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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’.
What we do know is that this was not the only yew that disappeared from the landscape in the early nineteenth century.
In 1848 one archaeological journal lamented that yews were ‘so reduced in number as to seem like the last of a once flourishing and noble race, mourning in their own decay over the magnificence of the past, and the desolation of the present’. In 1539, John Leland had counted thirty-nine yews at Strata Florida in Wales; they are the only ones he mentions in his famous itinerary around the British Isles. Three hundred years later, only three of the famous yews were still standing. There is an engraving and article from Gardener’s Chronicle in May 1874 with a description of the largest tree that is not unlike that of the Pelham yew in Wigram’s letter: it ‘was divided into two parts, leaving a passage through it, this was 22 ft in girth’. Beneath one of the three survivors was the traditional resting place of the fourteenth-century Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym. It too disappeared after 1874, possibly during an archaeological dig of the Cistercian abbey at the end of the nineteenth century.
It is loathsome to think that our tree was felled indifferently, because it was in the way, or to give unemployed labourers something to do to earn their gallon loaf, but whatever their reason, it had to come down. On their return from breakfast, the sight that greeted them must have been something of a surprise. Was their approach a cautious one? Where they had wrestled with the tree half an hour before, there was now a large hole, a cavern even, and the tree had fallen into it. ‘When they came back, that yew Tree had fallen down of itself; and when they looked, there was a girt hole right underneath it, underneath its roots, a girt cave like.’ This in the words of the rustic voice Wigram used in his final account to W. B. Gerish. His 1888 letter to the Hertfordshire Observer is less picturesque but more dramatic: ‘On his return [he] found that the old tree had fallen, collapsing into a large cavity underneath its roots.’
Until I read about grub felling, I simply could not understand how a half-felled tree had fallen into a hole, but if most of the roots had been severed and there was a cavity under the yew, it would have been suspended by a few stubborn roots that eventually surrendered their charge to the hollow in the earth. After visiting several ancient yews, I could believe that one might collapse in on itself. The weight distribution is uneven as the heart rots away leaving heavy outer trunks and branches, twisted and over-balanced as the branches trail along the ground. The roots, severed and weakened as they would have been by the men’s exertions, must have given way while they were at breakfast. At least that’s the explanation needed to understand the 1888 version in which the tree falls into a large hole. The later version could be interpreted differently: the tree simply fell over and left a large cavity where the roots had been, but surely these countrymen were used to the holes left by trees that came down in this way, and would not need a supernatural explanation for the cavity.
‘It’s not unknown for voids to develop under very old trees,’ wrote Wigram. It is certainly true that a cavern, or at least a hole, could have formed in the chalk under the shallow clay where the tree grew – it is not unusual for sink holes to form from erosion where the bedrock is limestone – and the weight of a tree no longer held steady by its roots could have brought in the ceiling of the cavity. It is not the only Pelham story of a cavity opening up in the chalk. Less than a mile to the east, on the other side of the Ash Valley, there is a tale recorded in the 1930s that the first church in the Pelhams was destroyed by Vikings or Pharisees (the local word for fairies) or, more prosaically, it collapsed into a hole that opened up beneath it.
She was down. ‘It is done,’ wrote Rider Haggard of another tree in another place.
A change has come over the landscape; the space that for generations has been filled with leafy branches is now white and empty air. I know of no more melancholy sight – indeed, to this day I detest seeing a tree felled; it always reminds me of the sudden and violent death of a man. I fancy it must be the age of timbers that inspires us with this respect and sympathy, which we do not feel for a sapling or a flower.
Ancient trees have personalities and attract stories; it is hard not to think that this was an event in the life of the village. A crowd must have gathered that morning, if not to watch the iniquitous act, then to see the cavity. We know the Skinner family kept loppings, which hints at the value of the highly prized wood. No doubt, other villagers kept pieces as well if they could – to make spoons and knife handles. Peter Kalm, an eighteenth-century Scandinavian traveller, left an account of a tree he saw chopped down in Hertfordshire, describing the surprising number of people on the scene, wanting the leaves and roots and twigs for fuel or to make baskets. I imagine a host of villagers turning up that day. Nothing of that prized wood would be wasted. John Aubrey’s fair and spreading ewe-tree furnished him and the other schoolboys with nutt-crackers and scoopes to pull the flesh out of their apples. These would make fine souvenirs from a dragon’s lair.
I have often wondered what was made of the yew. If anything has survived. I have started to keep an eye on the local antique auctions, hoping to find a Windsor chair from the right period. I know what I am looking for. The wood mustn’t be too dark. The seat needs to be elm and shaped like the flagstones of a castle staircase, as if worn by years of use. And it has to be a stick back, no splat, with two hoops of yew, one for the back and one for the elbows, burnished to a rich honey, the tight grain bewitching and warm, taken from a tree with a dragon in its story. I’ll know it when I see it.
10
Saint Augustine saith, that Dragons doe abide in deep Caves and hollow places of the earth, and the some-times when they perceive moistnes in the ayre, they come out of theyr holes, and beating the ayre with their wings, as it were with the strokes of Oares, they forsake the earth and flie aloft
—Edward Topsell, The Historie of Serpents, 1608
In the rocks of Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv, rest the last bones of the dragon that Perseus slew to save Andromeda. The skulls of similar monsters litter the Sivalik hills in Northern India, and on Turkey’s Aegean coast the remains of fabulous creatures, which stalked the myths of Heracles, weather from the cliffs to astonish passing travellers.
Heracles’ victory against the Monster of Troy is depicted most dramatically on an ancient Greek krater, or vase, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Here is the beast peppered with arrows by the hero as he rescues the Trojan princess Hesione. It is a very peculiar monster: just a head, white and skeletal, but to the modern eye it is impossible to mistake what we are looking at – a fossilised skull of a prehistoric creature projecting from a rocky outcrop; it is a two-and-a-half thousand-year-old black-figure masterpiece of palaeontology.
The vase appears on the cover of Adrienne Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters, a compelling account of fossil finds in antiquity, which argues that dragons, griffins, cyclops and many other nightmares from the ancient world were inspired by the remains of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. Mayor amasses accounts and archaeological evidence of encounters with giant bones in antiquity, alongside known fossil sites today, which dovetail neatly with the places where the legends of particular monsters first appeared.
In the first century CE, Apollonius of Tyana claimed to have seen dragon skulls in India where today we know the skulls of prehistoric giraffes, elephants and crocodiles are found in the famous Sivalik fossil beds. The Roman naturalist Aelian recorded the discovery of giant bones on the island of Chios following a forest fire and noted that the locals decided they must be the bones of a dragon: ‘From these gigantic bones the villagers were able to observe how immense and awful the monster was when it was alive.’ As for the dragons at Jaffa, biblical Joppa, a story from Ancient Rome tells how the consul Marcus Aemilius Scaurus held victory celebrations during which he paraded an immense skeleton found at Joppa, where tradition said the Greek hero Perseus rescued Andromeda from the dragon. One version of that myth even says that Perseus turned the monster to stone – petrified it, fossilised it perhaps?
W. B. Gerish entertained similar ideas about the origin of the Shonks’ legend. Had those rustics in the Pelhams found some dinosaur fossils under the yew tree? He wrote to the Geological Survey enquiring about a dinosaur find and asked Herbert Andrews, the son of his friend and collaborator Robert Andrews, to walk across the road from his desk at the V&A to find out about the Cetiosaurus on display at the Natural History Museum. The younger Andrews kindly wrote back describing the dinosaur, which had been pulled from the Oxford Clay near Peterborough, but at the end of the letter cautioned, ‘I don’t think it is possible to see in him the Herts dragon.’
But Gerish wasn’t to be put off; he had been collecting cuttings about fossil finds. One about an Ichthyosaurus found in Peterborough reveals what he was thinking: ‘The preying habits of this hungry flesh-eater, with its wide mouth and long jaws so well armed with serviceable teeth, bring to mind the fabled dragons of the ancients and may well be possibly the origin of these myths.’
Was Shonks’ dragon a Cetiosaurus, an Ichthyosaurus, or something else entirely, wondered Gerish. He wasn’t alone in conflating dragons with dinosaurs. In one of his box files there is a tiny newspaper advertisement for a book with a humdinger of a title: The Book of the Great Sea Dragons: Extinct Monsters of the Ancient Earth. The author, Thomas Hawkins, was an unpopular and eccentric collector, amassing fossils in Devon at about the same time the dragon’s lair in Great Pepsells was discovered. Hawkins believed his fossils were the remains of the giant creatures created by God in Genesis 1:21, the Geodolim Tanonim. Where most translators render this as the ‘Great Whales’, Hawkins argued for the far more exciting Great Dragons. In fact most of the dinosaur and ancient reptile fossils illustrated in his book are labelled as dragons (it was published the year before Richard Owen invented the word ‘dinosaur’): ‘Dragon from Lyme Regis. Discovered in 1835’, ‘Head of a Dragon from a village near Bristol’, ‘Dragon Plesiosaurus, from Street, Discovered in 1831’.
These scant remains of Gerish’s fossil research were his attempt to build on an idea that had struck him as early as 1901 when he published his first Hertfordshire St George article in the journal Folklore: ‘As to the dragon, fossil remains of extinct animals have often been found in the clay-pits of Hertfordshire, none of which, however, are of so recent a date as the medieval period. But the story may be very much older, dating possibly even from prehistoric times, and thus handed down from father to son it has become connected in the usual materialistic way with the monumental slab.’
This is oddly muddled. Gerish is not just thinking about the origins of dragon legends in general, but instead seems to have thought that a Cetiosaurus or other dinosaur was slain in prehistory by an impossibly early inhabitant of Brent Pelham and the story was passed down through the ages in the collective memory.
In the hierarchy of reasons Lawrence and the men may have had for presuming they had found a dragon’s lair, number one would be because they found the remains of a real-life dragon. Number two would be something that they mistook for a dragon: large bones? We can be fairly certain that neither of these were in the hole. What other traces of an imagined dragon might have been revealed by the woodcutters’ exertions? Earth scorched black by dragon fire, claw marks, treasure? How about a Roman mosaic of a dragon?
The idea of digging up something out of the ordinary would not have been alien to the men who knew that from time to time dull lumps of metal were pulled from the soil and could be turned into shillings and even pounds: a fabulous golden torque was found nearby a few years before, and some time in the 1830s labourers land-ditching unearthed a skeleton and a Bronze-Age founder’s hoard. It is tempting to surmise that the woodcutters’ attitudes to holes in the ground were conditioned by the fact that such treasure had been discovered in neighbouring fields. Treasure might even suggest the presence of guardian dragons, although the great folklorist and British dragon expert Jacqueline Simpson has pointed out that legends of dragons who guard treasure and those involving a dragon-slayer are not found together in England.
There was nothing in the hole, but in the same way that the Romans who found the fossils in Jappa assumed they had stumbled upon the remains of Perseus, those labourers’ thoughts turned to Shonks because he was their text. There are two explanations for the part fossils played in the formation of monster stories in antiquity: either they started the stories, or the stories of monsters and heroes existed before the fossils were found, but those finds were explained in terms of the stories, and then in time the stories were modified by the finds. Perhaps the monsters took on the guise of the fossils: mammoths begat cyclops, Protoceratops – griffins, and Giraffokeryx launched a thousand dragons.
We know the story of Shonks and the dragon existed before the hole was found. There were no fossils, but superstition, the ancient yew, the dark winter’s morning in a remote spot, and that great rent in the ground – together they were enough to suggest an extraordinary explanation.
It causes us moderns problems when the world of make-believe meets the everyday. We sometimes find it hard to imagine that people really thought these things: that dragons nested in a field. Weren’t they just messing around? Ted Barclay stands in the vestry of Brent Pelham Church holding the remains of an old weather vane and declaring that it is one of Shonks’ arrows. He is having a bit of fun. He does not really believe what he is saying – at least I hope not – but I am convinced those men did believe what they were saying. They believed it, because Shonks was the villagers’ key text, the key to their cosmology. The historian Ruth Richardson has cautioned that to make sense of the past, ‘we must come to terms with our own hostility to superstition’. It had been barely a century since an old woman in Brent Pelham was arrested on suspicion of witchcraft.
The writer Charles Nicholl has argued that Antonio Pigafetta, who chronicled Magellan’s voyages, saw giants in Argentina because he expected to see giants. Why? Because he had read outlandish travellers’ tales about them. In the same way Master Lawrence and the others would have expected to see a dragon’s lair because they had grown up with the story of Shonks’ and seen the dragon carved on his tomb.
We can hardly blame uneducated labourers for seizing upon the stories they knew best when scholars made similar mistakes, defaulting to Homer and the Bible to explain the world. When elephant bones were found with a flint hand-axe by the River Thames, some pointed to the Bible and said it dated from the Flood, whereas classicists thought the Romans brought the elephant to London in the first century CE and it had died in a battle with an axe-wielding Briton. (In fact, the axe is from a period when elephants roamed the Gray’s Inn Road, some 350,000 years ago.) Ask a nineteenth-century labourer from the Pelhams who slew a dragon and they would answer Shonks and not St Michael or St George.
An incident in 1833 attests to how closely the Pelhams were associated with the Shonks legend. The Country Press for Saturday 20 April 1833 contained a case of local excitement from the Petty Sessions at Bishop’s Stortford: ‘for it seemed as if the whole Pelham population had come to town. This arose from a “set-too” amongst the fair amazons of that village, whose pugnacious propensities have been handed down ever since the memorable year of 1086, when Hun, who first tempted, was vanquished by O’ Piers Shonks.’
Unfortunately no other record of this tantalising case has survived, but while it might be too large a claim to say that the Shonks legend was ubiquitous in that place, in those times, he was probably never that far from Pelham minds.
Or had something put them in mind of Shonks that morning?
Was something else going on that made those men eager to find evidence for the legend? Had someone questioned it and mocked the stories? In the 1840s, John Walker Ord interviewed a Mr Marr about the legend of Scaw the serpent-killer in Handale, North Yorkshire. Later Ord would write, ‘Of course we could not gainsay these facts, especially as they were recited with a determination that rendered argument dangerous.’ Challenging a legend had always been risky. In Bodmin in 1113 when a visiting French canon was foolish enough to scoff at the notion that King Arthur still lived he caused a riot. In Brittany at that time, it was said to be unsafe to assert in a public place that Arthur was dead: ‘Hardly will you escape unscathed without being whelmed by the curses or crushed by the stones of your hearers,’ reported Alain de Lille in the twelfth-century Prophetia Anglicana. If it wasn’t dangerous to scoff, it was certainly foolish, and still is – who is to say that the ‘set-too’ among the Amazons of the Pelhams was not because someone was foolish enough to suggest that Shonks did not slay a dragon.
In The Handbook of Folk-Lore, Charlotte Burne cautions the folklore collector to conceal incredulity and amusement and to suppress their smiles when encountering local beliefs and customs. Was the Reverend Soames a little too mirthful about Shonks, and vocal about it too? On the other hand, he may have been sour-faced and prayed the yew down. As the author of the History of the Reformation of the Church of England he would have known that the palming ceremony on Palm Sunday was banned in 1569, yet it continued for centuries on hilltops and in remote corners. The yew was a popular substitute for palm leaves. When Soames preached against Catholic-leaning innovations, did he also try to dispossess his flock of their superstitions, counselling that the yew tree should come down and pouring cold water on local legends about dragons?
The discovery of the dragon hole meant the villages had something to throw back at their parson with all his book learnin’. How could anyone deny the truth of the stories now they had found the dragon’s lair? What do you say to that, Reverend? If the discovery of the hole was a thumbing of the nose at authority, it may help us to understand the long-ago origins of the rest of the legends about Shonks. There are those who think that folk tales and legends were the folks’ response to their struggles against the feudal classes, their struggles for a better life.
In the 1830s, the folks’ traditions were under threat from even greater forces than the local vicar. Old ways of thinking about the world were changing. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology was published in three volumes between 1830 and 1833, while a disciple of Lyell was gathering evidence on a voyage that would completely change the way we look at the world. Charles Darwin was scrambling through the impenetrable forests of Chiloé Island in the winter of 1834, catching foxes by striking them on the head with a rock hammer, and meeting native Christian converts who still ‘pretended to old communication with the devil in certain caves’ and so risked the fate of forebears who had answered to the Inquisition. In the eyes of men of science, the villagers in the Pelhams might have seemed equally suitable subjects for anthropological observation. Such rationalists would have soon explained away the hole in the chalk and derided the existence of dragons.