Hollow Places

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 Duffersread 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.

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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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo): ‘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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)’. 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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

—Herman Melville (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo).

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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) – 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo)’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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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?

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