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On the mezzanine stairs in his library are carvings taken from a staircase that was originally made for Brent Pelham Hall in the late seventeenth century.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.
Ted pulled a small slipcase from the shelves and unfolded an old cloth-backed 25-inch Ordnance Survey map onto the carpet. It had been coloured and annotated over the years to show the extent of the Barclays’ Brent Pelham estate. Joseph Gurney Barclay, the banker and prominent Quaker, bought the manor of Brent Pelham in the middle of the nineteenth century and over time the family expanded their holdings, so the Barclays owned a fair portion of farmland in Furneux Pelham too. Surveying his domain, Ted traced a long finger across fields, across Nether Rackets, High Field and Lady Pightle.
He was looking for dragons and eventually tapped his finger on an irregularly shaped field defined by two blocks of ancient woodland: Great Hormead Park at the south-western corner and Patricks Wood on the eastern edge. It was labelled St Patricks Hill on the 1930s school map, but Ted was sure: this was Great Pepsells. After all, the land had been part of the Barclay estate for over a hundred years. It is in Furneux Pelham, bounded by Brent Pelham to the east and Great Hormead to the west.
If Ted was right, Woolmore Wigram may well have been telling the truth after all. There was certainly plenty of room for a dragon’s lair in the field, one of the largest in the Pelhams. Ted recalled that it had been the longest run of the steam plough, and during the Second World War the farmers filled it with old machinery to stop enemy planes landing. (Patricks Wood still concealed the rusting carcasses.)
Just so there could be no doubt, Ted produced an old notebook marked: Fields in Brent and Furneux Pelham: Owner-Occupiers-Area 1784. It was an eighteenth-century tithe book that had once belonged to a Robert Comyns, and inked into the columns of the first page were the fields owned by the Lord of the Manor in Furneux. There was no Great or Little Pepsells, but there were Pipsels and Pepsels in company with Nether Rackets, High Field and Lady Pightle, locating them just where Ted said they ought to be.
Great Pepsells was not the only field I discovered that day in Beeches. Next to the library in the old gunroom, hung a Victorian copy of ‘The Field of Cloth of Gold’. The original print was once famous for its vastness and for the man-hours expended to make it cover twelve square feet of plaster with so many tents and Tudor courtiers. Completed in 1773, it was the largest print ever made. The painter Edward Edwards spent 160 days at Windsor Castle copying the original oil for James Basire the Elder, who then took another two years to engrave the copper plate. Four hundred copies were pressed onto bespoke sheets of paper made for the occasion by the great paper-maker James Whatman in a sheet-size still known as Antiquarian. It was a print as ambitious as the event it commemorated.
It depicts the extraordinary pageant held in June 1520 when Henry VIII and the French King Francis I tried to outdo each other for excess and machismo in the Pale of Calais. Here was an endlessly diverting blend of historical detail, make-believe and mythmaking. Here were hundreds of richly costumed courtiers and halberdiers parading through a Barnum and Bailey landscape constructed specially for the occasion. The two larger-than-life kings embrace in a Big Top as knights gallop through the lists behind them, and men drink claret from fountains.
The Society of Antiquaries valued such paintings as historical documents, and scholars tried to tease out the factual from the fabulous – no easy task when the facts were so extraordinary anyway and the fabulous might symbolise much that was real. Take the statues of the three dragon-slayers on Henry’s extraordinary temporary palace. The showy Renaissance edifice was richly decorated with figures, but when Sydney Anglo published a detailed examination of the painting in the 1960s, he ruled that the dragon-slayers were figments of the painter’s imagination.
Another, much larger dragon, a magnificent, bearded wyvern, is painted in the sky above Calais. Whereas it is uncertain whether the painter portrayed the dragons on the gate accurately, presumably we can say with some confidence that there was no real dragon at the event, although chroniclers did write of one screaming through the
