Hollow Places. Christopher Hadley
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.
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 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 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: ‘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 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 and had to be demolished.