Hollow Places. Christopher Hadley
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 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.
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.