each piece was cut.’
Soon there would be loppings of a yew in Lawrence’s yard.
At that hour, women would be fetching water in buckets hanging from yokes, carters were securing the traces to horses while young boys baited them. Old timers might already be warming themselves at the furnace in James Funston’s Smithy. A man could speak freely there without being held to his word.
The track to the tree led south, following the boundary between Church Hill Field and Broadley Shot. Small children with chilblains hobble along in hard boots – off to pick flints or clean turnips. From the northern edge of Chalky Field it was little more than half a mile south and then west to Patricks Wood, and beyond the hornbeams lay Great and Little Pepsells where the labourers could set down their stoneware jars and their shovels and axes.
The spot was oddly remote. It is the landscape of M. R. James’s ghost story ‘A Neighbour’s Landmark’ that is one minute picturesque, the next, with the changing of the light, bleak, frightening and vulnerable to supernature. Imagine this spot on a grey winter’s morning setting your axe to a village landmark and the only building in view is the tower of the church within whose walls an ancient legend sleeps. Marked by a small triangle where three fields meet, hemmed by three parish boundaries and two dark blocks of woodland, it was the kind of place where gallows once stood, or gibbets swung – places where suicides and strangers were buried. Yews are known to have been used as hanging trees. Such knowledge might well have worked upon the minds of those men that morning. W. B. Gerish is good on this, writing of an older time, of the medieval winter when ‘The spirit world was abroad, riding in every gale, hiding in the early and late darkness of evening among the shadows of the farmhouse, of the rickyard, of the misty meadows, of the dark-some wood. Ghosts – we talk about ghosts, but our ancestors lived with them from All Hallows to Candlemas.’
R. M. Healey in his Shell Guide to Hertfordshire is generous about the countryside thereabouts, finding in it Samuel Palmer’s elegiac landscape paintings, better Palmer’s dark etchings from his final years after he had grown angry at the plight of the agricultural labourer.
In the right weather, the wrong weather, the view belongs in the old nurse’s tale that troubled Jane Eyre’s imagination, making her think of Thomas Bewick’s engraving of a ‘black horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows’. But so would many such views in England: the historian John Lowerson has written about the ‘popular sense of an eternal cosmic battle between good and evil that is being fought out in an essentially rural English context’. Our yew site is a place as good as any for such battles, for stories, for putting ideas in men’s heads about dragons and their slayers. Was it the place as much as the belief that a dragon once stalked those parts that would soon make them think they’d found a dragon’s lair?
Farm labourers worked from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the winter. Six shillings a week was a usual wage, but felling timber was paid by the load: one shilling for fifty cubic feet. You can do the working out. John Carrington’s oak we met in the last chapter would have earned them fifteen shillings. Was it blood money enough? Were they superstitious about their task that day? No doubt there were those who thought that chopping down a yew brought bad luck. Plant lore is thick with injunctions against bringing down trees. The folklorist Jeremy Harte, writing about the Isle of Man, tells of the seemingly lonely places where ‘locals know about the elder trees that should never be touched, not since the farmer hacked them back, and hanged himself in the barn that night’. But Harte is writing about fairies, and it is thorn trees and elders, not yews, that must be left alone. But a yew was also a sacred tree to many: ‘A bed in hell is prepared for him / Who cut the tree about thine ears.’ Did the men have sentiments similar to this final couplet from an old rhyme about the Yew Tree Well in Easter Ross, Scotland? A chill warning to those wielding an axe. The Yew of Ross in Ireland had to be prayed down by St Laserian because its wood was wanted, but no one dared fell it. Recall King Hywel Dda’s tenth-century prohibition on felling yews associated with saints. Do similar injunctions survive far and wide in the collective memory? When the Victorian archaeologist Augustus Pitt-Rivers removed an old yew from a prehistoric burial mound in Dorset, the locals were not happy, even though Pitt-Rivers said the tree was dead: ‘I afterwards learned that the people of the neighbourhood attached some interest to it, and it has since been replaced.’
John Aubrey relates the fate of the men who felled an oak in 1657 and in passing recalls the wife and son of an earl who died after he had an oak grove removed. These tales linger and still give pause for thought today to the sensitive and cautious: Harte writes, ‘When we find that the N18 from Limerick to Ennis curves to go around a fairy thorn, we admire the knowledge of Eddie Lenihan, who campaigned to save the tree, as well as the prudence of the County Surveyor who knew of the risk involved in damaging it.’
Still, the Lawrences and the Skinners had their work to do, and so they savaged the roots of the great tree. Specifically the roots, I think. There is an engraving by Turner in his Liber Studiorum called ‘Hedging and Ditching’. Two men are in a ditch in the ground fetching down a tree, not neatly chopping it down, but seeming to lever it out of the ground with pickaxes. A woman in a bonnet with a shawl over her shoulder walks by looking on. This is no rural idyll. The drawing has something in common with First World War art, with the pencil lines that suggest mud and stones, the thin leafless trees in the hedge, shredded of the fullness of trees. Grubbing up is an evocative expression. It is an unpleasant image, total and annihilating: trees torn violently from the soil. I think of Ted Hughes’ Whale-Wort torn out by the roots and flung into the sea when he just wanted to sleep. It is the slow deliberate painstaking act of men with hand tools. Those in Turner’s sketch might be doing hard labour; they look a bad lot, like pirates or smugglers – Turner was on the coast at East Sussex, so maybe they were.
Forget a neat V-shaped wedge incised with an axe prior to sawing. Dynamite and perhaps club hammers would make more sense than a copybook felling. An ancient yew with its hollows and split trunks and the irregular sprawl of its weary branches mocks the surgical approach. H. Rider Haggard, the author of the adventure stories She and King Solomon’s Mines, gives the best and most plausible description of how the tree was felled in his A Farmer’s Year: Being His Commonplace Book for 1898. He writes that there are two ways of felling a tree:
one the careless and slovenly chopping off of the tree above the level of the ground, the other its scientific ‘rooting’. In rooting at timber, the soil is first removed from about the foot of the bole with any suitable instrument till the great roots are discovered branching this way and that. Then the woodsmen begin upon these with their mattocks, which sink with a dull thud into the soft and sappy fibre.
This was known as grub-felling in East Anglia and was the common method for bringing down timber trees in that part of the country.
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