newspaper report of the day’s excursion called it ‘a moated site of some two and a half acres across upon which once stood the castle of the celebrated Piers Shonks, the slayer of the Pelham Dragon’. The castle (if not the dragon and its slayer) was a fiction. Most moats that trench the countryside are not the stuff of medieval sieges, but are homestead moats built around new farms and manor houses in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by men ostentatiously proclaiming their independent status and their membership of the knightly class – or their aspirations to it. They were especially popular on the boulder clay of East Anglia. Oliver Rackham has written that anyone who has dug as much as a posthole in the clay will be in awe of the labour that went into excavating an entire moat, so people must have had a good reason to do it. They may have served a practical purpose as fishponds, or as a ready water supply for putting out fires, or for drainage or sewerage, and they must have offered some degree of deterrence to passing robbers and rapists, the notorious trailbastons – vagabonds with big sticks – of the period, but many historians agree that moats were first and foremost a status symbol.
William Blyth Gerish, the man who had organised the trip that afternoon, was careful to call the vanished building a house and not a castle. To the Elizabethans, the moated site had been plain old Shonkes. It was by then an ‘ancient and decayed place’. Known as Shonkes Barn in the eighteenth century, it was said it would soon ‘lose its name in all likelyhood with its substance, which is in a very tottering condition’. The prediction proved partly true. Thomas Hollingworth’s beautiful Georgian estate map of Beeches Farm in green and yellow watercolours shows a neat four-sided moat identified in the key simply as Nursery & Moat, the building forgotten and seemingly the hero’s name as well, but all is not lost: the adjacent fields are labelled Shonks Farmyard and Shonks Hoppett. Some forty years later, a new survey showed that the moat had been extended and gained an extra enclosure; it was now The Hoppits & Shonks Garden. Shonks played on people’s minds and their superstitions in those parts: writing at Clifton School in Bristol in 1872, one pretentious schoolboy from near the Pelhams noted that by night Shonks Garden is ‘studiously avoided by the simple villagers’. Other locals were less easily spooked, treasuring the moated old pasture, not only for its association with their hero, but also for its early summer carpet of narcissus, the double white jonquil.
The earliest large-scale Ordnance Survey map has it as Shonk’s Moat (in the gothic typeface reserved for antiquities) and clearly shows a double moat arrangement forming two islands. By 1905, when the archaeological society visited, a fishpond remained, and the arms of the moat were mostly dry. The only clues that there had once been a building were the traces of foundations, which still dimpled the turf.
A photograph, perhaps taken earlier that day, shows William Gerish standing behind the Brent Pelham stocks and whipping post, looking younger than his forty-one years, his face framed by a neat dagger-shaped beard and a straw boater. A bank clerk by day, the indefatigable Mr Gerish is best characterised by pointing to his magnum opus, Monumental Inscriptions, for which he trawled the churches and graveyards of Hertfordshire recording some 70,000 inscriptions on strips of paper that he and his wife pasted into thirteen volumes in alphabetical order– a pursuit that was said to have destroyed his health and contributed to his premature death at the age of fifty-six.
Gerish was part of what became known as the nationwide folklore revival, avidly collecting local stories and publishing them in one shilling pamphlets. It was one of these that Gerish read to his fellow archaeological society members that Thursday afternoon in July 1905. It was called A Hertfordshire St George, or the story of Piers Shonks and the Pelham Dragon. While he had chosen for his stage the countryside where Shonks once lived, Gerish’s pamphlet paid greater attention to the home of his adversary. In fact, Gerish’s chief claim to originality is his treatment of the yew tree, its felling and the dragon’s lair beneath it. He had first written about the incident in an article for Folklore three years earlier; written about a ‘terrible dragon kennelled under a yew tree which stood between what were afterwards two fields called Great and Little Pepsells’, adding the surprising news that the tree had been chopped down some years before and the dragon’s cave found in its roots. Gerish’s papers in the Hertfordshire Archives reveal the original source for this story to be a series of letters in the Hertfordshire Mercury from some fifteen years earlier. A correspondent identified only as D.E. set the ball rolling with a query published in late February 1888:
Brent Pelham: There is a man buried under the foundation on the north side of Brent Pelham Church of the name of Shonks. Can any of the readers of the Mercury give the reason why he was buried there, and also the date of the year he was buried? —D.E.
The year 1888 was a good one for enquiring about bones. On 23 January, the remains of a skeleton were discovered in a stone coffin in the eastern crypt of Canterbury Cathedral that some would claim were the lost relics of St Thomas Becket. The story broke in The Times early in February, sparking a series of letters to the editor and a controversy that has lasted to the present day. I cannot help but wonder if D.E., whoever he or she was, thought to question the identity of Shonks because of the excitement over Becket’s bones.
There were several replies: quoting the various county historians on the matter, describing the tomb and giving versions of the inscription over it. Between them, the authors of each letter managed to encompass most of the traditions: here was Shonks the Lord of the Manor who supposedly died in 1086, Shonks the giant who got the better of a rival, Shonks the dragon-slayer, and Shonks who cheated the devil. But the most interesting letter by far ran in the paper on 17 March, and came from a local vicar with a name like a hardwearing fabric; he was the alliterated Reverend Woolmore Wigram, and what he had to say would change the centuries-old folk legend for ever.
On what occasions are stories told? Is there a story-telling season? Do particular stories belong to particular occasions? For what purposes are they told? For instruction or warning, or simply for amusement?
—Charlotte Sophia Burne, The Handbook of Folk-Lore, 1914
In a letter written towards the end of his life, Reverend Woolmore Wigram recalled that the story of the dragon’s lair found under a yew tree belonged to a particular occasion in the 1860s; to one of his traditional tithe luncheons. This was the annual meeting when the parson and the farmers agreed – or more likely disagreed – on the tax due to the church. Traditionally held in Brent Pelham on the second Friday in December, there could hardly be a more apt occasion to discuss the old stories. Tithes were part and parcel of the customs of the village. Onerous, contentious and unedifying, tithes are an entertaining way to glimpse the lives of the folk, their personalities, their world and their preoccupations.
Though familiar themes crop up everywhere, ancient tithing customs were particular to each parish. Today they read like magic potions: toad under cold stone, days and nights has forty-one, could well be the vicar’s due at Lammastide. As well
