Was the Pepsells yew already centuries old when Peola gave his name to Peola’s-ham, the homestead that became Pelham? Did the militia enter the village butts with longbows from her boughs? Did a Saxon, a Roman, a scout from the Trinovantes tribe 2,000 years ago take his bearings from her? Generations pass while some trees stand, and old families last not three oaks. Nor one yew.
Master Lawrence, the woodcutter, was unlikely to think of these things. He would have thought of village stories. Perhaps of poor Widow Bowcock stabbed to death in the fields thereabouts in the last century, or the handles of grubbing axes broken in the heavy ground when clearing the roots from Ten Acres Field to make way for barley; of tall tales told by old men as they coppiced the hornbeam to make charcoal on a morning such as that one; tales about the black tomb in the church wall and the man called Shonks who sleeps in it, about his winged dogs, the monster they killed and the immense double-jointed finger bones that gave Mr Morris so much trouble.
Master Lawrence heard from the pulpit on the first day of Lent that cursed be he who removeth his neighbour’s landmark. He may have fretted that his first job that winter’s morning was to bring down such a singular tree. A landmark, which they of old time have set. Might he pay more heed to an old wife’s ‘no-good-will-come-of-it’? Perhaps there was little room in such a life for superstition. I think he pulled his stockings up to meet his breeches in the light of the hearth and rush-light and thought that his business was no one else’s concern, turning his mind instead to how hard the ground was that morning – yet not as hard as yew wood from which he might fashion axle pins or mill cogs. A practical man who kept his concerns to himself. After the event, I don’t suppose he would have had much truck with foolish enquiries about a morning’s work.
Gone, the song of Gamelyn.
And yet years later he would talk about the ordeal of felling that tree – and the ‘girt hole underneath it, underneath its roots, a girt cave like’ – and in this way the simple woodcutter became as important to this story as the stonemason had 800 years earlier, no less important than the map-maker, the fundamentalist, the poet and all those who are caught in its weave.
It is the early 1830s: a time of great change. The sailor King William IV is on the throne, a young Charles Dickens has begun writing under the pen name Boz, Charles Darwin is on board HMS Beagle, and in a Hertfordshire village Master Thomas Lawrence and a gang of farm labourers are about to find a dragon’s lair beneath the roots of a tree.
The Reader will rather excuse an unsuccessful Attempt to clear up the Truth where so little Light is to be had, than giving Things up for nursery Tales to save the Pains of Inquiry.
—Nathaniel Salmon, The History of Hertfordshire, 1728
I like to know where dragons once lurked and where the local fairies baked their loaves, where wolves were trapped and suicides buried, who cast the church bells, which side the Lord of the Manor took in the Civil War and which modern surnames were found in the first parish register (and which in the records of the assize). I am with Walter Scott, who was ‘but half satisfied with the most beautiful scenery if he could not connect it with some local legend’. To map a place and to know its stories is to belong, to find companionship with the living and the dead, to time-travel on every visit to the Brewery Tap or the Black Horse. Sometimes you spot something – a burial mound, a scratch dial in the church porch – and then set out to find its story. Other times you hear a story and go in search of it in the landscape, or the archive or someone’s memories, and that is how my journey to Great Pepsells field and the spot where Master Lawrence felled a yew tree began.
I first encountered the name Shonks some years ago on the Pelhams’ website. Piers Shonks, a local hero, was buried in a tomb in the wall of the church in Brent Pelham. Apparently, he was a giant who had slain a dragon that once had its lair under a yew tree in a field called Great Pepsells. As one rustic supposedly said, ‘Sir, it’s one of the rummiest stories I ever heard, like, that ’ere story of old Piercy Shonkey, and if I hadn’t see the place in the wall with my own eyes I wouldn’t believe nothing about it.’
To know Shonks is to wander the margins of history: the margins of the Bayeux Tapestry where strange creatures gather, the margins of ancient woodland where hollow trees hide secrets, of eighteenth-century manuscripts where antiquaries have scribbled clues to the identity of folk heroes. It is to encounter the many other folk legends we find around the country: stories about dragons and giants and devils, avenging spirits and outlaws, which all have their echoes in the legend of Piers Shonks. It is to rediscover a world where the community was in part defined by its collective memory, by its pride in its past, and a story its members had passed down through the generations: to wrestle with their superstition, what they really believed and what that tells us about them, their priorities and their needs (and about us too for that matter, how we are different and how very much still like them).
To know Piers Shonks is to sit shivering in a church in Georgian England sketching the dragon on his tomb, to stand atop its tower triangulating the Elizabethan countryside, and to confront the zealous Mr Dowsing and his thugs looting the brasses and smashing the masonry during the Civil War. It is to ask why Churchwarden Morris could not sleep at night, and how long bones last in a crypt, and where a medieval stonemason found his inspiration. It is to wonder what a thirteenth-century tomb is doing in the wall of a fourteenth-century church, who is really inside it, and why he was immortalised by generations of storytellers.
At first, and for many months, to know Piers Shonks was to wonder that less than 200 years ago some farm labourers supposedly uncovered a cave under a tree in a field where a centuries-old folk legend said that a dragon had lived. Did they really? Surely not. This is where people usually wrinkle their brow. ‘You’re writing a children’s book?’ they ask.
No, it’s a history book, a historical detective story … People generally look confused at this and then venture: ‘Oh, it’s a novel.’
It’s non-fiction, I explain.
‘But no one really found a dragon’s lair under a tree.’
Maybe not, I concede, but they believed they did.
‘They didn’t really.’
I think they did.
‘Really?’
This book began with that question, and in trying to answer it I discovered
