of their superstitions, counselling that the yew tree should come down and pouring cold water on local legends about dragons?

The discovery of the dragon hole meant the villages had something to throw back at their parson with all his book learnin’. How could anyone deny the truth of the stories now they had found the dragon’s lair? What do you say to that, Reverend? If the discovery of the hole was a thumbing of the nose at authority, it may help us to understand the long-ago origins of the rest of the legends about Shonks. There are those who think that folk tales and legends were the folks’ response to their struggles against the feudal classes, their struggles for a better life.

In the 1830s, the folks’ traditions were under threat from even greater forces than the local vicar. Old ways of thinking about the world were changing. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology was published in three volumes between 1830 and 1833, while a disciple of Lyell was gathering evidence on a voyage that would completely change the way we look at the world. Charles Darwin was scrambling through the impenetrable forests of Chiloé Island in the winter of 1834, catching foxes by striking them on the head with a rock hammer, and meeting native Christian converts who still ‘pretended to old communication with the devil in certain caves’ and so risked the fate of forebears who had answered to the Inquisition. In the eyes of men of science, the villagers in the Pelhams might have seemed equally suitable subjects for anthropological observation. Such rationalists would have soon explained away the hole in the chalk and derided the existence of dragons.

The way of life for those in the English countryside was changing more rapidly than at any time since the end of the Middle Ages; old beliefs and stories were disappearing as people turned their backs on the fields. The populations of cities like Manchester and Liverpool doubled in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century as labourers left the countryside in search of work. London saw its population increase by over 50 per cent to 1.6 million. This in a country of just fifteen million people. The first railway opened in September 1830 and was the prelude to the laying of 1,000 miles of iron and the synchronisation of clocks to the railway timetables before mid-century. Time itself was changing. The world was changing. Agricultural labourers were living in a countryside that had been pulled out from under their feet.

The agricultural revolution had changed everything. Customary rights of ordinary people were forgotten, enclosure meant they had nowhere to pasture their livestock, nowhere to collect wood or furze. The woods had been fenced for game by the new landlords from London, who were heedless of those customs that had been honoured time out of mind. Customs were replaced by laws.

It is for these new game laws that the social historians John and Barbara Hammond reserve their greatest ire in their classic The Village Labourer. The Laws of England that had shorn people of their rights and replaced their wages with charity, now threatened them with the gallows if they failed to resist the urge to vary their diet of roots by bagging a pheasant for the table. It is undeniable that, like William Cobbett, the Hammonds were purveyors of that particular style of the picturesque we might call the you-don’t-know-you’re-born school of history. Many historians would argue that things weren’t as bad as they claimed, and that enclosure was an essential component of the agricultural revolution that ultimately brought better standards of living to all. Yet it is telling that the man who was the high priest of agricultural progress, the great champion of enclosure, Arthur Young, had second thoughts in later life: he thought the human cost had been too high.

The Swing Riots that began in Kent in the summer of 1830 were as much about resisting change to a way of life as about money. Captain Swing was the name signed to letters sent to farmers and landowners across southern England, threatening arson, machine breaking and murder. They went hand-in-hand with a series of uprisings starting in Kent in the autumn of 1830. Barns and hayricks were burned, the new threshing machines – which ‘stole’ winter work from labourers – were smashed, and unpopular overseers and parsons hauled from parishes in dung carts. The agricultural labourers were demanding higher wages, reduced rents and lower tithes (so the farmers could afford to pay the wages). But it was not just about poverty. One of the complaints of a mob at Walden in Buckinghamshire during the Swing Riots was that buns used to be thrown from the church steeple and beer given away in the churchyard on Bun Day. They wanted the customs continued, but the parson refused. Traditions and customs and rights were ignored. The Furneux Pelham overseers accounts once contained the item ‘paid for ringing church bell for gleaners’. But gleaning – the right to pick up dropped corn during harvest – was being curtailed.

In 1834 there was a total overhaul of the Poor Laws, which would now be administered by Boards of Guardians in the big towns. Change was needed, but at the time it must have seemed like another of the links between a person, the place he lived, and the rights he had in that place, were being destroyed.

Belonging had mattered. Keith Snell looked at inscriptions on 16,000 gravestones in eighty-seven burial grounds to chart the use of the phrase ‘of this parish’ as in ‘To the memory of Mr James Smith late of this parish who departed this life 5th March 1830 aged 63’ and ‘Ellen, beloved wife of Thomas Tinworth of this parish died June 2nd 1888 aged 64 yrs’ – both in Brent Pelham churchyard. People had been proud of belonging, but by the 1870s examples became ever rarer.

Jacqueline Simpson has written that dragon legends ‘foster the community’s awareness of and pride in its own identity, its conviction that it is in some respect unusual, or even unique. That the lord of the manor should be descended from a dragon-slayer, that a dragon should once have roamed these very fields, or, best of all, that an ordinary lad from this very village should have outwitted and killed such a monster – these are claims to fame which any neighbouring community would be bound to envy.’

Those men did not only have a dragon legend to be proud of, they had a dragon-slayer in their village church and an ancient coffin lid to mark his resting place. Little wonder they thought first of dragons when they stared down into that great hollow in the earth.

Part II

Stone

11

Somewhere, perhaps, in the spaces between the pictures and the objects … lies a monument true to both us and the past.

—Mike Pitts in Making History: Antiquaries in Britain 1707–2007

Little is known of Mr John Morice of Upper Gower Street, London, other than the fact that in the 1830s he contracted a severe case of grangeritis: a condition coined by Holbrook Jackson in his Anatomy of Bibliomania to describe a ‘contagious and delirious mania endangering many books’.

Jackson was poking fun at the practice of grangerising or extra-illustrating books by re-binding them with pictures, often ruthlessly chopped out of other books. It was popularised by the followers of James Granger, a late eighteenth-century print collector and author. Although Granger did not paste his own vast collection of prints into published books, countless grangerites had theirs bound into his three-volume Biographical History (a catalogue of historical portraits from the reign of Egbert the Great to the Glorious Revolution). Granger’s surname became a verb: the first edition of the OED defined grangerise as ‘To illustrate (a book) by the addition of prints, engravings, etc., especially such as have been cut out of other books.’ And some of the most notorious cases of grangeritis involved grangerised ‘Grangers’, including one that expanded the original three volumes into a shelf-full of thirty-six, each as fat as the binding would allow.

Other popular titles to inflate were county histories, and it is one of these that was the cause of Mr John Morice’s affliction: Robert Clutterbuck’s recently published History and Antiquities of the County of Hertford. In the 1830s, Morice developed such an affinity for the History that he expanded its three volumes to ten, adding over 2,500 illustrations. The result would become known as the Knowsley Clutterbuck (after Knowsley Hall, seat of the Stanleys, earls of Derby who owned it for many years) and has been called the most sumptuous extra-illustrated county history ever conceived.

The chances that anonymous Mr Morice had played a bit part in the long history of Piers Shonks’ tomb were good because many of the illustrations were said to be original. When the Earl of Derby bought the volumes for 800 guineas in the late nineteenth century, the sales catalogue boasted of over 1,000 original landscapes, architectural views and portraits in neutral tints and watercolours, and 1,400 beautifully emblazoned coats of arms. A mere 550 additional engravings were acquired from other books. And this in a book that originally had only fifty-four pictures.

Among the best additions were those made in the 1830s by John Buckler and two of his sons, who appear to have landed their dream commission. The Bucklers were successful architects, but painting antiquities was their true vocation. Why draw new buildings when there were so many fine churches and manor houses to visit and preserve in ink? Reflecting on his career in 1849, John Buckler Snr wrote: ‘To build, repair, or survey warehouses and sash-windowed dwellings, however profitable, was so much less to my taste than perspective drawing with such subjects before me as cathedrals, abbeys and ancient parish churches, that I never made any effort to increase the number of my employments as an architect.’

Following page 450 of volume ten are six extra folio leaves. Pasted neatly in is an engraving of Shonks’ tomb, appropriated from some poor adulterated copy of the 1816 Antiquarian Itinerary. The picture is the Itinerary’s most important contribution to the history of the legend since the text was unoriginal. Drawn by the thirty-year-old Frederick Stockdale, an antiquary more often associated with the West Country, it is captioned ‘Remains of the Tomb of O Piers Shonks, Brent Pelham Church, Herts’. The composition is a little cramped, but mostly accurate, and captures the relief of the carvings although Stockdale chose to frame them in a rectangle, ignoring the shape of the coffin lid, and so the essential tombness is lost.

On the page facing Stockdale’s cannibalised drawing is something much more pleasing, real treasure: a unique sepia ink painting of Shonks’ tomb slab seen from directly overhead. Unusually for the prints in the Knowsley Clutterbuck, the signature and date have not been trimmed off. In the bottom left-hand corner it reads J. C. Buckler 1833. This was John Chessell Buckler, the eldest son, notable for coming second to Charles Barry in the 1836 competition to design the new Houses of Parliament. He first came to Brent Pelham in 1831 and produced three sepia watercolours: one each of Brent Pelham Hall, Beeches and St Mary’s Church – seen from the west or tower end. His father John Buckler visited the village in 1841 and painted a more complete view of the churchyard from the south-east, revealing that the nave was without a roof. John brought with him his youngest son George, who also painted three pictures in sepia: a view of the nave and font, another picture of Brent Pelham Hall seen from the churchyard, and lastly an interior view of the chancel screen with the two-faced royal arms mounted on them. The Bucklers liked to be thorough. The art historian Robert Wark has written that they were ‘fond of documenting a building from several points of view and over a period of time, especially if new construction or changes of some kind were taking place’.

The date on the picture of the tomb, 1833, is different to the other pictures. J. C. must have returned to Brent Pelham that year expressly to document the tomb. Perhaps he feared the weather pouring into the roofless nave was taking its toll on the interior, or perhaps the light had simply not been good enough during his first visit.

Buckler’s sketch picks out the four figures around a floriated cross, the large angel above it, and the dragon below. Of the eight known illustrations of the tomb, which predate the first known photograph in 1901, J. C. Buckler’s best captures the work of the mason. He is prepared to sacrifice detail to impression. He is trying to show that this is stone, and stone of great antiquity: the smudged blank face of the angel, the wear on the other figures slowly and inexorably being smoothed back into the block of marble by the passing of time and its blows and caresses. For an architect, he is surprisingly undraughtsman-like here. It is a work of art and not just a record of the tomb at a moment in time. The art and craftsmanship of the mason inspired Buckler to create something much more than just a topographical record.

When Holbrook Jackson called grangeritis ‘a contagious and delirious mania endangering many books’, he was concerned for the hundreds of books cut up and ruined to create one vast work, such as James Gibb’s grangerised Bible, which ran to sixty vast folio volumes, ‘each so thick that he could hardly lift it from the counter’. Jackson disapproved less, if at all, when books were not destroyed but instead collectors saved pictures from ephemeral publications such as newspapers and magazines or, better still, had new pictures specially made as John Morice did.

And yet Jackson, still tongue in cheek, called it a derangement for reasons other than the desecration of books for their prints. ‘Those afflicted by the derangement,’ Jackson writes, ‘are the most flagrant of all book-defectives.’ Why? Not just because they were handy with a pair of scissors, but also because they hunted for pictures ‘of every person place and thing in any way mentioned in the text or vaguely connected with its subject matter’. The grangeriser Richard Bull epitomised this habit of wild deviation or going off at tangents: a footnote referring to Audley End in the Reverend Granger’s Biographical History of England was an excuse to add fourteen large engravings of the palace to the volume. Although Alexander Sutherland was arguably the worst afflicted grangerite of them all, transforming the six volumes of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion into no less than sixty-one volumes in elephant folio – each nearly two feet high – with over 19,000 extra illustrations (including 743 portraits of Charles I alone).

Behind the hyperbole of Jackson’s derision I sense a secret admiration for the grangeriser. Is their crime so very bad? After all, they give us unique pictures, and in some cases the only surviving record of buildings and views and monuments. On those days when I am overwhelmed by books, by my bookshelves, and the towers of books on the kitchen table and beside my bed demanding to be read, it has occurred to me that not just readers but writers ought to grangerise existing texts rather than fuel the anxiety of book lovers by making new ones. Paste in pictures, tip in reviews, scribble in the margins, insert maps and postcards, photos and poems and train tickets, draw pictures and diagrams, and eventually unpick the book and have it rebound. What else am I doing other than unpicking the story of Piers Shonks, collating what others have thought and said, chronicling my own journey, and inserting lots of new leaves? What better way to possess a much-loved text, to make it one’s own, than to grangerise it? What did Jackson say? They hunted for pictures ‘of every person place and thing in anyway mentioned in the text or vaguely connected with its subject matter’. Guilty as charged, and not just pictures. This book stands as testament to the technique; one that at times may be clumsy, but one by which hidden truths may be revealed. Something unique, and occasionally worth keeping, emerges simply from the juxtaposition of material. Putting all those Charles I portraits together in a particular order creates something that did not exist before; the deliberate or accidental meeting of one with another may reveal something or suggest something wonderful and previously unthought-of. Like my encounter with the Field of Cloth of Gold, here was a fingerpost pointing off the main highway to the trackways and holloways. Some would lead back to the main road, others would head across country to encounter – a pleasant surprise – other byways. Some would turn out to be dead ends, but they might be where the treasure is buried. All this hints at the process by which the legend itself came together and spread; a means to understanding how the folk legend grew by steady accumulation and accretion around the tomb – both deliberate and accidental – of images and rumours, half-remembered beliefs, the common store of folklore and tale, the theories of antiquaries and, only rarely, smatterings of historical truth.

The vogue for grangerising in the late eighteenth century was partly about the reinterpretation of the written word with the pictorial. The practice came into fashion just as the relationship between visual and verbal means of communication was changing. William Blake was mixing words and pictures to create something sublime, and the first illustrated Shakespeare appeared. This points us to the importance of the tomb as both image and text: its art to captivate and inspire us; its rich imagery, in which we can read its meaning, creatively and historically. It is likely that in the same way that a picture pasted into a book altered how the book was read, so with the passing of years the imagery of the tomb altered an oral tradition about somebody called Shonks. Perhaps. But only when I had exhausted that imagery – its original meaning and what it came to represent – would I have any idea of what that oral tradition might have been. It will be what is left.

The Knowsley Clutterbuck and the Buckler painting also pointed me to all those who had communed with the tomb to create images. Their drawings and paintings, with all their flaws – and the flaws contain their own important insights – helped explain the allure of the tomb and its capacity to conjure stories. The Bucklers and their fellow travellers (the prolific Mr Cole, the tragic Mr Oldfield, the meticulous Mr Anderson) are one of the organising principles of the second part of this book – the part that belongs to the tomb. They have wrestled with it in the shadows, tried to capture it, tried to decipher it. In many ways, the Shonks I tangle with here, is made of hatchings and brushstrokes on parchment: scribbles and shadows and smudges as much as percussions and chisel marks on stone.

12

… speaks to us from a forgotten world, drowned, mysterious, irrecoverable.

—May McKisack, The Fourteenth Century, 1959

At Barley in Hertfordshire, between the 13th and the 14th milestones, the Cambridge to London road forked south-east towards the small village of Burnt Pelham. The man enduring the sloughs and mires of these notoriously bad roads one morning in 1743 was the twenty-nine-year-old William Cole. He was destined to be one of the great antiquaries of his age, gouty and ink-stained and only comfortable among old stones or old parchment. A Hogarth painting from around the time of his pilgrimage to Shonks’ tomb shows him standing in the background of a family portait examining old papers, perhaps less at home in the salon than in the muniment room. Would his scant worldliness stand the test of the man he was about to meet? Captain William Wright, the Lord of the Manor of Beeches, was known far and wide as ‘a man of great parts and wickedness’.

‘Great parts and wickedness.’ The phrase is somehow picturesquely archaic without losing any of its force. Wickedness as a noun is stronger than the adjective and especially if applied to a grown man and one in a position of power. ‘Great parts’ is the quiddity of the characterisation. I understand it as great means, but also talents and roles in life. Returning to Cole’s notes I find he considered the captain ‘a man of great natural and acquired understanding [who] knows much more than he cares to put into practise’. I Google ‘Great parts and wickedness’ to see if it is a literary allusion, something Richardson or Fielding wrote of a lecherous squire, but draw a blank. It gave me a type and I hope that it is a fair reckoning, but it is a harsh epitaph for anyone.

I imagine Cole entering the village on a dun-coloured horse that morning (comfortable carriage rides and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment were a long time coming to the Pelhams). Only thirty miles from London now, and yet according to one observer, it was a place both isolated and secluded and thus prone to superstitious fancies. Later, another would write uncharitably that, ‘The three Pelhams are in a dark state. The people very ignorant.’

1743 was notable as the year that George II became the last English monarch to lead an army into battle, but it would not be surprising if some in Brent Pelham had not heard that George I had died sixteen years earlier, or that his son was now king and embroiled in the quarrel over who should rule Austria.

Captain Wright was infamously slothful. He drove the Reverend Charles Wheatly to devote the page in his ledger facing the captain’s tithe payments to passages from scripture. He scribbled a proverb: ‘I went by the field of the slothful and by the vineyard of the man devoid of understanding. And, lo, it was all grown over with thorns, and nettles had covered the face thereof, and the stone wall thereof was broken down.’ (Proverbs 24:30–1). And ends with a psalm: ‘A fruitful land maketh he barren: for the wickedness of them that dwell therein.’ (Psalm 107:34). They are there as judgements and amulets against the captain’s laziness and supposed malignity.

Wright was a notorious miser. When Cole arrived, he was horrified that he had to stable his horse in the dairy and to find only two rooms with glass in the windows. The captain was holed up in one of them with hogs and dogs and litter and lice and ‘four strapping wenches who had nothing to do but obey their master and play at cards with him’. But Cole was willing to stomach the disreputable captain to satisfy his curiosity (and his taste for scandal). Wright was not only the current Lord of the Manor of Beeches, but also of the manors of Greys and Shonks, and, ‘the famous old monument of Piers Shonks … was the only reason which drew me out of my own province of Cambridgeshire into a church of this county,’ wrote Cole in a manuscript now in the British Library.

For all his bad parts, Captain Wright may have helped Cole. Perhaps one of his wenches accompanied him westward along the bridleway to the church and dangled a light while he pored over Shonks’ tomb. It is a Hogarthian composition, the single-minded scholar peering earnestly into the niche of the ancient tomb, the buxom (is that what Cole meant by ‘strapping’?) servant getting in his way, a suspicious sexton lurking in the background, and other stock village characters all arranged to lampoon Cole’s curiosity and the decrepit parish church.

In his prime, Cole would have made a great study for Thomas Rowlandson, who liked to caricature antiquaries. One of his contemporaries wrote of him, ‘With all his oddities he was a worthy and valuable man.’ It is the oddities we are interested in, and Rowlandson would have captured them as he hunkered over a tomb, measuring the exact length of the nose on the effigy, as Virginia Woolf imagined Cole doing in a letter she wrote to him post mortem, after reading his diaries. He became wedded to historical research while at Clare College Cambridge in the 1730s and later at King’s College, and, after being ordained the year after his visit to Burnt Pelham, he continued to put his research first. Woolf in her letter chastises Cole for not enjoying the eighteenth century. It was said he wanted to escape to the Middle Ages. She speculates that he was disappointed in love, which is why in later life he only loved his dun-coloured horse. He variously referred to his volumes as his wife, his children and his closest friends. By his death in 1789, he had compiled nearly a hundred large volumes of notes, transcripts and sketches, mainly on Cambridgeshire, and with remarkable industry; he told his friend Horace Walpole that ‘You will be astonished at the rapidity of my pen when you observe that this folio of four hundred pages with above a hundred coats of arms and other silly ornaments, was completed in six weeks.’

He rarely showed his papers to anyone. They were bequeathed to the British Museum on the proviso that they would not be opened until twenty years after his death, but even this term of grace was said to have caused some alarm for fear of what he had written about those he disagreed with – particularly anyone who had dared to remove his beloved stained glass from windows. He had no time for modernisers. Cole predicted that posterity might not appreciate the work he had done for it and admitted that he had committed his most private thoughts and much ‘scandalous rubbish’ to his papers. They were indeed deplored, when they were finally opened, as licentious and even morally reprehensible for mixing gossip, scandal and his personal prejudices with his antiquarian observations. If the nineteenth century was prurient and unkind to Cole, the early twentieth century found his historical notes, his journals and vast collection of correspondence invaluable and fascinating (especially the tittle-tattle), all written in his beautiful, easily legible hand.

Cole took out his pen and ink that day in 1743 and made the earliest known sketch of the tomb. Like Buckler’s painting, Cole’s sketch was hidden away and forgotten; unlike Buckler’s painting, it is not art. It is a scratching, an aide-memoire, and in both its virtues and flaws reminds me that it is no easy matter to identify the detailed carvings on the tomb, let alone their meaning. He did capture those features that make it such an intriguing and mysterious object: its position in the wall of the nave, the strange inscription above it, and the grey-black marble slab with its extraordinary medieval carvings around which stories had gathered for centuries.

In drawing it, Cole seems to be the first writer to have examined the carvings in detail, and he tells us that the middle figure holds a smaller figure in its lap. Earlier writers had called the former a man, but as Cole’s sketch shows, it is an angel, a demi-angel, without legs, flying heavenwards, although the stumpy wings on Cole’s angel look hardly capable of flight. He gives it a scallop-edged costume reminiscent of something you would dress a baby in for its christening. The face has the features of a stick man: a long stick for the nose, a small one for the mouth. Oddly, these give it a patrician feel, he is curly haired with sideburns on his chubby face, shaded to a flush, and more eighteenth century than thirteenth.

In his Sepulchral Monuments of 1786, Richard Gough would explain that the angel is ‘conveying up a soul in a shroud, or sheet in the usual attitude’ – the ‘usual attitude’ being hands together in prayer. The image of a small naked figure – in this case probably male – standing in a napkin held by one or two angels has since been called a ‘stock symbol on monuments for the salvation of the soul’. The earliest known example can be seen on a beautiful slab in Ely Cathedral thought to commemorate Bishop Nigel who died in 1169.

Cole’s drawing is a scratching, but it is lovely: it reveals more than it obscures, while being far from precise. We can see the coffin shape of the slab. At its head end, he has drawn the four animals that represent the Evangelists: an angel for St Matthew, a winged lion for St Mark, an eagle for St John and a winged bull for St Luke. Cole has drawn a lion because he already knew he would find a lion representing St Mark, but it bears only a faint resemblance to what the mason put there. Cole’s lion faces us with the beard of an old sea captain, its forequarters raised semi-rampant upon a bow shape, its wings teardrops. Cole’s lion is too naturalistic, but his eagle seems to have rigor mortis, its legs grasping for something in the moment of death when it should be clutching a scroll. It is lumpy, with a parrot’s head, and looks incapable of flight. The bull or ox is dog-like, and St Matthew’s angel is awkward and timorous, hugging himself against the draughty nave.

The cross below the angel and soul is more feather dusters than the foliaged arms of a cross fleury, and its central boss has four petals and not five – such details are important when they come from an age when everything could carry a meaning. None of Cole’s sketches do justice to the hand of the mason, but he is not alone, the artists of Shonks’ tomb have often led commentators astray because the tomb has eluded capture on paper. Looking at his renderings, it is easy to understand how later, less educated observers than him mistook the lion, ox and eagle for three dogs, which quickly became part of the story.

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