Hollow Places. Christopher Hadley
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and mocked the stories? In the 1840s, John Walker Ord 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 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, 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’ 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 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 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.
Somewhere,