Hollow Places. Christopher Hadley
Читать онлайн книгу.
href="#fb3_img_img_b0469195-849d-5215-a0c5-b01b9eb02720.jpg" alt="Image Missing"/>
Ted pulled a small slipcase from the shelves and unfolded an old cloth-backed 25-inch Ordnance Survey map onto the carpet. It had been coloured and annotated over the years to show the extent of the Barclays’ Brent Pelham estate. Joseph Gurney Barclay, the banker and prominent Quaker, bought the manor of Brent Pelham in the middle of the nineteenth century and over time the family expanded their holdings, so the Barclays owned a fair portion of farmland in Furneux Pelham too. Surveying his domain, Ted traced a long finger across fields, across Nether Rackets, High Field and Lady Pightle.
He was looking for dragons and eventually tapped his finger on an irregularly shaped field defined by two blocks of ancient woodland: Great Hormead Park at the south-western corner and Patricks Wood on the eastern edge. It was labelled St Patricks Hill on the 1930s school map, but Ted was sure: this was Great Pepsells. After all, the land had been part of the Barclay estate for over a hundred years. It is in Furneux Pelham, bounded by Brent Pelham to the east and Great Hormead to the west.
If Ted was right, Woolmore Wigram may well have been telling the truth after all. There was certainly plenty of room for a dragon’s lair in the field, one of the largest in the Pelhams. Ted recalled that it had been the longest run of the steam plough, and during the Second World War the farmers filled it with old machinery to stop enemy planes landing. (Patricks Wood still concealed the rusting carcasses.)
Just so there could be no doubt, Ted produced an old notebook marked: Fields in Brent and Furneux Pelham: Owner-Occupiers-Area 1784. It was an eighteenth-century tithe book that had once belonged to a Robert Comyns, and inked into the columns of the first page were the fields owned by the Lord of the Manor in Furneux. There was no Great or Little Pepsells, but there were Pipsels and Pepsels in company with Nether Rackets, High Field and Lady Pightle, locating them just where Ted said they ought to be.
Great Pepsells was not the only field I discovered that day in Beeches. Next to the library in the old gunroom, hung a Victorian copy of ‘The Field of Cloth of Gold’. The original print was once famous for its vastness and for the man-hours expended to make it cover twelve square feet of plaster with so many tents and Tudor courtiers. Completed in 1773, it was the largest print ever made. The painter Edward Edwards spent 160 days at Windsor Castle copying the original oil for James Basire the Elder, who then took another two years to engrave the copper plate. Four hundred copies were pressed onto bespoke sheets of paper made for the occasion by the great paper-maker James Whatman in a sheet-size still known as Antiquarian. It was a print as ambitious as the event it commemorated.
It depicts the extraordinary pageant held in June 1520 when Henry VIII and the French King Francis I tried to outdo each other for excess and machismo in the Pale of Calais. Here was an endlessly diverting blend of historical detail, make-believe and mythmaking. Here were hundreds of richly costumed courtiers and halberdiers parading through a Barnum and Bailey landscape constructed specially for the occasion. The two larger-than-life kings embrace in a Big Top as knights gallop through the lists behind them, and men drink claret from fountains.
The Society of Antiquaries valued such paintings as historical documents, and scholars tried to tease out the factual from the fabulous – no easy task when the facts were so extraordinary anyway and the fabulous might symbolise much that was real. Take the statues of the three dragon-slayers on Henry’s extraordinary temporary palace. The showy Renaissance edifice was richly decorated with figures, but when Sydney Anglo published a detailed examination of the painting in the 1960s, he ruled that the dragon-slayers were figments of the painter’s imagination.
Another, much larger dragon, a magnificent, bearded wyvern, is painted in the sky above Calais. Whereas it is uncertain whether the painter portrayed the dragons on the gate accurately, presumably we can say with some confidence that there was no real dragon at the event, although chroniclers did write of one screaming through the sky above the crowd as Cardinal Wolsey sang the Corpus Christi mass. Historians cannot agree what this was. Some say that there was a ‘Flying Dragon’ firework display, others that it was perhaps a kite in the shape of a salamander released prematurely during the service. Whatever it was, it must have been a strange omen to some sixteenth-century minds. Today, the airborne dragon stands for the spirit of the piece: the myth and history, the real and the make-believe side by side. It stands as a cipher for all the fabulous but true features of the occasion, because ambitious as the painting and its print are, they cannot hold a torch to the real event.
There were not hundreds of soldiers, gentry and nobility, but over ten thousand. Their clothes were so fine that one French eyewitness said noblemen were walking around with their estates on their back because they had mortgaged their lands to finance the cloth. The temporary palace contained five thousand square feet of the finest glass ever made. A fountain ran with claret, but if you preferred beer, the English had brought 14,000 gallons with them – presumably to wash down their other rations: 9,000 plaice, 8,000 whiting, 4,000 sole, 3,000 crayfish, 700 conger eels, 300 oxen, 2,000 chickens, 1,200 capons, 2,000 sheep and over 300 heron. As Melvyn Bragg said when his BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time tackled the occasion, ‘The fun is in the detail.’ And that great dragon in the sky stands for the detail that the picture, for all its intricacy, can only hint at.
Encountering that print during my quest for Great Pepsells was serendipitous: with its associations, its mysteries, its vivid historical detail, its poetic licence, its riddles, its unwitting challenge to find out just how much history it contained, and, of course, its dragons.
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
—Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851
Ancient yews stand few and far between. Did one really straddle the boundary of Great and Little Pepsells until the early nineteenth century? A four-foot by three-foot oblong of greying parchment lies unfolded on the chart table at the Hertfordshire Archives, held flat by weighted leather snakes to reveal a jigsaw puzzle of Furneux Pelham’s fields. The 1836 Act of Parliament that did away with tithes had the wonderful side effect of creating remarkable encyclopedic maps and surveys, covering some 80 per cent of English parishes. Every field within the parish bounds is there, numbered and surveyed at six chains, or 132 yards, to every inch, some enclosed shortly before the map was made, neat and geometrical, others with edges softened by time and use, squashed polygons, their boundaries meandering and dog-legged to attest to their antiquity. The odd large field bears a dotted line intersected by S-marks to tie fields together that were not then enclosed, but considered separate. Thin yellow roads run east to west and north to south partitioning the village. Along them, in two or three places, buildings cluster in plan: red for homes and grey for all the others, the church indicated by a cross, the windmill a small crude X on a stick. There are avenues of trees, blocks of woodland, ponds and the River Ash roughly bisecting the map.
It was surveyed a hundred years before Miss Prior’s school map, and whereas her students had found some 300 field names, the tithe maps for Brent and Furneux Pelham list over 400. Some names had swapped fields over time: Handpost Field is on the other side of the road – perhaps the handpost moved, or more likely the children or the surveyors made a mistake. Many changed their names, becoming more poetic, like Moat Duffers, which was originally Dove House Field, or less so, like Violets Meadow, which was once the much lovelier Fylets. The field identified as Great Pepsells by Ted Barclay, but St Patricks Hill by the school map, is five separate fields on the tithe: ancient enclosures amalgamated by Victorian landowners. On the western boundary, no. 7 is simply Spring, and no. 8 the self-explanatory eleven-acre field called Ten Acres. On the eastern edge is no. 10 Wood Field, and part of no. 12, the delightful Lady Pightle. There, in the middle, is