Hollow Places
IN THE MIDDLE AGES, a remarkable tomb was carved to cover the bones of an English hero. For centuries, tales spread about dragons, giants and devils. How and why this happened is the subject of this book.Do you wonder where dragons once lurked and where the local fairies baked their loaves? Or where wolves were trapped and suicides buried? Did people in the past really believe the marvellous stories they told and can those beliefs and those stories still teach us something about how to live in the world today?These questions lie at the heart of Christopher Hadley’s Hollow Places as it searches through the centuries for the truth behind the legend of Piers Shonks, a giant from a village in Hertfordshire, who slew a dragon that once had its lair under ancient yew in a field called Great Pepsells.Hadley’s quest takes us on a journey into the margins of history: to the margins of the Bayeux Tapestry where strange creatures gather, of ancient woodland where hollow trees hide secrets, of 18th century manuscripts where antiquaries scribbled clues to the identity of folk heroes.Hollow Places takes us back shivering to a church in Georgian England, 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 asks why Churchwarden Morris could not sleep at night, and how long bones last in a crypt, and where a medieval stonemason found his inspiration.Hollow Places rescues a vanished world and wrestles with superstition, with what people really believed; with what that tells us about them and how very much we are still alike– dragons or nay.The story of Piers Shonks is an obscure tale, but it has endured: the survivor of an 800-year battle between storytellers and those who would mock or silence them. Shonks’ story stands for all those thousands of seemingly forgotten tales that used to belong to every village. It is an adventure into the past by a talented and original new writer and a meditation on memory and belief that underlines the importance and the power of the folk legends we used to tell and why they still matter.
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HOLLOW PLACES
An Unusual History of Land and Legend
Christopher Hadley
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © Christopher Hadley 2019
Cover illustration by Joe McLaren
Christopher Hadley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008319472
Ebook Edition © August 2019 ISBN: 9780008319519
Version: 2019-06-28
To my dad Harry Raymond Hadley, and in loving memory of my mum Joan Mary Hadley, a born storyteller
Dummling set to work, and cut down the tree; and when it fell, he found in a hollow under the roots a goose with feathers of pure gold.
—‘The Golden Goose’ in German Popular Stories, collected by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, from oral tradition, London, 1823
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Part I: Tree
Part II: Stone
Part III: Story
Part IV: Name
Part V: Last Things
Chronology and select textual history
Notes
List of illustrations
Index
Acknowledgements
THE SHONKS EPITAPH, BRENT PELHAM. — I should be grateful for information regarding the epitaph on O. Piers Shonks in Brent Pelham Church, Hertfordshire. The tomb of this worthy lies in a recess cut into the north wall of the church and bears the following inscription in Latin (I quote from memory):—
Tantum fama manet Cadmi Sanctique Georgi Postuma; tempus edax ossa sepulchra vorat.
Hoc tamen in muro tutus qui perdidit anguem Invito positus Daemone Shonkus erat.
There is also a neat rhyming translation in English which I cannot recall.
Who was Shonks? What is the point in the reference to Cadmus and St. George (in itself a curious conjunction of names)? What is the significance of ‘who destroyed the snake’ (the Devil?) as applied to Shonks? What is the point of ‘invito Daemone’?
I understand that a field in the village still bears the name ‘Shonks’ field.’
D. C. THOMPSON.
Notes and Queries, 1932
In the High Middle Ages, on the Hertfordshire–Essex border, a remarkable tomb was carved out of grey-black marble to cover the bones of an English hero whom legend calls Piers Shonks. For centuries, tales about dragons, giants and the devil have gathered around the tomb and spread into the surrounding countryside. How and why that happened is the subject of this book: it is both a historical detective story and a meditation on memory, belief, the stories we used to tell – and why they still matter.
I begin on the edge of Great Pepsells field on a cold winter’s morning in the early nineteenth century.
She was the oldest living thing thereabouts.
Alone, on the wide plateau between the rivers Ash and Quin, the old yew tree had stood since time out of mind and beyond the memory of man.
Did old Master Lawrence think of her great age when he tested the cold edge of his felling axe that winter’s morning? He would have known that bringing her down was going to be an ’umbuggin job, but he had no idea how things would turn out; that before the day was over he and his axe would become part of a story already ages old. Two hundred years hence, people would still be talking about the yew in Great Pepsells field, of the day she fell and of what the woodcutters found in her roots.
For some twenty years now she had stood alone: resolute but incongruous in that heavy-clay field where tracks and parishes met; her evergreen boughs prey to lightning, the knots and sinews of her trunk rivened by wind and hail. She had once marked the northernmost boundary of a wood, but the acres of ash and maple had been grubbed up in the years between Trafalgar and the death of Old Boney.
Perhaps the landowner, or his steward, had left her standing for her grandeur. Generations must have paused to admire her or sheltered beneath her thick crown. Children, dallying on their way to gather brushwood or flints or rushes, would have carved their names in her bark and picked her blood-red arils –
