Christi mass. Historians cannot agree what this was. Some say that there was a ‘Flying Dragon’ firework display, others that it was perhaps a kite in the shape of a salamander released prematurely during the service. Whatever it was, it must have been a strange omen to some sixteenth-century minds. Today, the airborne dragon stands for the spirit of the piece: the myth and history, the real and the make-believe side by side. It stands as a cipher for all the fabulous but true features of the occasion, because ambitious as the painting and its print are, they cannot hold a torch to the real event.
There were not hundreds of soldiers, gentry and nobility, but over ten thousand. Their clothes were so fine that one French eyewitness said noblemen were walking around with their estates on their back because they had mortgaged their lands to finance the cloth. The temporary palace contained five thousand square feet of the finest glass ever made. A fountain ran with claret, but if you preferred beer, the English had brought 14,000 gallons with them – presumably to wash down their other rations: 9,000 plaice, 8,000 whiting, 4,000 sole, 3,000 crayfish, 700 conger eels, 300 oxen, 2,000 chickens, 1,200 capons, 2,000 sheep and over 300 heron. As Melvyn Bragg said when his BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time tackled the occasion, ‘The fun is in the detail.’ And that great dragon in the sky stands for the detail that the picture, for all its intricacy, can only hint at.
Encountering that print during my quest for Great Pepsells was serendipitous: with its associations, its mysteries, its vivid historical detail, its poetic licence, its riddles, its unwitting challenge to find out just how much history it contained, and, of course, its dragons.
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
—Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851
Ancient yews stand few and far between. Did one really straddle the boundary of Great and Little Pepsells until the early nineteenth century? A four-foot by three-foot oblong of greying parchment lies unfolded on the chart table at the Hertfordshire Archives, held flat by weighted leather snakes to reveal a jigsaw puzzle of Furneux Pelham’s fields. The 1836 Act of Parliament that did away with tithes had the wonderful side effect of creating remarkable encyclopedic maps and surveys, covering some 80 per cent of English parishes. Every field within the parish bounds is there, numbered and surveyed at six chains, or 132 yards, to every inch, some enclosed shortly before the map was made, neat and geometrical, others with edges softened by time and use, squashed polygons, their boundaries meandering and dog-legged to attest to their antiquity. The odd large field bears a dotted line intersected by S-marks to tie fields together that were not then enclosed, but considered separate. Thin yellow roads run east to west and north to south partitioning the village. Along them, in two or three places, buildings cluster in plan: red for homes and grey for all the others, the church indicated by a cross, the windmill a small crude X on a stick. There are avenues of trees, blocks of woodland, ponds and the River Ash roughly bisecting the map.
It was surveyed a hundred years before Miss Prior’s school map, and whereas her students had found some 300 field names, the tithe maps for Brent and Furneux Pelham list over 400. Some names had swapped fields over time: Handpost Field is on the other side of the road – perhaps the handpost moved, or more likely the children or the surveyors made a mistake. Many changed their names, becoming more poetic, like Moat Duffers, which was originally Dove House Field, or less so, like Violets Meadow, which was once the much lovelier Fylets. The field identified as Great Pepsells by Ted Barclay, but St Patricks Hill by the school map, is five separate fields on the tithe: ancient enclosures amalgamated by Victorian landowners. On the western boundary, no. 7 is simply Spring, and no. 8 the self-explanatory eleven-acre field called Ten Acres. On the eastern edge is no. 10 Wood Field, and part of no. 12, the delightful Lady Pightle. There, in the middle, is no. 9, Pepsels and directly to the north is field no. 5, known then as Pipsels Mead.
Strikingly, a track is marked on the tithe map crossing the intersection of Pepsels, Nether Rackets, Pipsels Mead and Ten Acres fields. This track might have passed straight through the stile in the yew tree. The track – a tunnel of dashed lines on the map – goes no further, as if it led to something no longer there. The countryside is marked with these strange paths to nowhere, or rather paths to the past.
The good Reverend Wigram had not made up the names of Great and Little Pepsells after all, so perhaps no one had invented the tree either. The boundary between them was a real place and you could visit it still. There may even be something in the rest of the tale, if once again we allow the logic of that rustic who would not have believed a word of Shonks’ tale if he hadn’t seen the place in the wall with his own eyes. There was certainly a field, so we might as well believe that there was a tree, but what was an ancient yew of all trees doing growing there astride a track in the middle of nowhere?
A single yew alone outside a churchyard is a great rarity – with or without a dragon’s lair. Of the 311 ancient yews known in Britain, very few are not – and have never been – associated with a known church or religious site, and an ancient yew growing anywhere at all is an unfamiliar sight in the countryside around the Pelhams: there are none in Cambridgeshire, Essex or Bedfordshire, and just two surviving ancient yews known in Hertfordshire – both in churchyards. There are a further seven veteran yews in the county – that is trees between 500 and 1,200 years old according to the latest classification by the Ancient Yew Group – but they are all linked to a church.
The nearest non-churchyard yew is a lone veteran growing in Hatfield Forest some sixteen miles away. Although Oliver Rackham insisted that it was only 230 years old, ‘and should be remembered by anyone who supposes that big yews must always be of fabulous age’. Recent analysis by an arborist suggests that the tree is much older and has a smaller circumference than you’d expect because it has spent much of its life in the shade. Perched on the edge of the decoy lake, sloughing off the bark of its many-corded bole, it conceals the mysterious cavities of ancient yew. Its existence gives us some confidence that our yew is within the geographical distribution of these curious trees.
Nearer to the Pelhams, a remarkable specimen lingers in the churchyard of St James the Great, in Thorley, near Bishop’s Stortford. Ringed by precarious gravestones, the main trunk appears to be made from many closely packed smaller trunks, like the product of black fairy magic, an impenetrable palisade of thick stakes imprisoning some secret. A terrible secret: the tree has been hollowed out by arson, its innards gone, and what remains is dreadfully tormented and charcoaled. Yet still it lives and grows and puts out new leaves. Yews are extraordinary trees. In the church is a certificate, from when the Conservation Foundation ran its Yew Tree Campaign in the 1980s, attesting that the tree is 1,000 years old. Ancient yews are now defined as those over 800 years old, with no upper age limit, but determining the age of yews is about as controversial as botany gets. Tim Hills of the Ancient Yew Group writes that the science has moved on a lot since those certificates were awarded based on the ideas of Allen Meredith in his influential The Sacred Yew. Regardless of its age, the yew at Thorley is rightly something to be revered.
Robert Blair in his eighteenth-century poem ‘The Grave’ calls the yew a cheerless, unsocial plant that loves to spend its time in the midst of skulls and coffins. Illustrating the poem, William Blake depicted the tree’s only merriment as ghosts and shades performing their mystic dance around the trunk under a wan moon, but in his watercolour the tree is at the centre, it is evergreen and blue, not
