Hollow Places. Christopher Hadley
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.
… 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