Hollow Places

—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 (#litres_trial_promo) on the second Friday in December, there could hardly be a more apt occasion to discuss the old stories. Tithes (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo). 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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?

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The Variety of Wonders (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)’ 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’ (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), and Italo Calvino (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)’. 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 (#litres_trial_promo): ‘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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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.