And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.

—A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 5, Scene 1

On a summer’s afternoon in the early years of the twentieth century, a group of Edwardian gentlemen processed through a field of close scrub in Brent Pelham like men who had lost something important. The ground was unremarkable, broken and tumbled down to woodland, but was bound by wide and now stagnal ditches dug with great effort some seven or eight centuries earlier to fashion a moat. The members of the East Hertfordshire Archaeological Society were searching for signs of a half-remembered house that had once stood there, but I hope that some among them were looking for something more, hoping to catch sight of a great rumour in its infancy, to detect, in a broken blade of grass perhaps, the long-ago path Piers Shonks took on the day legend says he bested a dragon.

See you the dimpled track that runs,

All hollow through the wheat?

O that was where they hauled the guns

That smote King Philip’s fleet.

Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Puck’s Song’ didn’t appear in print until the following year, but the archaeological imagination it embodies was no doubt at work that summer’s day in 1905 as those men tried to find something hidden beneath tussock and root that would carry them back to the distant past.

A local newspaper report of the day’s excursion called it ‘a moated site of some two and a half acres across upon which once stood the castle of the celebrated Piers Shonks, the slayer of the Pelham Dragon’. The castle (if not the dragon and its slayer) was a fiction. Most moats that trench the countryside are not the stuff of medieval sieges, but are homestead moats built around new farms and manor houses in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by men ostentatiously proclaiming their independent status and their membership of the knightly class – or their aspirations to it. They were especially popular on the boulder clay of East Anglia. Oliver Rackham has written that anyone who has dug as much as a posthole in the clay will be in awe of the labour that went into excavating an entire moat, so people must have had a good reason to do it. They may have served a practical purpose as fishponds, or as a ready water supply for putting out fires, or for drainage or sewerage, and they must have offered some degree of deterrence to passing robbers and rapists, the notorious trailbastons – vagabonds with big sticks – of the period, but many historians agree that moats were first and foremost a status symbol.

William Blyth Gerish, the man who had organised the trip that afternoon, was careful to call the vanished building a house and not a castle. To the Elizabethans, the moated site had been plain old Shonkes. It was by then an ‘ancient and decayed place’. Known as Shonkes Barn in the eighteenth century, it was said it would soon ‘lose its name in all likelyhood with its substance, which is in a very tottering condition’. The prediction proved partly true. Thomas Hollingworth’s beautiful Georgian estate map of Beeches Farm in green and yellow watercolours shows a neat four-sided moat identified in the key simply as Nursery & Moat, the building forgotten and seemingly the hero’s name as well, but all is not lost: the adjacent fields are labelled Shonks Farmyard and Shonks Hoppett. Some forty years later, a new survey showed that the moat had been extended and gained an extra enclosure; it was now The Hoppits & Shonks Garden. Shonks played on people’s minds and their superstitions in those parts: writing at Clifton School in Bristol in 1872, one pretentious schoolboy from near the Pelhams noted that by night Shonks Garden is ‘studiously avoided by the simple villagers’. Other locals were less easily spooked, treasuring the moated old pasture, not only for its association with their hero, but also for its early summer carpet of narcissus, the double white jonquil.

The earliest large-scale Ordnance Survey map has it as Shonk’s Moat (in the gothic typeface reserved for antiquities) and clearly shows a double moat arrangement forming two islands. By 1905, when the archaeological society visited, a fishpond remained, and the arms of the moat were mostly dry. The only clues that there had once been a building were the traces of foundations, which still dimpled the turf.

A photograph, perhaps taken earlier that day, shows William Gerish standing behind the Brent Pelham stocks and whipping post, looking younger than his forty-one years, his face framed by a neat dagger-shaped beard and a straw boater. A bank clerk by day, the indefatigable Mr Gerish is best characterised by pointing to his magnum opus, Monumental Inscriptions, for which he trawled the churches and graveyards of Hertfordshire recording some 70,000 inscriptions on strips of paper that he and his wife pasted into thirteen volumes in alphabetical order– a pursuit that was said to have destroyed his health and contributed to his premature death at the age of fifty-six.

Gerish was part of what became known as the nationwide folklore revival, avidly collecting local stories and publishing them in one shilling pamphlets. It was one of these that Gerish read to his fellow archaeological society members that Thursday afternoon in July 1905. It was called A Hertfordshire St George, or the story of Piers Shonks and the Pelham Dragon. While he had chosen for his stage the countryside where Shonks once lived, Gerish’s pamphlet paid greater attention to the home of his adversary. In fact, Gerish’s chief claim to originality is his treatment of the yew tree, its felling and the dragon’s lair beneath it. He had first written about the incident in an article for Folklore three years earlier; written about a ‘terrible dragon kennelled under a yew tree which stood between what were afterwards two fields called Great and Little Pepsells’, adding the surprising news that the tree had been chopped down some years before and the dragon’s cave found in its roots. Gerish’s papers in the Hertfordshire Archives reveal the original source for this story to be a series of letters in the Hertfordshire Mercury from some fifteen years earlier. A correspondent identified only as D.E. set the ball rolling with a query published in late February 1888:

Brent Pelham: There is a man buried under the foundation on the north side of Brent Pelham Church of the name of Shonks. Can any of the readers of the Mercury give the reason why he was buried there, and also the date of the year he was buried? —D.E.

The year 1888 was a good one for enquiring about bones. On 23 January, the remains of a skeleton were discovered in a stone coffin in the eastern crypt of Canterbury Cathedral that some would claim were the lost relics of St Thomas Becket. The story broke in The Times early in February, sparking a series of letters to the editor and a controversy that has lasted to the present day. I cannot help but wonder if D.E., whoever he or she was, thought to question the identity of Shonks because of the excitement over Becket’s bones.

There were several replies: quoting the various county historians on the matter, describing the tomb and giving versions of the inscription over it. Between them, the authors of each letter managed to encompass most of the traditions: here was Shonks the Lord of the Manor who supposedly died in 1086, Shonks the giant who got the better of a rival, Shonks the dragon-slayer, and Shonks who cheated the devil. But the most interesting letter by far ran in the paper on 17 March, and came from a local vicar with a name like a hardwearing fabric; he was the alliterated Reverend Woolmore Wigram, and what he had to say would change the centuries-old folk legend for ever.

3

On what occasions are stories told? Is there a story-telling season? Do particular stories belong to particular occasions? For what purposes are they told? For instruction or warning, or simply for amusement?

—Charlotte Sophia Burne, The Handbook of Folk-Lore, 1914

In a letter written towards the end of his life, Reverend Woolmore Wigram recalled that the story of the dragon’s lair found under a yew tree belonged to a particular occasion in the 1860s; to one of his traditional tithe luncheons. This was the annual meeting when the parson and the farmers agreed – or more likely disagreed – on the tax due to the church. Traditionally held in Brent Pelham on the second Friday in December, there could hardly be a more apt occasion to discuss the old stories. Tithes were part and parcel of the customs of the village. Onerous, contentious and unedifying, tithes are an entertaining way to glimpse the lives of the folk, their personalities, their world and their preoccupations.

Though familiar themes crop up everywhere, ancient tithing customs were particular to each parish. Today they read like magic potions: toad under cold stone, days and nights has forty-one, could well be the vicar’s due at Lammastide. As well as the joy of otherness and unfamiliar words to justify time spent with tithe records, they are also especially instructive for anyone chasing old stories. They challenge us to unravel them, to reveal lost ways of making sense of the world and to shed light on the long-forgotten machinations of the stock characters of village life: impecunious parsons, resentful husbandmen and bombastic squires.

Tithes were organic and multi-layered, built out of cunning millers and higglers’ horses, village personalities, stolen land, ancient disputes, forgotten farming practices and lost ways of life. While farmers and most tithe payers of the past would be delighted to know of their utter obliteration, we are right to be anxious that something has been lost with their passing, and we should treasure the traces we have left. In this they are like local legends: Piers Shonks has fought many battles but none more important than the battle between memory and forgetting.

In about 1902 Wigram wrote to Gerish, ‘I will send you another time the legend of O. Piers Shonks; as I heard it from the Inhabitants, at my Tithe Audits when the good folk used to pay their 1/6 or 2/ worth of tithe (quite punctually) and sit down to cold beef bread & cheese & conversation; and give me all the folk-lore.’

Was it simply that the luncheon was held at the Yew Tree Inn, a popular village meeting place since the middle of the previous century, and Wigram asked about village yews and one story led to another? Perhaps someone was talking about the tithes due on mature timber in the old days when his neighbour mentioned what was found under the oldest of all trees in those parts, back when Reverend Soames was vicar and busy writing his books instead of earning his tithes, back when churchwarden Morris was farming the tithes in Brent Pelham and making himself very unpopular? A story to impress or entertain the new vicar. ‘Are dragon’s eggs tithable, Reverend?’ somebody quipped.

Woolmore Wigram became vicar of both Brent and Furneux Pelham in 1864 and held the post for twelve years. In his early thirties when he arrived, Wigram was a mutton-chopped and muscular Christian, a founding member of the Alpine Club. Just two years before he arrived in the Pelhams, he had braved storms that had turned his hair white with icicles and driven frozen spicules into his face as he made the first successful ascent of the White Tooth, La Dent Blanche, near Zermatt. At over 14,000 feet, it was considered one of the hardest climbs in the Alps. How would he occupy himself in countryside that was pleasantly undulating but with no discernible peaks? Perhaps he might turn his hand to more scholarly pursuits, to folklore and local history.

The clergy had gradually been replacing the squire as the keepers of parish history. An early local history manual urged clergymen to collect field names and look into the parish chest to find accounts from the Overseers of the Poor so they could write the history of ordinary people. Wigram was one of the more enlightened local historians, someone who would not restrict himself to title deeds and the genealogies of those in the Big House. He also cared about the folk and their customs: what they remembered and what they valued.

Tithes are almost as alien to most of us today as dragons, but baffling customs, grumbling farmers and greedy vicars added piquancy to life in your average village. For centuries tithes were paid in kind – in other words, the tithe on piglets was paid in piglets. As endless legal cases testified, what was owed to the church was often cause for much debate: at times desperate clergy, eager to increase their incomes, had been known to claim that stones in a field were subject to tithe. Others were said to have demanded tithe on the ‘germins’ or shoots growing from the roots of felled trees (although these anecdotes, told against the church, have the ring of the apocryphal, or at least exceptional, about them). In 1727, Alexander Pope in his description of a fictional parish clerk’s memoirs jokes that there are ‘seventy chapters containing an exact detail of the Law-suits of the Parson and his Parishioners concerning tythes, and near an hundred pages left blank, with an earnest desire that the history might be compleated by any of his successors, in whose time these suits should be ended’.

There were two main types of tithe: great and small. Great tithes were paid on the produce of the land – grain, hay, fruit, timber – and these usually went to the rector, who in the Pelhams, owing to a shady deal done in 1160, was the Treasurer of St Paul’s Cathedral. After the dissolution of the monasteries in Henry VIII’s reign, some third of all great tithes in the country ended up in the hands of lay rectors, who had nothing to do with the church. Once tithes could be bought and sold like any other property, the moral and religious argument for paying them became increasingly hard to make.

The small tithes were paid on those things resulting from the produce of the land – pigs, chickens, milk, cheese, eggs, fatting beasts, geese and bees. In the Pelhams, by custom, the small tithes also included potatoes, turnips, clover, herbs and aftermouth (grass from the second mowing). These were paid to the rector’s representative on the ground, the vicar, who was wise to keep detailed accounts and records of parish customs. In the 1730s, the vicar of Furneux with Brent Pelham, Reverend Charles Wheatly, did just that. On 4 May 1732, Wheatly visited the aptly named Farmer Pigg to claim his tithe of seven lambs. By this date, he would normally accept a cash payment, but the two men were unable to agree on a price. Wheatly set down what happened in his account book: ‘[Mr Pigg] had 75 lambs, offered 3 s. a piece for my seven: But I refused it & drew them out in kind … I took one Ram, 5 Ewes & one Weather [sic]: & in lieu of the tithe of the remaining 5 lambs, I took a lame infirm one.’

Other parishioners paid with a fat goose on Lammas Day, in honey or wax or bushels of apples. Tithe eggs were due in Lent: two for every hen and three for every cock, ‘whether they be fowls ducks or turkeys’ according to custom. Some paid by work: a William Keene settled his tithe by ‘making the hay of the Close’. Among the more unusual forms of payment were brass ‘nozels’, pricked bricks or bottles of tent – a low-alcohol Spanish wine used for the sacrament.

The tithe customs had been written down at much the same time as the first references to the exploits of Piers Shonks. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, William Bishop, the vicar of Brent Pelham, sued Richard Dalton for seven years’ worth of tithes on the underwood, that is the smaller woodland trees that were used for fuel or to make poles or fences and such like. Dalton, however, knew the customs of his village, which included such arcane and impenetrable rules as: ‘If a lamb was sold with its Damme between Lady Day and St George’s Day the tithe for every lamb would be 4 d.’ Another dictated that not all the underwood in the Pelhams was tithable; they were usually paid on coppice wood, lopped wood and wood from springs and hedgerows, but they were not paid on any underwood that was used to repair hedges and fences. And so Dalton won the case, and all the customs that were confirmed and written down at the time would still be guiding the villagers and confusing the vicar when Master Lawrence felled the yew tree centuries later.

Tithes, like old stories, were under threat in the early nineteenth century. They were gradually monetised, stripped of their interest, homogenised and made intangible. The traditions that went with them would soon fade from memory. Over the years, clergy and tithe farmers found it increasingly tiresome to keep track of all the ringes of wood and bushels and pecks of barley. The counting, weighing, transport, storage and use of tithes in kind could be costly and burdensome. It distracted incumbents from less worldly concerns and it was in most people’s interest to convert tithes to regular cash payments. This had happened in many places in a piecemeal way since the Middle Ages, and by the eighteenth century many tithe owners agreed on fixed sums known as compositions. For a while, some agreed a fixed sum, but still settled their bill in kind. Like Richard Hagger who paid his annual 3s. 6d. in honey and apples.

By the 1830s, it was observed that no tithe had been collected in kind in living memory. Wrested from tradition, they would eventually be easier to do away with. Throughout the early years of the nineteenth century, there was growing agitation nationally to reform the system. Tithes were accused of being a tax on industry and land improvement and caused particular resentment among the growing ranks of non-conformists, who did not see why they should be financing the Church of England. As agricultural methods changed, it became ever harder to decide whether something was tithable and in what way. Turnips might be tithable, but then again not, it depended on whether they were grown to feed animals or people. How about partridges? Acorns? Charcoal?

When Master Lawrence felled the yew tree, the last days of the old tithe system had come, but vestiges of it lingered on, and traditions such as tithe luncheons were still around thirty years later, when two members of his family played a prominent role at them. The brothers Thomas and James Lawrence were variously master carpenters, constables, sub-postmasters, grocers, innkeepers and, for many years, parish clerks in both Furneux and Brent Pelham. One or both of them were also good storytellers.

Before his death in 1907, the then Canon Wigram, casting his mind back some forty years to his tithe luncheons, wrote two letters to W. B. Gerish about Shonks that provide several clues to the identity of the man who told him about the yew tree. His informant was a Master Lawrence, who was not only related to the woodcutter, but also remembered the tree. This Lawrence worked at the post office and was also his parish clerk, which should narrow things down, but describes both Thomas in Furneux and his brother James in Brent Pelham. Perhaps both regaled Wigram with village history, but in Wigram’s last known letter to Gerish, written in July 1905, which he begins by saying he has already told Gerish everything he can about Shonks, we learn that it was Thomas Lawrence who told Wigram old stories about the village, and so he emerges as the prime candidate for tale-spinner-in-chief.

What Wigram didn’t learn about the yew tree at the tithe luncheon he must have found out later through conversations with Thomas, facts he finally set down on paper in February 1888 when he wrote to the Hertfordshire Mercury, replying to D.E.’s question about Piers Shonks’ tomb. His letter concluded with the following story:

In subsequent ages the yew tree was cut down by a labourer well known to my informant, the parish clerk. The man began his work in the morning, but left it at breakfast time, and on his return found that the old tree had fallen, collapsing into a large cavity underneath its roots. That such cavities have been found in other cases under old yew trees I have been told. Whether this one was simply enlarged by the dragon for his own convenience, or whether it was wholly dug out by that creature’s claws, there is no evidence to show.

This is the earliest account of the felling of the tree. Was Wigram preserving custom or creating it? If true, it posed some fascinating questions. Was the cavity visible before the tree came down? Had it played a role in the origin of the legend, or at least in the tradition that the dragon lived under a tree in that field? Many of the written accounts said that the dragon had lived in Great Pepsells field, others said it had lived under a yew tree in the field. Had tradition always associated the dragon with that particular tree and, more to the point, had Master Lawrence known that when he set his axe to its roots?

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