Hollow Places

4

The Variety of Wonders caused some Suspition of the Truth of his Relations; but all things that seem improbable are not impossible, and the ignorance of the Reader does oftentimes weaken the Truth of the Author …

—Henry Chauncy, The Historical Antiquities of Hertfordshire, 1700

Folk legends, with their origins buried deep in the past, owe much to unseen forces; they are crafted gradually like limestone pillars on the seashore, eroded imperceptibly to their present shape by sea and wind and rain. For a time at least, they might resemble something recognisable: a witch’s face in profile, say, or a giant’s fist. Can we say what the rock originally looked like or what other shapes it has taken over thousands of years? Occasionally, however, it changes in a moment – when a storm sweeps away a large chunk – and the cause of the new shape can be discovered by listening to the old people or turning up the water-damaged logbook of a ship.

The shifting themes and motifs in the different versions of the Shonks legend made it clear that his story had changed many times over the centuries. Oral accounts must have morphed in the telling, and then, once people started writing them down, they could not resist dreaming up a detail or two of their own; eventually the oral tradition became a garbled version of early written accounts and vice versa. Old motifs were embellished by an eager storyteller, others borrowed, new emphases were made, traditions were misconstrued, meanings were forgotten and re-remembered back to front, small details were tacked on to add colour.

Was it possible to say where the detail t hat the dragon lived in a yew tree in Great Pepsells field had come from? Had it been there from the beginning? How was it passed down through the generations? Who first wrote it down? It was not mentioned by the cartographer John Norden in 1598, nor by the county historian Nathaniel Salmon, who was very taken with the legend in the early eighteenth century, nor even by Edward Brayley, who wrote at length on the tomb in his Beauties of England and Wales in 1808. In over twenty accounts of the legend by locals, antiquaries and journalists written before Wigram set down his version, not one mentioned the tree or the fields.

It is not impossible that an oral tradition about Pepsells had been overlooked by all these early chroniclers, but it is unlikely when every other element of the legend that we will meet in this book had found its way onto the page. By the early nineteenth century there were vague references to where the dragon lived. An account published in 1827 mentioned a location for the battle between Shonks and the dragon that took place on somewhere called Shonks’ Hill, which villagers still pointed out at the time. In 1865, the same year that Woolmore Wigram became vicar, Frances Wilson wrote to The Reliquary (A Depository for Precious Relics Legendary, Biographical and Historical, Illustrative of the Habits, Customs and Pursuits of our Forefathers). She had grown up in neighbouring Little Chishill, the daughter of the village blacksmith, and for the first time, in print at least, she associated the dragon’s lair with a tree, mentioning in passing that the beast occupied a tree in a meadow. But not one text in the first two hundred and ninety years of written accounts mentioned Great or Little Pepsells field, or a yew tree, until Wigram wrote his letter to the Hertfordshire Mercury. Anyone reading it in 1888, or since, would assume that the location of the dragon’s lair was part of the tradition before the men chopped down the yew. Subsequent accounts take Wigram at face value and name the field as if it had been a key part of the story long before the labourers uncovered the cavity beneath the tree. The woodcutters’ belief in the dragon’s cave became entwined with the story in such a way that the cave appears to have always been part of the tradition, but the textual evidence was clear: it was simply Wigram’s narrative conceit. The felling of the tree, especially Wigram’s account of that day years later, was a storm that in an instant changed the limestone pillar. I love W. G. Hoskins’ axiom that most things in the landscape are older than we think, but it is not always true, even of trees and fields and dragons’ lairs, but especially not the stories we tell about them.

In his famous essay ‘On the Cannibals’, Montaigne wrote that he would rather have a story from a plain ignorant fellow than an educated one:

for your better-bred sort of men are much more curious in their observation, ’tis true, and discover a great deal more; but then they gloss upon it, and to give the greater weight to what they deliver, and allure your belief, they cannot forbear a little to alter the story; they never represent things to you simply as they are, but rather as they appeared to them, or as they would have them appear to you, and to gain the reputation of men of judgement, and the better to induce your faith, are willing to help out the business with something more than is really true, of their own invention.

Wigram could not forbear to gloss and help out the business, but we should be glad of it, glad he played the storyteller. Wigram enriched the legend from the moment he responded to that newspaper query in 1888. Contrast that with the reaction of his contemporary John Edwin Cussans who had already called the stories about Shonks’ tomb ‘absurd traditions’ in his History of Hertfordshire. In 1888, the so-called ‘laughing historian’ followed the correspondence in the newspaper and then waded in with his own ex cathedra pronouncement. After trying to pour cold water on another Hertfordshire tradition, he added a spiteful coda: ‘I forebore to address you on the discussion which has recently taken place in your columns on the subject of Shonk’s tomb, as I thought I had sufficiently demolished the ridiculous tradition in my account of Furneaux [sic] Pelham.’ We will run into others like him, who boast of demolishing things and are proud of their own dragon-slaying and giant-killing exploits. Give us the Wigrams any day, even if they cannot resist tinkering.

‘If stories remain undisturbed they die of neglect,’ writes Philip Pullman, and Italo Calvino said something similar when he justified his own tampering with Italian folk tales with a Tuscan proverb: ‘The tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it.’ That is not to say anything goes. The wrong kind of change destroys more than it creates: you have to be true to the fact that people used to believe folk legends were true.

It was a clever bit of storytelling by the vicar, but we would not be happy if he had just made up the yew tree, the fields and the felling. We would feel cheated. As the folklorist Jacqueline Simpson has pointed out, we want a reason to say of our dragons and their slayings, ‘there was something in it after all’.

The realisation of Wigram’s conceit not only provided an unusually detailed instance of a folk legend metamorphosing – and perhaps a model for how other parts of the legend had been seeded or transformed – it completely changed the nature of my curiosity. I no longer had to wrestle with what it meant to find a cave under a tree that according to tradition grew over a dragon’s lair, because that was back to front: the tradition did not begin until the day the tree was felled. But the question remaining is even more curious: why on finding a cavity under a tree in a field with no previous connection to the legend did those nineteenth-century labourers think of the dragon that Shonks slew?

This hints at much about folk legends and their status within communities as recently as the 1830s. Stories about dragons and their holes are assumed to have medieval origins, conjured by medieval minds as they conjured up other strange creatures to populate bestiaries, adorn the edges of manuscripts and support the corbel tables of churches, but nineteenth-century agricultural labourers? Was the legend so powerful and so ubiquitous in the Pelhams that when uneducated farm workers found an unexpected cavity under a yew tree they immediately turned to the legend of a dragon-slayer for an explanation?

That such wonders hid in the fields and spinneys of the English countryside so recently is a delight, as well as a reminder that folk legends differed from folk tales – that were never believed and told only for entertainment – by the evidence in the real world as well as in the story: the hilltop, the gravestone, the tree that sages can point at and say: ‘You can still see it today’. It proves the legend.

I was first attracted to Shonks’ story by the yew tree in a named field. Finding such survivals, tangible evidence for stories and folk legends, is psychologically very appealing. At the beginning of Albion, her compendium of English folk legends, the folklorist Jennifer Westwood quotes Walter de la Mare: ‘Who would not treasure a fragment of Noah’s Ark, a lock of Absalom’s hair, Prester John’s thumb-ring, Scheherazade’s night lamp, a glove of Caesar’s or one of King Alfred’s burnt cakes?’

Such wonders have been called mnemonic bridges that help us connect with the past. It is the reason people have venerated fragments of the cross, or followed in the footsteps of Caesar and Alexander. It is the attraction of the perennial plot device in children’s stories where the young hero or heroine awakes in bed thinking they dreamed it all, only to find the golden coin in their dressing-gown pocket, proving they had really been there. Coleridge once imagined a dream about Paradise where he was given flowers and awoke to find them beside him, and Hans Christian Andersen knew the power of objects that crossed the boundary between fantasy and reality when at the end of his little story ‘The Princess and the Pea’ he wrote: ‘The pea was exhibited in the royal museum; and you can go there and see it, if it hasn’t been stolen. Now that was a real story!’

Objects that locate legends in a real landscape possess some archetypal magic. Some place the story in a distant, fantastical past, while others root it in the everyday. Some tales explain oddly shaped hills and standing stones by the antics of immense dragons, giants or the devil, but a yew tree in a field has the commonplace about it, the evidence is on a more human scale. There was a real tree, chopped down by real people, in a field with a name. It was important for the legend. Such things can be the reason stories prevail. Yet here was a strange instance of that rule because the yew did not ensure the survival of the legend by providing a regular, visible reminder of that story, since on the very day it became part of that story someone removed it from the landscape. It was an artefact, both in the sense that its significance lay in the workmanship of the woodcutters and in the sense that its place in the story was a remnant of the storytelling process. In spite of this, it undoubtedly helped to perpetuate the tale and did so largely thanks to Wigram’s rhetorical device.

The Shonks legend had the moat named for him and a mysterious tomb, and now it had a magical tree on the edge of Great Pepsells field as well.

5

Field names and Folk-lore are naturally classed together; both alike speak to us of the lives and customs of our forefathers; of creeds and cults, long since abandoned, but still surviving, though unrecognised, to these modern days.

—U. B. Chisenhale-Marsh, 1906

In the late 1930s, the English Place-Name Society asked schoolchildren to save the names of England’s fields before they were lost and forgotten for ever. In the fourteenth year of her forty-four-year reign as headmistress of Furneux Pelham School, Miss Evelyn Prior heard the call to arms and sent her pupils out to interview the farmers and field hands. The parish magazine for March 1937 records that: ‘With the aid of the school children and an Ordnance map and a few other helpers, and at the request of the County Council, Miss Prior, the headmistress of our school has drawn up a list of the names of all the fields of the parish.’

Did they find Great and Little Pepsells?

These names situate the yew in the real world, and evoke a bygone landscape. As with tithe customs, field names once again bring us into the territory of collective memories and tradition. The folklore collector Charlotte Burne said that all such ‘trifling relics’ were important for the study of social history: local sayings, rhymes, even the bell-jingles (the words that the different peals of church bells are supposed to ‘say’). ‘They reflect the rural life of past generations, with its anxieties, its trivialities, its intimate familiarity with Nature, and its strong local preoccupations.’ They helped make us what we are.

In Reverend Wigram’s day, the countryside was not numbered by bureaucrats but named by, and for, the people who worked it. Our landscapes and sense of the spaces around us were richer and more highly developed than today, or at least that is what the names would suggest. Today field names can help us recover that landscape from the blandscapes of modernity and to see our world with fresh eyes. Every parcel of cultivated land in the country had a name – more often than not one that can tell us something interesting about the land and put us in touch with the past.

It has been said that place names are linguistic fossils containing within them extinct words; they are often dense with information. They carry echoes of the dead, how they worked the land, their hopes and struggles, and the stories they told each other.

In many places, the fields themselves have disappeared. The London Borough of Ealing is not somewhere you naturally associate with the countryside, but it is the subject of the first of the English Place-Name Society’s series of Field-Name Studies written in 1976. Here beneath the pavements and Victorian villas are forgotten pastures that remember the names of local men known to have been on an early fourteenth-century list of the local militia. Other names will tell you where those men and their descendants built a dovecote, a menagerie, or ice house, where they quarried clay, farmed rabbits, or struggled to make crops grow in a stony field.

John Field, the aptly named historian and taxonomist of English field names, arranged them into useful categories. There are names that describe the shape of a field (Harps), its wild plants (Cockerels), the productivity of the land (Smallops), or long-lost buildings (Duffers). Its size (Pightle or Thousand Acres), how it was farmed (Lammas Meadow), and industrial uses (Brick Kiln Meadow). He came up with twenty-six types in all.

The meanings, as you have probably noticed, are not always self-explanatory, although Harps is easy: it should be a triangular-shaped field. Cockerels on the other hand is a false friend. Field names can morph in a process that gradually transforms a strange-sounding word into something familiar that seems to fit – philologists call this ‘popular etymology’. So Cockerels was originally Cocklers – from the weed corn cockle – and nothing to do with male chickens. Similar forces tinker with our folk tales and our urban myths, and in such ways dragons are sometimes born and giants set free to stalk the land. A well-known instance of popular etymology is Gravesend; there is one in Kent and another on the border of the Pelhams, and no doubt elsewhere. A friend told me recently that the local Gravesend was named for the plague victims who were buried there in the seventeenth century; she suspected this because Gravesend in Kent was apparently so-called because the London dead were washed down the Thames and ended up there, where they were buried. It is a good story, but a quick check of the place-name dictionaries tells us that both places were so-called centuries before the plague, before the Black Death even, and probably owed their monikers to local landowners called Graves.

Some field names have simply become mumbles of the original: how does Smallops tell us about the productivity of the land? For Smallops read Small Hopes. The meaning of Duffers has also been submerged in the argot of the agricultural labourer. For Duffers read Dovecote. Other names are made from obsolete words: a pightle is a small field, while a croat or croft is a small piece of land often attached to a house and usually enclosed. Thousand Acres is, of course, usually a very small field. If we ask why Lammas Meadow tells us something about how a field was farmed we can find an answer rich with 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.