Hollow Places. Christopher Hadley
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’.