Hollow Places

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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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo). Such knowledge might well have worked upon the minds of those men that morning. W. B. Gerish (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)’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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo). 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) for bringing down timber trees in that part of the country.

By Wigram’s account, Lawrence and the other men had an uncommon amount of trouble with those roots. Perhaps their hearts were not in it, or something held back the full strength of their axe strokes. Did one of them stroke the scaly bark that yews can slough off to get rid of infections? Did it rattle under their fingers and the sap begin to run blood red? Fred Hageneder in his Yew: A History tells us that the yew is the only European tree that can bleed red sap. A feat that is scientifically unexplained, he says. The yew at Nevern in Wales (#litres_trial_promo) is notorious for bleeding the blood of those buried in its churchyard. A bleeding tree might have given those men – any men – second thoughts. Or did the texture of its bark look like scales from a picture book dragon? In Ulverton, his extraordinary record of a fictional village across time, Adam Thorpe channels an old carpenter in an inn in 1803 regaling a visitor with his memories. He recalls the time the master carpenter chose an oak by smell, seasoned it for two years, then made a lid for the church font. ‘Atween you an’ I, though, I can spot a dragon in them patterns. I reckons as how there were a dragon in that tree. He’ll avenge hisself one day.’ Is this a brilliant bit of invention or does Thorpe know of a folk tradition among carpenters about dragons in trees?

They kept at it, but the tree would not yield. Yet is thy root sincere, sound as the rock, / A quarry of stout spurs and knotted fangs, / Which crook’d into a thousand whimsies, clasp / The stubborn soil, and hold thee still erect.

Eventually, they took a break. ‘It was very hard work to get it down. The men had been at work all the morning, and went away to dinner,’ wrote Wigram. In one of his later letters he put the story into the mouth of a local: ‘They do say Sir, that the men could not get that yew Tree down. And at last they all went away to breakfast.’

It was an ’umbuggin job to remove such a tree. Why take so much effort to bring her down? Maybe someone wanted the timber. John Aubrey (#litres_trial_promo) recalls the churchyard yew of his childhood in the 1630s, ‘a fair and spreading ewe-tree … The clarke lop’t it to make money of it to some bowyer or fletcher’. The lopping killed it.

Walter Rose (#litres_trial_promo) gives us clues as to what would be going through a carpenter’s mind as he stood in front of the tree, writing that when his father looked at trees he saw what could be made of them: ‘In a stumpy butt, with large branches spreading off not far from the base, he would see four large gate posts, the spread of the branches to form the portion that would go into the ground.’ Another would be large enough to split down the centre and quarter-up for coffin boards, or for rails or the slats of a field gate. He might have been calculating how much useful timber was in the Pelham yew. How much marquetry (#litres_trial_promo). How many writing slopes or clock cases were latent in the bole. More likely, Lawrence was counting how many poles could be sold to bodgers for the bows and hoops of the Windsor chairs made in vast quantities back then, with the very best given backs of yew.

‘A post of yew will outlast (#litres_trial_promo) a post of iron,’ noted one naturalist in the 1830s. The Furneux Pelham Smock mill (#litres_trial_promo) was modernised in those years, perhaps the year the tree came down, after James Seabrook the Younger bought the mill from his father and paid off the mortgage on it. Yew was excellent wood for cogs and pins, and its branches would yield fine barrel hoops for the fledgling brewing enterprise at Furneux Pelham Hall. The wood’s waterproof qualities made it a favourite for buckets and palings. It had other uses besides, known to country folk: lengths of it were traditionally used for dowsing. It was also said that if you held a switch of yew in your hand while cursing your enemy they would not hear you.

No doubt some wanted the old tree down not because they valued its timber but simply because they did not want it in the landscape. They wanted it down, just as the doctor wanted rid of the elm in Hardy’s The Woodlanders, because it oppressed Marty South’s father as he lay on his deathbed. It is finally felled – by dead of night, but ‘Little good it did poor old South, who was dead the next day from the shock of the tree’s disappearance.’

The agricultural improvers detested the space taken up, and even the shadows cast, by hedgerow trees. Surprisingly to us, even those who loved the landscape may have wanted the old yew gone. Pollards, which often marked the boundaries of fields, were seen as ugly and had been under attack since the late eighteenth century – an old yew might be viewed with similar disdain by some. ‘Not only were outgrown hedges tamed and excess trees removed. In many places hedges were grubbed out altogether … The grubbing of hedges was especially common in the high farming period after c.1830,’ writes the historian of the East Anglian landscape Tom Williamson (#litres_trial_promo). Our tree was probably in the way of planting, or blocked a new drainage ditch. The Ancient Tree Forum (#litres_trial_promo) publish a pamphlet for farmers on how to care for ancient and veteran trees. It contains a terrible map showing all the hedgerow trees that have disappeared from a single fifty-acre parcel in North Yorkshire since the middle of the nineteenth century, each standing tree a little green icon representing a surviving pollard or standard ash, beech, oak or sycamore. There are some fifty of them, but they are outnumbered nearly three to one by a mass of red ‘X’s in a circle representing a lost tree.

Little Pepsells was listed as pasture in 1837, and while it is unlikely that an old yew would ever drop enough leaves to poison stock, horses tied to yews have been known to die from grazing on them. Might the squire or his tenant farmer have taken a disliking to the tree for some such reason, or did they just need to invent winter work for men sent to them under the old Poor Laws? Remember that according to the Hammonds (#litres_trial_promo), ‘degrading and repulsive work was invented for those whom the farmer would not or could not employ’.

What we do know is that this was not the only yew that disappeared from the landscape in the early nineteenth century.

In 1848 one archaeological journal lamented (#litres_trial_promo) that yews were ‘so reduced in number as to seem like the last of a once flourishing and noble race, mourning in their own decay over the magnificence of the past, and the desolation of the present’. In 1539, John Leland (#litres_trial_promo) had counted thirty-nine yews at Strata Florida in Wales; they are the only ones he mentions in his famous itinerary around the British Isles. Three hundred years later, only three of the famous yews were still standing. There is an engraving and article from Gardener’s Chronicle in May 1874 with a description of the largest tree that is not unlike that of the Pelham yew in Wigram’s letter: it ‘was divided into two parts, leaving a passage through it, this was 22 ft in girth’. Beneath one of the three survivors was the traditional resting place of the fourteenth-century Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym. It too disappeared after 1874, possibly during an archaeological dig of the Cistercian abbey at the end of the nineteenth century.

It is loathsome to think that our tree was felled indifferently, because it was in the way, or to give unemployed labourers something to do to earn their gallon loaf, but whatever their reason, it had to come down. On their return from breakfast, the sight that greeted them must have been something of a surprise. Was their approach a cautious one? Where they had wrestled with the tree half an hour before, there was now a large hole, a cavern even, and the tree had fallen into it. ‘When they came back, that yew Tree had fallen down of itself; and when they looked, there was a girt hole right underneath it, underneath its roots, a girt cave like.’ This in the words of the rustic voice Wigram used in his final account to W. B. Gerish. His 1888 letter to the Hertfordshire Observer is less picturesque but more dramatic: ‘On his return [he] found that the old tree had fallen, collapsing into a large cavity underneath its roots.’

Until I read about grub felling, I simply could not understand how a half-felled tree had fallen into a hole, but if most of the roots had been severed and there was a cavity under the yew, it would have been suspended by a few stubborn roots that eventually surrendered their charge to the hollow in the earth. After visiting several ancient yews, I could believe that one might collapse in on itself. The weight distribution is uneven as the heart rots away leaving heavy outer trunks and branches, twisted and over-balanced as the branches trail along the ground. The roots, severed and weakened as they would have been by the men’s exertions, must have given way while they were at breakfast. At least that’s the explanation needed to understand the 1888 version in which the tree falls into a large hole. The later version could be interpreted differently: the tree simply fell over and left a large cavity where the roots had been, but surely these countrymen were used to the holes left by trees that came down in this way, and would not need a supernatural explanation for the cavity.

‘It’s not unknown for voids to develop under very old trees,’ wrote Wigram. It is certainly true that a cavern, or at least a hole, could have formed in the chalk under the shallow clay where the tree grew – it is not unusual for sink holes to form from erosion where the bedrock is limestone – and the weight of a tree no longer held steady by its roots could have brought in the ceiling of the cavity. It is not the only Pelham story of a cavity opening up in the chalk (#litres_trial_promo). Less than a mile to the east, on the other side of the Ash Valley, there is a tale recorded in the 1930s that the first church in the Pelhams was destroyed by Vikings or Pharisees (#litres_trial_promo) (the local word for fairies) or, more prosaically, it collapsed into a hole that opened up beneath it.

She was down. ‘It is done,’ wrote Rider Haggard (#litres_trial_promo) of another tree in another place.

A change has come over the landscape; the space that for generations has been filled with leafy branches is now white and empty air. I know of no more melancholy sight – indeed, to this day I detest seeing a tree felled; it always reminds me of the sudden and violent death of a man. I fancy it must be the age of timbers that inspires us with this respect and sympathy, which we do not feel for a sapling or a flower.

Ancient trees have personalities and attract stories; it is hard not to think that this was an event in the life of the village. A crowd must have gathered that morning (#litres_trial_promo), if not to watch the iniquitous act, then to see the cavity. We know the Skinner family kept loppings, which hints at the value of the highly prized wood. No doubt, other villagers kept pieces as well if they could – to make spoons and knife handles. Peter Kalm (#litres_trial_promo), an eighteenth-century Scandinavian traveller, left an account of a tree he saw chopped down in Hertfordshire, describing the surprising number of people on the scene, wanting the leaves and roots and twigs for fuel or to make baskets. I imagine a host of villagers turning up that day. Nothing of that prized wood would be wasted. John Aubrey’s fair and spreading ewe-tree furnished him and the other schoolboys with nutt-crackers and scoopes to pull the flesh out of their apples. These would make fine souvenirs from a dragon’s lair.

I have often wondered what was made of the yew (#litres_trial_promo). If anything has survived. I have started to keep an eye on the local antique auctions, hoping to find a Windsor chair from the right period. I know what I am looking for. The wood mustn’t be too dark. The seat needs to be elm and shaped like the flagstones of a castle staircase, as if worn by years of use. And it has to be a stick back, no splat, with two hoops of yew, one for the back and one for the elbows, burnished to a rich honey, the tight grain bewitching and warm, taken from a tree with a dragon in its story. I’ll know it when I see it.

10 (#ulink_ce513007-1360-5e11-99a4-01029b198b5e)

Saint Augustine saith, that Dragons doe abide in deep Caves and hollow places of the earth, and the some-times when they perceive moistnes in the ayre, they come out of theyr holes, and beating the ayre with their wings, as it were with the strokes of Oares, they forsake the earth and flie aloft

—Edward Topsell (#litres_trial_promo), The Historie of Serpents,1608

In the rocks of Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv, rest the last bones of the dragon that Perseus slew to save Andromeda. The skulls of similar monsters litter the Sivalik hills in Northern India, and on Turkey’s Aegean coast the remains of fabulous creatures, which stalked the myths of Heracles, weather from the cliffs to astonish passing travellers.

Heracles’ victory against the Monster of Troy is depicted most dramatically on an ancient Greek krater, or vase, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Here is the beast peppered with arrows by the hero as he rescues the Trojan princess Hesione. It is a very peculiar monster: just a head, white and skeletal, but to the modern eye it is impossible to mistake what we are looking at – a fossilised skull of a prehistoric creature projecting from a rocky outcrop; it is a two-and-a-half thousand-year-old black-figure masterpiece of palaeontology.

The vase appears on the cover of Adrienne Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters, a compelling account of fossil finds in antiquity, which argues that dragons, griffins, cyclops and many other nightmares from the ancient world were inspired by the remains of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. Mayor amasses accounts and archaeological evidence of encounters with giant bones in antiquity, alongside known fossil sites today, which dovetail neatly with the places where the legends of particular monsters first appeared.

In the first century CE, Apollonius of Tyana claimed to have seen dragon skulls in India where today we know the skulls of prehistoric giraffes, elephants and crocodiles are found in the famous Sivalik fossil beds. The Roman naturalist Aelian recorded the discovery of giant bones on the island of Chios following a forest fire and noted that the locals decided they must be the bones of a dragon: ‘From these gigantic bones the villagers were able to observe how immense and awful the monster was when it was alive.’ As for the dragons at Jaffa, biblical Joppa, a story from Ancient Rome tells how the consul Marcus Aemilius Scaurus held victory celebrations during which he paraded an immense skeleton found at Joppa, where tradition said the Greek hero Perseus rescued Andromeda from the dragon. One version of that myth even says that Perseus turned the monster to stone – petrified it, fossilised it perhaps?

W. B. Gerish entertained similar ideas about the origin of the Shonks’ legend. Had those rustics in the Pelhams found some dinosaur fossils under the yew tree? He wrote to the Geological Survey enquiring about a dinosaur find and asked Herbert Andrews, the son of his friend and collaborator Robert Andrews, to walk across the road from his desk at the V&A to find out about the Cetiosaurus on display at the Natural History Museum. The younger Andrews kindly wrote back describing the dinosaur, which had been pulled from the Oxford Clay near Peterborough, but at the end of the letter cautioned, ‘I don’t think it is possible to see in him the Herts dragon.’

But Gerish wasn’t to be put off; he had been collecting cuttings about fossil finds. One about an Ichthyosaurus found in Peterborough reveals what he was thinking: ‘The preying habits of this hungry flesh-eater, with its wide mouth and long jaws so well armed with serviceable teeth, bring to mind the fabled dragons of the ancients and may well be possibly the origin of these myths.’

Was Shonks’ dragon a Cetiosaurus, an Ichthyosaurus, or something else entirely, wondered Gerish. He wasn’t alone in conflating dragons with dinosaurs. In one of his box files there is a tiny newspaper advertisement for a book with a humdinger of a title: The Book of the Great Sea Dragons: Extinct Monsters of the Ancient Earth. The author, Thomas Hawkins (#litres_trial_promo), was an unpopular and eccentric collector, amassing fossils in Devon at about the same time the dragon’s lair in Great Pepsells was discovered. Hawkins believed his fossils were the remains of the giant creatures created by God in Genesis 1:21, the Geodolim Tanonim. Where most translators render this as the ‘Great Whales’, Hawkins argued for the far more exciting Great Dragons. In fact most of the dinosaur and ancient reptile fossils illustrated in his book are labelled as dragons (it was published the year before Richard Owen invented the word ‘dinosaur’): ‘Dragon from Lyme Regis. Discovered in 1835’, ‘Head of a Dragon from a village near Bristol’, ‘Dragon Plesiosaurus, from Street, Discovered in 1831’.

These scant remains of Gerish’s fossil research were his attempt to build on an idea that had struck him as early as 1901 when he published his first Hertfordshire St George article in the journal Folklore: ‘As to the dragon, fossil remains of extinct animals have often been found in the clay-pits of Hertfordshire, none of which, however, are of so recent a date as the medieval period. But the story may be very much older, dating possibly even from prehistoric times, and thus handed down from father to son it has become connected in the usual materialistic way with the monumental slab.’

This is oddly muddled. Gerish is not just thinking about the origins of dragon legends in general, but instead seems to have thought that a Cetiosaurus or other dinosaur was slain in prehistory by an impossibly early inhabitant of Brent Pelham and the story was passed down through the ages in the collective memory.

In the hierarchy of reasons Lawrence and the men may have had for presuming they had found a dragon’s lair, number one would be because they found the remains of a real-life dragon. Number two would be something that they mistook for a dragon: large bones? We can be fairly certain that neither of these were in the hole. What other traces of an imagined dragon might have been revealed by the woodcutters’ exertions? Earth scorched black by dragon fire, claw marks, treasure? How about a Roman mosaic of a dragon?

The idea of digging up something out of the ordinary would not have been alien to the men who knew that from time to time dull lumps of metal were pulled from the soil and could be turned into shillings and even pounds: a fabulous golden torque (#litres_trial_promo) was found nearby a few years before, and some time in the 1830s labourers land-ditching unearthed a skeleton and a Bronze-Age founder’s hoard (#litres_trial_promo). It is tempting to surmise that the woodcutters’ attitudes to holes in the ground were conditioned by the fact that such treasure had been discovered in neighbouring fields. Treasure might even suggest the presence of guardian dragons, although the great folklorist and British dragon expert Jacqueline Simpson (#litres_trial_promo) has pointed out that legends of dragons who guard treasure and those involving a dragon-slayer are not found together in England.

There was nothing in the hole, but in the same way that the Romans who found the fossils in Jappa assumed they had stumbled upon the remains of Perseus, those labourers’ thoughts turned to Shonks because he was their text. There are two explanations for the part fossils played in the formation of monster stories in antiquity: either they started the stories, or the stories of monsters and heroes existed before the fossils were found, but those finds were explained in terms of the stories, and then in time the stories were modified by the finds. Perhaps the monsters took on the guise of the fossils: mammoths begat cyclops, Protoceratops – griffins, and Giraffokeryx launched a thousand dragons.

We know the story of Shonks and the dragon existed before the hole was found. There were no fossils, but superstition, the ancient yew, the dark winter’s morning in a remote spot, and that great rent in the ground – together they were enough to suggest an extraordinary explanation.

It causes us moderns problems when the world of make-believe meets the everyday. We sometimes find it hard to imagine that people really thought these things: that dragons nested in a field. Weren’t they just messing around? Ted Barclay stands in the vestry of Brent Pelham Church holding the remains of an old weather vane and declaring that it is one of Shonks’ arrows. He is having a bit of fun. He does not really believe what he is saying – at least I hope not – but I am convinced those men did believe what they were saying. They believed it, because Shonks was the villagers’ key text, the key to their cosmology. The historian Ruth Richardson (#litres_trial_promo) has cautioned that to make sense of the past, ‘we must come to terms with our own hostility to superstition’. It had been barely a century since an old woman in Brent Pelham was arrested on suspicion of witchcraft.

The writer Charles Nicholl (#litres_trial_promo) has argued that Antonio Pigafetta, who chronicled Magellan’s voyages, saw giants in Argentina because he expected to see giants. Why? Because he had read outlandish travellers’ tales about them. In the same way Master Lawrence and the others would have expected to see a dragon’s lair because they had grown up with the story of Shonks’ and seen the dragon carved on his tomb.

We can hardly blame uneducated labourers for seizing upon the stories they knew best when scholars made similar mistakes, defaulting to Homer and the Bible to explain the world. When elephant bones were found with a flint hand-axe by the River Thames, some pointed to the Bible and said it dated from the Flood, whereas classicists thought the Romans brought the elephant to London in the first century CE and it had died in a battle with an axe-wielding Briton. (In fact, the axe is from a period when elephants roamed the Gray’s Inn Road, some 350,000 years ago.) Ask a nineteenth-century labourer from the Pelhams who slew a dragon and they would answer Shonks and not St Michael or St George (#litres_trial_promo).

An incident in 1833 attests to how closely the Pelhams were associated with the Shonks legend. The Country Press for Saturday 20 April 1833 contained a case of local excitement from the Petty Sessions at Bishop’s Stortford: ‘for it seemed as if the whole Pelham population had come to town. This arose from a “set-too” amongst the fair amazons of that village, whose pugnacious propensities have been handed down ever since the memorable year of 1086, when Hun, who first tempted, was vanquished by O’ Piers Shonks.’

Unfortunately no other record of this tantalising case has survived, but while it might be too large a claim to say that the Shonks legend was ubiquitous in that place, in those times, he was probably never that far from Pelham minds.

Or had something put them in mind of Shonks that morning?

Was something else going on that made those men eager to find evidence for the legend? Had someone questioned it and mocked the stories? In the 1840s, John Walker Ord (#litres_trial_promo) interviewed a Mr Marr about the legend of Scaw the serpent-killer in Handale, North Yorkshire. Later Ord would write, ‘Of course we could not gainsay these facts, especially as they were recited with a determination that rendered argument dangerous.’ Challenging a legend had always been risky. In Bodmin in 1113 when a visiting French canon was foolish enough to scoff at the notion that King Arthur (#litres_trial_promo) still lived he caused a riot. In Brittany at that time, it was said to be unsafe to assert in a public place that Arthur was dead: ‘Hardly will you escape unscathed without being whelmed by the curses or crushed by the stones of your hearers,’ reported Alain de Lille in the twelfth-century Prophetia Anglicana. If it wasn’t dangerous to scoff, it was certainly foolish, and still is – who is to say that the ‘set-too’ among the Amazons of the Pelhams was not because someone was foolish enough to suggest that Shonks did not slay a dragon.

In The Handbook of Folk-Lore, Charlotte Burne cautions the folklore collector to conceal incredulity and amusement and to suppress their smiles when encountering local beliefs and customs. Was the Reverend Soames a little too mirthful about Shonks, and vocal about it too? On the other hand, he may have been sour-faced and prayed the yew down. As the author of the History of the Reformation of the Church of England he would have known that the palming ceremony on Palm Sunday was banned in 1569, yet it continued for centuries on hilltops and in remote corners. The yew was a popular substitute for palm leaves. When Soames preached against Catholic-leaning innovations, did he also try to dispossess his flock of their superstitions, counselling that the yew tree should come down and pouring cold water on local legends about dragons?

The discovery of the dragon hole meant the villages had something to throw back at their parson with all his book learnin’. How could anyone deny the truth of the stories now they had found the dragon’s lair? What do you say to that, Reverend? If the discovery of the hole was a thumbing of the nose at authority (#litres_trial_promo), it may help us to understand the long-ago origins of the rest of the legends about Shonks. There are those who think that folk tales and legends were the folks’ response to their struggles against the feudal classes, their struggles for a better life.

In the 1830s, the folks’ traditions were under threat from even greater forces than the local vicar. Old ways of thinking about the world were changing. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology was published in three volumes between 1830 and 1833, while a disciple of Lyell was gathering evidence on a voyage that would completely change the way we look at the world. Charles Darwin was scrambling through the impenetrable forests of Chiloé Island in the winter of 1834, catching foxes by striking them on the head with a rock hammer, and meeting native Christian converts who still ‘pretended to old communication with the devil in certain caves’ (#litres_trial_promo) and so risked the fate of forebears who had answered to the Inquisition. In the eyes of men of science, the villagers in the Pelhams might have seemed equally suitable subjects for anthropological observation. Such rationalists would have soon explained away the hole in the chalk and derided the existence of dragons.

The way of life for those in the English countryside was changing more rapidly than at any time since the end of the Middle Ages; old beliefs and stories were disappearing as people turned their backs on the fields. The populations of cities like Manchester and Liverpool doubled in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century as labourers left the countryside in search of work. London saw its population increase by over 50 per cent to 1.6 million. This in a country of just fifteen million people. The first railway opened in September 1830 and was the prelude to the laying of 1,000 miles of iron and the synchronisation of clocks to the railway timetables before mid-century. Time itself was changing. The world was changing. Agricultural labourers were living in a countryside that had been pulled out from under their feet.

The agricultural revolution had changed everything. Customary rights of ordinary people were forgotten, enclosure meant they had nowhere to pasture their livestock, nowhere to collect wood or furze. The woods had been fenced for game by the new landlords from London, who were heedless of those customs that had been honoured time out of mind. Customs were replaced by laws.

It is for these new game laws that the social historians John and Barbara Hammond reserve their greatest ire in their classic The Village Labourer. The Laws of England that had shorn people of their rights and replaced their wages with charity, now threatened them with the gallows if they failed to resist the urge to vary their diet of roots by bagging a pheasant for the table. It is undeniable that, like William Cobbett, the Hammonds were purveyors of that particular style of the picturesque we might call the you-don’t-know-you’re-born school of history. Many historians would argue that things weren’t as bad as they claimed, and that enclosure was an essential component of the agricultural revolution that ultimately brought better standards of living to all. Yet it is telling that the man who was the high priest of agricultural progress, the great champion of enclosure, Arthur Young, had second thoughts in later life: he thought the human cost had been too high.

The Swing (#litres_trial_promo) Riots that began in Kent in the summer of 1830 were as much about resisting change to a way of life as about money. Captain Swing was the name signed to letters sent to farmers and landowners across southern England, threatening arson, machine breaking and murder. They went hand-in-hand with a series of uprisings starting in Kent in the autumn of 1830. Barns and hayricks were burned, the new threshing machines – which ‘stole’ winter work from labourers – were smashed, and unpopular overseers and parsons hauled from parishes in dung carts. The agricultural labourers were demanding higher wages, reduced rents and lower tithes (so the farmers could afford to pay the wages). But it was not just about poverty. One of the complaints of a mob at Walden in Buckinghamshire during the Swing Riots was that buns used to be thrown from the church steeple and beer given away in the churchyard on Bun Day. They wanted the customs continued, but the parson refused. Traditions and customs and rights were ignored. The Furneux Pelham overseers accounts once contained the item ‘paid for ringing church bell for gleaners’. But gleaning – the right to pick up dropped corn during harvest – was being curtailed.

In 1834 there was a total overhaul of the Poor Laws, which would now be administered by Boards of Guardians in the big towns. Change was needed, but at the time it must have seemed like another of the links between a person, the place he lived, and the rights he had in that place, were being destroyed.

Belonging had mattered. Keith Snell (#litres_trial_promo) looked at inscriptions on 16,000 gravestones in eighty-seven burial grounds to chart the use of the phrase ‘of this parish’ as in ‘To the memory of Mr James Smith late of this parish who departed this life 5th March 1830 aged 63’ and ‘Ellen, beloved wife of Thomas Tinworth of this parish died June 2nd 1888 aged 64 yrs’ – both in Brent Pelham churchyard. People had been proud of belonging, but by the 1870s examples became ever rarer.

Jacqueline Simpson has written that dragon legends ‘foster the community’s awareness of and pride in its own identity, its conviction that it is in some respect unusual, or even unique. That the lord of the manor should be descended from a dragon-slayer, that a dragon should once have roamed these very fields, or, best of all, that an ordinary lad from this very village should have outwitted and killed such a monster – these are claims to fame which any neighbouring community would be bound to envy.’

Those men did not only have a dragon legend to be proud of, they had a dragon-slayer in their village church and an ancient coffin lid to mark his resting place. Little wonder they thought first of dragons when they stared down into that great hollow in the earth.

Part II (#ulink_ce513007-1360-5e11-99a4-01029b198b5e)

Stone (#ulink_ce513007-1360-5e11-99a4-01029b198b5e)

11 (#ulink_35855765-a206-52c8-905c-e1b9fd4a9b26)

Somewhere, perhaps, in the spaces between the pictures (#litres_trial_promo) and the objects … lies a monument true to both us and the past.

—Mike Pitts in Making History: Antiquaries in Britain 1707–2007

Little is known of Mr John Morice of Upper Gower Street, London, other than the fact that in the 1830s he contracted a severe case of grangeritis: a condition coined by Holbrook Jackson (#litres_trial_promo) in his Anatomy of Bibliomania to describe a ‘contagious and delirious mania endangering many books’.

Jackson was poking fun at the practice of grangerising or extra-illustrating books by re-binding them with pictures, often ruthlessly chopped out of other books. It was popularised by the followers of James Granger, a late eighteenth-century print collector and author. Although Granger did not paste his own vast collection of prints into published books, countless grangerites had theirs bound into his three-volume Biographical History (a catalogue of historical portraits from the reign of Egbert the Great to the Glorious Revolution). Granger’s surname became a verb: the first edition of the OED defined grangerise as ‘To illustrate (a book) by the addition of prints, engravings, etc., especially such as have been cut out of other books.’ And some of the most notorious cases of grangeritis involved grangerised ‘Grangers’, including one that expanded the original three volumes into a shelf-full of thirty-six, each as fat as the binding would allow.

Other popular titles to inflate were county histories, and it is one of these that was the cause of Mr John Morice’s affliction: Robert Clutterbuck’s recently published History and Antiquities of the County of Hertford. In the 1830s, Morice developedsuch an affinity for the History that he expanded its three volumes to ten, adding over 2,500 illustrations. The result would become known as the Knowsley Clutterbuck (after Knowsley Hall, seat of the Stanleys, earls of Derby who owned it for many years) and has been called the most sumptuous extra-illustrated county history ever conceived.

The chances that anonymous Mr Morice had played a bit part in the long history of Piers Shonks’ tomb were good because many of the illustrations were said to be original. When the Earl of Derby bought the volumes for 800 guineas in the late nineteenth century, the sales catalogue boasted of over 1,000 original landscapes, architectural views and portraits in neutral tints and watercolours, and 1,400 beautifully emblazoned coats of arms. A mere 550 additional engravings were acquired from other books. And this in a book that originally had only fifty-four pictures.

Among the best additions were those made in the 1830s by John Buckler and two of his sons, who appear to have landed their dream commission. The Bucklers were successful architects, but painting antiquities was their true vocation. Why draw new buildings when there were so many fine churches and manor houses to visit and preserve in ink? Reflecting on his career in 1849 (#litres_trial_promo), John Buckler Snr wrote: ‘To build, repair, or survey warehouses and sash-windowed dwellings, however profitable, was so much less to my taste than perspective drawing with such subjects before me as cathedrals, abbeys and ancient parish churches, that I never made any effort to increase the number of my employments as an architect.’

Following page 450 of volume ten are six extra folio leaves. Pasted neatly in is an engraving of Shonks’ tomb, appropriated from some poor adulterated copy of the 1816 Antiquarian Itinerary. The picture is the Itinerary’smost important contribution to the history of the legend since the text was unoriginal. Drawn by the thirty-year-old Frederick Stockdale, an antiquary more often associated with the West Country, it is captioned ‘Remains of the Tomb of O Piers Shonks, Brent Pelham Church, Herts’. The composition is a little cramped, but mostly accurate, and captures the relief of the carvings although Stockdale chose to frame them in a rectangle, ignoring the shape of the coffin lid, and so the essential tombness is lost.

On the page facing Stockdale’s cannibalised drawing is something much more pleasing, real treasure: a unique sepia ink painting of Shonks’ tomb slab seen from directly overhead. Unusually for the prints in the Knowsley Clutterbuck, the signature and date have not been trimmed off. In the bottom left-hand corner it reads J. C. Buckler 1833. This was John Chessell Buckler, the eldest son, notable for coming second to Charles Barry in the 1836 competition to design the new Houses of Parliament. He first came to Brent Pelham in 1831 and produced three sepia watercolours: one each of Brent Pelham Hall, Beeches and St Mary’s Church – seen from the west or tower end. His father John Buckler visited the village in 1841 and painted a more complete view of the churchyard from the south-east, revealing that the nave was without a roof. John brought with him his youngest son George, who also painted three pictures in sepia: a view of the nave and font, another picture of Brent Pelham Hall seen from the churchyard, and lastly an interior view of the chancel screen with the two-faced royal arms mounted on them. The Bucklers liked to be thorough. The art historian Robert Wark has written that they were ‘fond of documenting a building from several points of view and over a period of time, especially if new construction or changes of some kind were taking place’.

The date on the picture of the tomb, 1833, is different to the other pictures. J. C. must have returned to Brent Pelham that year expressly to document the tomb. Perhaps he feared the weather pouring into the roofless nave was taking its toll on the interior, or perhaps the light had simply not been good enough during his first visit.

Buckler’s sketch picks out the four figures around a floriated cross, the large angel above it, and the dragon below. Of the eight known illustrations of the tomb, which predate the first known photograph in 1901, J. C. Buckler’s best captures the work of the mason. He is prepared to sacrifice detail to impression. He is trying to show that this is stone, and stone of great antiquity: the smudged blank face of the angel, the wear on the other figures slowly and inexorably being smoothed back into the block of marble by the passing of time and its blows and caresses. For an architect, he is surprisingly undraughtsman-like here. It is a work of art and not just a record of the tomb at a moment in time. The art and craftsmanship of the mason inspired Buckler to create something much more than just a topographical record.

When Holbrook Jackson called grangeritis ‘a contagious and delirious mania endangering many books’, he was concerned for the hundreds of books cut up and ruined to create one vast work, such as James Gibb’s grangerised Bible, which ran to sixty vast folio volumes, ‘each so thick that he could hardly lift it from the counter’. Jackson disapproved less, if at all, when books were not destroyed but instead collectors saved pictures from ephemeral publications such as newspapers and magazines or, better still, had new pictures specially made as John Morice did.

And yet Jackson, still tongue in cheek, called it a derangement for reasons other than the desecration of books for their prints. ‘Those afflicted by the derangement,’ Jackson writes, ‘are the most flagrant of all book-defectives.’ Why? Not just because they were handy with a pair of scissors, but also because they hunted for pictures ‘of every person place and thing in any way mentioned in the text or vaguely connected with its subject matter’. The grangeriser Richard Bull epitomised this habit of wild deviation or going off at tangents: a footnote referring to Audley End in the Reverend Granger’s Biographical History of England was an excuse to add fourteen large engravings of the palace to the volume. Although Alexander Sutherland was arguably the worst afflicted grangerite of them all, transforming the six volumes of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion into no less than sixty-one volumes in elephant folio – each nearly two feet high – with over 19,000 extra illustrations (including 743 portraits of Charles I alone).

Behind the hyperbole of Jackson’s derision I sense a secret admiration for the grangeriser. Is their crime so very bad? After all, they give us unique pictures, and in some cases the only surviving record of buildings and views and monuments. On those days when I am overwhelmed by books, by my bookshelves, and the towers of books on the kitchen table and beside my bed demanding to be read, it has occurred to me that not just readers but writers ought to grangerise existing texts rather than fuel the anxiety of book lovers by making new ones. Paste in pictures, tip in reviews, scribble in the margins, insert maps and postcards, photos and poems and train tickets, draw pictures and diagrams, and eventually unpick the book and have it rebound. What else am I doing other than unpicking the story of Piers Shonks, collating what others have thought and said, chronicling my own journey, and inserting lots of new leaves? What better way to possess a much-loved text, to make it one’s own, than to grangerise it? What did Jackson say? They hunted for pictures ‘of every person place and thing in anyway mentioned in the text or vaguely connected with its subject matter’. Guilty as charged, and not just pictures. This book stands as testament to the technique; one that at times may be clumsy, but one by which hidden truths may be revealed. Something unique, and occasionally worth keeping, emerges simply from the juxtaposition of material. Putting all those Charles I portraits together in a particular order creates something that did not exist before; the deliberate or accidental meeting of one with another may reveal something or suggest something wonderful and previously unthought-of. Like my encounter with the Field of Cloth of Gold, here was a fingerpost pointing off the main highway to the trackways and holloways. Some would lead back to the main road, others would head across country to encounter – a pleasant surprise – other byways. Some would turn out to be dead ends, but they might be where the treasure is buried. All this hints at the process by which the legend itself came together and spread; a means to understanding how the folk legend grew by steady accumulation and accretion around the tomb – both deliberate and accidental – of images and rumours, half-remembered beliefs, the common store of folklore and tale, the theories of antiquaries and, only rarely, smatterings of historical truth.

The vogue for grangerising in the late eighteenth century was partly about the reinterpretation of the written word with the pictorial (#litres_trial_promo). The practice came into fashion just as the relationship between visual and verbal means of communication was changing. William Blake was mixing words and pictures to create something sublime, and the first illustrated Shakespeare appeared. This points us to the importance of the tomb as both image and text: its art to captivate and inspire us; its rich imagery, in which we can read its meaning, creatively and historically. It is likely that in the same way that a picture pasted into a book altered how the book was read, so with the passing of years the imagery of the tomb altered an oral tradition about somebody called Shonks. Perhaps. But only when I had exhausted that imagery – its original meaning and what it came to represent – would I have any idea of what that oral tradition might have been. It will be what is left.

The Knowsley Clutterbuck and the Buckler painting also pointed me to all those who had communed with the tomb to create images. Their drawings and paintings, with all their flaws – and the flaws contain their own important insights – helped explain the allure of the tomb and its capacity to conjure stories. The Bucklers and their fellow travellers (the prolific Mr Cole, the tragic Mr Oldfield, the meticulous Mr Anderson) are one of the organising principles of the second part of this book – the part that belongs to the tomb. They have wrestled with it in the shadows, tried to capture it, tried to decipher it. In many ways, the Shonks I tangle with here, is made of hatchings and brushstrokes on parchment: scribbles and shadows and smudges as much as percussions and chisel marks on stone.

12 (#ulink_37385ca5-080c-501a-a0eb-5a7faee7e47e)

… speaks to us from a forgotten world (#litres_trial_promo), drowned, mysterious, irrecoverable.

—May McKisack, The Fourteenth Century, 1959

At Barley in Hertfordshire, between the 13th and the 14th milestones (#litres_trial_promo), the Cambridge to London road forked south-east towards the small village of Burnt Pelham. The man enduring the sloughs and mires of these notoriously bad roads (#litres_trial_promo) one morning in 1743 was the twenty-nine-year-old William Cole. He was destined to be one of the great antiquaries of his age, gouty and ink-stained and only comfortable among old stones or old parchment. A Hogarth painting (#litres_trial_promo) from around the time of his pilgrimage to Shonks’ tomb shows him standing in the background of a family portait examining old papers, perhaps less at home in the salon than in the muniment room. Would his scant worldliness stand the test of the man he was about to meet? Captain William Wright, the Lord of the Manor of Beeches, was known far and wide as ‘a man of great parts and wickedness’ (#litres_trial_promo).

‘Great parts and wickedness.’ The phrase is somehow picturesquely archaic without losing any of its force. Wickedness as a noun is stronger than the adjective and especially if applied to a grown man and one in a position of power. ‘Great parts’ is the quiddity of the characterisation. I understand it as great means, but also talents and roles in life. Returning to Cole’s notes I find he considered the captain ‘a man of great natural and acquired understanding [who] knows much more than he cares to put into practise’. I Google ‘Great parts and wickedness’ to see if it is a literary allusion, something Richardson or Fielding wrote of a lecherous squire, but draw a blank. It gave me a type and I hope that it is a fair reckoning, but it is a harsh epitaph for anyone.

I imagine Cole entering the village on a dun-coloured horse (#litres_trial_promo) that morning (comfortable carriage rides and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment were a long time coming to the Pelhams). Only thirty miles from London now, and yet according to one observer, it was a place both isolated and secluded and thus prone (#litres_trial_promo) to superstitious fancies. Later, another would write uncharitably that, ‘The three Pelhams are in a dark state (#litres_trial_promo). The people very ignorant.’

1743 was notable as the year that George II became the last English monarch to lead an army into battle, but it would not be surprising if some in Brent Pelham had not heard that George I had died sixteen years earlier, or that his son was now king and embroiled in the quarrel over who should rule Austria.

Captain Wright was infamously slothful. He drove the Reverend Charles Wheatly to devote the page in his ledger (#litres_trial_promo) facing the captain’s tithe payments to passages from scripture. He scribbled a proverb: ‘I went by the field of the slothful and by the vineyard of the man devoid of understanding. And, lo, it was all grown over with thorns, and nettles had covered the face thereof, and the stone wall thereof was broken down.’ (Proverbs 24:30–1). And ends with a psalm: ‘A fruitful land maketh he barren: for the wickedness of them that dwell therein.’ (Psalm 107:34). They are there as judgements and amulets against the captain’s laziness and supposed malignity.

Wright was a notorious miser. When Cole arrived, he was horrified that he had to stable his horse in the dairy and to find only two rooms with glass in the windows. The captain was holed up in one of them with hogs and dogs and litter and lice and ‘four strapping wenches who had nothing to do but obey their master and play at cards with him’. But Cole was willing to stomach the disreputable captain to satisfy his curiosity (and his taste for scandal). Wright was not only the current Lord of the Manor of Beeches, but also of the manors of Greys and Shonks, and, ‘the famous old monument of Piers Shonks … was the only reason which drew me out of my own province of Cambridgeshire into a church of this county,’ wrote Cole in a manuscript now in the British Library.

For all his bad parts, Captain Wright may have helped Cole. Perhaps one of his wenches accompanied him westward along the bridleway to the church and dangled a light while he pored over Shonks’ tomb. It is a Hogarthian composition, the single-minded scholar peering earnestly into the niche of the ancient tomb, the buxom (is that what Cole meant by ‘strapping’?) servant getting in his way, a suspicious sexton lurking in the background, and other stock village characters all arranged to lampoon Cole’s curiosity and the decrepit parish church.

In his prime, Cole would have made a great study for Thomas Rowlandson, who liked to caricature antiquaries. One of his contemporaries wrote of him, ‘With all his oddities (#litres_trial_promo) he was a worthy and valuable man.’ It is the oddities we are interested in, and Rowlandson would have captured them as he hunkered over a tomb, measuring the exact length of the nose on the effigy, as Virginia Woolf (#litres_trial_promo) imagined Cole doing in a letter she wrote to him post mortem, after reading his diaries. He became wedded to historical research while at Clare College Cambridge in the 1730s and later at King’s College, and, after being ordained the year after his visit to Burnt Pelham, he continued to put his research first. Woolf in her letter chastises Cole for not enjoying the eighteenth century. It was said he wanted to escape to the Middle Ages. She speculates that he was disappointed in love, which is why in later life he only loved his dun-coloured horse. He variously referred to his volumes as his wife, his children and his closest friends (#litres_trial_promo). By his death in 1789, he had compiled nearly a hundred large volumes of notes, transcripts and sketches, mainly on Cambridgeshire, and with remarkable industry; he told his friend Horace Walpole that ‘You will be astonished at the rapidity of my pen when you observe that this folio of four hundred pages with above a hundred coats of arms and other silly ornaments, was completed in six weeks.’

He rarely showed his papers to anyone. They were bequeathed to the British Museum on the proviso that they would not be opened until twenty years after his death, but even this term of grace was said to have caused some alarm for fear of what he had written about those he disagreed with – particularly anyone who had dared to remove his beloved stained glass from windows. He had no time for modernisers. Cole predicted that posterity might not appreciate the work he had done for it and admitted that he had committed his most private thoughts and much ‘scandalous rubbish’ (#litres_trial_promo) to his papers. They were indeed deplored, when they were finally opened, as licentious and even morally reprehensible for mixing gossip, scandal and his personal prejudices with his antiquarian observations. If the nineteenth century was prurient and unkind to Cole, the early twentieth century found his historical notes, his journals and vast collection of correspondence invaluable and fascinating (especially the tittle-tattle), all written in his beautiful, easily legible hand.

Cole took out his pen and ink that day in 1743 and made the earliest known sketch of the tomb. Like Buckler’s painting, Cole’s sketch was hidden away and forgotten; unlike Buckler’s painting, it is not art. It is a scratching, an aide-memoire, and in both its virtues and flaws reminds me that it is no easy matter to identify the detailed carvings on the tomb, let alone their meaning. He did capture those features that make it such an intriguing and mysterious object: its position in the wall of the nave, the strange inscription above it, and the grey-black marble slab with its extraordinary medieval carvings around which stories had gathered for centuries.

In drawing it, Cole seems to be the first writer to have examined the carvings in detail, and he tells us that the middle figure holds a smaller figure in its lap. Earlier writers had called the former a man, but as Cole’s sketch shows, it is an angel, a demi-angel, without legs, flying heavenwards, although the stumpy wings on Cole’s angel look hardly capable of flight. He gives it a scallop-edged costume reminiscent of something you would dress a baby in for its christening. The face has the features of a stick man: a long stick for the nose, a small one for the mouth. Oddly, these give it a patrician feel, he is curly haired with sideburns on his chubby face, shaded to a flush, and more eighteenth century than thirteenth.

In his Sepulchral Monuments of 1786, Richard Gough would explain that the angel is ‘conveying up a soul in a shroud, or sheet in the usual attitude’ – the ‘usual attitude’ being hands together in prayer. The image of a small naked figure – in this case probably male – standing in a napkin held by one or two angels has since been called a ‘stock symbol on monuments for the salvation of the soul’. (#litres_trial_promo) The earliest known example can be seen on a beautiful slab in Ely Cathedral thought to commemorate Bishop Nigel who died in 1169.

Cole’s drawing is a scratching, but it is lovely: it reveals more than it obscures, while being far from precise. We can see the coffin shape of the slab. At its head end, he has drawn the four animals that represent the Evangelists: an angel for St Matthew, a winged lion for St Mark, an eagle for St John and a winged bull for St Luke. Cole has drawn a lion because he already knew he would find a lion representing St Mark, but it bears only a faint resemblance to what the mason put there. Cole’s lion faces us with the beard of an old sea captain, its forequarters raised semi-rampant upon a bow shape, its wings teardrops. Cole’s lion is too naturalistic, but his eagle seems to have rigor mortis, its legs grasping for something in the moment of death when it should be clutching a scroll. It is lumpy, with a parrot’s head, and looks incapable of flight. The bull or ox is dog-like, and St Matthew’s angel is awkward and timorous, hugging himself against the draughty nave.

The cross below the angel and soul is more feather dusters than the foliaged arms of a cross fleury, and its central boss has four petals and not five – such details are important when they come from an age when everything could carry a meaning. None of Cole’s sketches do justice to the hand of the mason, but he is not alone, the artists of Shonks’ tomb have often led commentators astray because the tomb has eluded capture on paper. Looking at his renderings, it is easy to understand how later, less educated observers than him mistook the lion, ox and eagle for three dogs, which quickly became part of the story.