The Wood for the Trees

by Richard Fortey

  Saxon lords parcelled up their estates in ways that organised the countryside into slices that still exist today. Bensington was “taken by the king” after 571. It comprised a royal vill—a large estate, with land enough to support parties of nobles if need be. By later Saxon times Bensington’s compass included a generous stretch of country running all across our Chiltern territory, from the settlement itself as far as the River Thames near what would become Henley-on-Thames much later. Its outline may even have followed the “old ditch” of Grim’s Dyke, as a convenient, pre-existing line scribed on the ground. Our wood would have been no more than a tiny fragment of the vill. Royal pleasure would have required rides for hunting, supplies for feasting, lodges for leisure. Nonetheless, we know that people lived within its bounds. A burial site at Bix has been unearthed to reveal two skeletons buried clutching coins in their hands, fees for a passage to a better world. The coins belong to the reign of Burgred of Mercia (852–74), and numismatists recognise, with their wonderful blend of scholarship and history, tokens minted specifically by moneyer Heahwulf in about 865.

  For administrative purposes the shire was an important Saxon division, and one only has to hear spats between Yorkshiremen and Lancastrians today to understand how shire identity has embedded itself in regional pride. Administrative convenience has become a variety of tribal fealty: many of our visceral loyalties may at root be Saxon. A shire was administered through a sheriff, the modern connotations of which I do not need to explain. Less resonant today are the “Hundreds.” This division of a shire was based on the notional resources needed to support a hundred families (for one family, the measurement of a “hide” persisted into medieval times). In our part of Oxfordshire the Chiltern Hundreds comprise a series of local territorial divisions. Henley-on-Thames—and our wood—is a part of the Binfield Hundred. The adjacent Hundreds are subdivisions of that extensive tract of land embraced by the great southward loop on the course of the River Thames as it negotiates the Goring Gap, and were linked to royal Benson—as “Bynsington-land” in a charter of 996.6 One particular feature of the southern Chiltern Hundreds is that they have river frontage. They embrace different kinds of land with particular agricultural and pastoral possibilities: rich floodplain soils closer to the Thames, chalky slopes, and woodland with clearings on the high Chiltern plateau. They comprise broad linear strips across the physiography, providing nearly everything that could be required for a farming community.

  After the conversion of Anglo-Saxon England to Christianity, parishes followed similar lines, subdividing the Hundreds into parochial strips almost radially about the course of the River Thames,7 and continuing in similar fashion further north with slivers at right angles to the Chiltern scarp. Each parish was supplied with land that ensured near self-sufficiency; their distinctive shape always spanned a useful range of natural environments. The better ground grew wheat and barley, which also provided the material for thatching; downland and cleared areas supported domesticated animals; woodland supplied fuel, acorns to fatten pigs, and furnished the raw material to make huts and halls, bowls and spoons. We shall see how this pattern of mixed farming lasted for more than a thousand years, and that its legacy still influences the countryside today. The southern Chiltern Hills comprise a “fossil landscape” where the past can be read from the disposition of woods and hedges, field boundaries and churches, as much as from excavation or old archives. Maybe this is not an inappropriate place for a palaeontologist like me to come to terms with the vagaries of human history.

  Detail of Richard Davis’s map of Oxfordshire, 1797, showing the Binfield Hundred.

  The Anglo-Saxon centuries gave us place names—linguistic fossils, if you like. The ancient parish in which our wood lies is Rotherfield Greys. Rother is an Anglo-Saxon word for oxen; feld is often a cleared patch of ground. The name should have applied to open land grazed by cattle. “Greys” was appended after the Norman Conquest to signify it as the property of our local lord of the manor, Robert de Grey. The long, dry valleys so typical of the Chiltern Hills were indicated by the suffix “-den” or “-don.” A typical example is Assendon, lying at the end of the Fair Mile just below our wood, where Cecil Roberts recorded a handful of spelling variations. Harpsden, the excavation site for Roman villas, lies in another, similar valley to the south; Hambleden is to the north. The names are more than labels. The “rother” tag reminds us that oxen were the working beasts of Saxon times; a pair of these powerful animals was employed to pull the plough and coulter to turn the soil for sowing. The name alone conjures a picture of a farm labourer in a simple shift steering his single-bladed plough across an acre or two of clay-with-flints, whistling encouragement to his team in the winter sunshine as his oxen trudge ahead.

  Just over the Chiltern scarp, the name of the tiny but perfectly preserved medieval hamlet of Swyncombe records forever that the late Saxon Lord Wigod of Wallingford was wont to hunt wild boar in its sharply bounded valley (the second part of the name is even older—cwm, a Celtic dell).8 However, there is a caution to be attached to old names: land use may have changed; wild boar has disappeared. Turville, on the far side of the Assendon Valley, derives from thyrre feld, meaning dry, open country. Now it is largely wooded, but older cottages are still scattered around the edges of a large common area, even though it is much overgrown. Once upon a time it may indeed have been open ground.

  Nor are there any Viking names in Oxfordshire, like those commonly found in Yorkshire and eastern parts of England long subject to Danelaw. In the ninth century King Alfred the Great of Wessex had a strongly fortified burgh built at Wallingford by the River Thames to keep the threat of Viking pillage at bay. The huge trenches defining his military base are still there, and the site can even be seen from the top of our nearest Chiltern scarp. It was a great work, which has been estimated to have taken ten thousand man hours to dig. In 1002 King Aethelred ordered the slaughter of all the Danes in Oxford, in what is termed the St. Brice’s Day massacre. Revenge raids by Norsemen on Wallingford led by Sweyn Forkbeard early in the eleventh century must have passed close by our wood as his fearsome crew rowed upstream along the River Thames. By now the hills were spread with trees: oak, beech, ash and lime. The invaders would have sped past this thickly covered and unknown high ground, leaving the forest to the pale ghosts of Romans and the “horned gods of the coven.”

  Ash and After

  Earlier generations of Vikings were pagans who venerated the great ash, Yggdrasil, as the World Tree.9 The gods assemble beneath it, and its branches extend to the heavens, while three delving roots reach to the deep well of wisdom, to the spring that feeds all waters, and to the place where the Norns spin out human fate. Humans instinctively embrace trees as symbols. In nearly all religions the tree of life is a metaphor for commonality of descent. Roots extend to a dark underworld, branches to celestial paradise. The tree of Jesse validates the lineage of Christ. The fruit of the tree of Good and Evil brings sin into the world, and with it the possibility of salvation. Trees are always at the heart of the matter. In art, the tree lends itself to decorative simplification, or can become as complex as a Qum Persian carpet in which every twiglet is bedecked with scarlet plums and persimmons fringed by a border richer than fruitcake. Nor can science escape the attraction of the tree as metaphor or shorthand. The latest computer programs that explore the coded messages of DNA still print out trees diagrammatically to represent new evolutionary relationships. Numbers and names dangle off these trees the way armorial crests illuminate medieval genealogical histories. Every exciting fossil discovery made in Africa by anthropologists is invariably described as “redrawing the human family tree”—a redraft that has happened more than a dozen times during my lifetime. Trees can clarify or confuse, enlighten or darken, delight or dismay, but they flourish eternally in the crowded forest of the human psyche.

  In our wood, ash (Fraxinus excelsior) always seems the airiest of the trees, and not at all like deep, dark Yggdrasil. Its canopy is the la
st to unfurl in spring, and even fully clothed its divided leaves let in more light than do crowns of beech or oak, so that some flowers flourish beneath its benevolent guardianship. I love its Latin species name—excelsior! onward and upward!—so apposite for a tree that soars up straight when it is in competition with its neighbours. Ash seems to have a more secure instinct for the truly vertical than beech. Its bark always has a yellow tint to it, and becomes longitudinally fissured at maturity, oddly resembling wrinkled reptilian skin. Dead ash branches retain their bark for some time, and nearly always become studded with black hemispheres the size of golf balls belonging to a fungus called “King Alfred’s cakes” (Daldinia concentrica), recalling an incineration for which King Alfred is better known than for fending off Vikings at Wallingford.

  Ash is easy to recognise in winter, with its distal branches that dip and then curve up into a rise, like a complex candelabra. Its knobby twigs with sharp black scars like tiny hoofs are not like those of any other dormant tree. In our wood the ash flowers are over before the leaves emerge in May. The male flowers are little more than bundles of crimson whiskery stamens, and the females on the same twig longer, greener, but hardly more conspicuous. When the leaves emerge at last at the ends of the shoots, the danger of late frost—to which they are susceptible—is over; each leaf has four or five pairs of willow-like leaflets along the petiole, and always a single leaflet at the tip. By August, bundles of the fruits are beginning to mature, deep green now, but on their way to bleaching out to compose pale-brownish, dangling bunches of “keys” the length of matchsticks. Each bladed “key” has a seed at its base, and when released from its tether in the autumn will twiddle round as it falls like a tiny helicopter (a monocopter perhaps?) to spread away from its parent to a new site. As a strategy for propagation it is effective, as my crowded hordes of young saplings prove. I will have to start thinning them out; and all these came from only four goodly sized adult ash trees jostling for their place in the canopy.

  Fast-growing trees: ash (left) and cherry bark compared.

  John Evelyn appreciated ash in Sylva as “so useful and profitable…next to the oak, that every prudent Lord of a Manor should employ one acre of ground with Ash to every twenty acres of other land: since in as many years it would be worth more than the land itself.” Saxon farmer or feudal woodward alike would have appreciated the qualities of the timber. Naturally strong and elastic, it suits tools that come under pressure, like rakes and harrows, or the axles of carts. All our garden tools in my childhood—forks, spades, hoes—had ash handles, and coupled with Sheffield steel blades they put the cheap and tawdry imitations on offer in today’s DIY superstores to shame. They did not snap off at the provocation of a deep rose root or recalcitrant horseradish. I have to lurk around garage sales to find their like today. Ash also makes all the turned parts—stretchers and bows, spindles and legs—of the traditional Windsor chair, a mighty construction of true endurance. Our own example (plus elm seat) has seen out a century of bottoms, some heavy to start with, and even heavier after a good Sunday lunch.

  Ash also supplies the very best firewood. Logs cleave cleanly and burn without complaint. A rhyme by Anonymous explains:

  Beechwood fires are bright and clear

  If the logs are kept a year;

  Oaken logs burn steadily

  If the wood be old and dry;

  But ash dry or ash green

  Makes a fire fit for a queen.

  I have also entered wild cherry from our wood into the burning competition. Freshly felled it is impossible, just too full of juice, but after a year’s drying it burns cheerfully enough in our hearth with a gentle sweet fragrance, except that a flaming log occasionally spits out gobbets of incendiary shards designed to burn down houses. Ash still wins comfortably.

  There is one way to make ash immortal, like Yggdrasil. If ash is coppiced it regenerates happily, and will continue to do so indefinitely. A tree has to have attained a certain maturity before its root system is large enough to stand the trauma of the removal of its main trunk. Ash survives this treatment well, and around the low stump left behind after felling will throw up a circle of new shoots in the following year, which will transmute into vigorous young trunks when the old root system plumbs into new shoots, and pumps up fresh growth. A coppice “stool” results if this procedure is repeated. In East Anglia I have seen coppice stools yards across that are reputed to be eight hundred years old. A crop of standing wood is taken as often as needed—for fork handles or axles or whatever—as long as the tree can survive well. The most vigorous growth in ash happens in the first sixty years, which provides an approximate upper limit for the crop. Maybe twenty years is typical. This is a sustainable harvest as long as the woodsman has the judgement to know the right moment to cull the young trees, and the skill to coppice the tree again without killing it. If everything is done just right, natural regeneration defies time.

  Hazel is our own coppice tree. We have too few ash trees to risk an experiment in old coppicing techniques with them. Hazels (Corylus avellana) also regenerate wonderfully well. There are seven or eight mature hazels in Grim’s Dyke Wood, and all of them have been neglected. Hazels regrow as understory trees if the beeches around them are felled periodically, gifting light. It is likely that our old hazels have been there as long as any beech, though you would not guess it to look at them. They make up a bundle composed of a dense cluster of straight trunks of various thicknesses growing from a common base to twenty-five feet or so. The largest trunks are rather too thick to be embraced by my hands. They carry a thin, light-brown glistening bark, with a natural sheen, really no more than a subtle gloss. I have counted thirty-five to fifty annual rings in polished cut sections of the largest trunks, so these trees were following upon the beech trees that now mostly surround them. Like all trees they reach for the light. My clumps probably should have been coppiced several decades ago, but it is not too late.

  I selected the most vigorous of our hazel trees to coppice last winter. I had been told that deer find the fresh shoots of regenerating hazels irresistible, so I restrained from cutting right back to the ground, although this does produce the best regrowth. Instead, I chose waist-height. It was an easy task to cut off the small trunks, compared with felling a mature beech tree. The younger hazel poles were long and straight and provided excellent supports for climbing beans. Traditional country uses for such poles were in making the uprights for woven fencing, or stays for the laying of hedges, or spars for thatching. Hazel laths were favoured for producing a supporting lattice for wattle-and-daub walls that “filled in” between structural oak beams in many vernacular cottages. Finally, hazelnuts are a thoroughly acceptable crop if they can be harvested ahead of greedy squirrels. In sum, the humble hazel is a useful tree by any measure. The New Sylva relates that it is known to support 230 invertebrate species, so it is clearly a major asset for biodiversity in any wood.

  I began to wonder if I had been too cruel to my first coppice tree, for after being trimmed low, the stool appeared quite dead. For several months the bare stumps remained stubbornly inert. I had decked trimmings from the upper parts of the branches to make a kind of tent over the stool to discourage roe deer that fancied a snack from any regenerating shoots. At last, tiny reddish knobs pushed out of the shiny surface of the bark, a kind of eruption. They soon morphed into shoots. At their growing tips a mass of red hairs emerged along the petioles of the leaves as they began to develop—no other tree in the wood has twigs like this. Then finally big, jagged-edged, point-tipped leaves unfurled fully—the most generously proportioned leaves we have. Now, in August, it is clear that strong new shoots will push towards the light and another crop of coppice is on the way. Deer browsing proved no problem after all.

  Like a well-balanced person, the most serviceable woodland has different virtues that rise to different demands. This is not the result of any landowner making a conscious management plan; rather, a diverse range of needs leads naturally enough t
o an optimal way of exploiting what a wood has to offer. Coppice products are useful, but mature trees are equally necessary to supply timber, and as an item for trade. The eventual outcome is an ancient combination which has been called “coppice with standards”—a staggered crop rotation, if you will, in which nothing is wasted. The kinds of trees that still grow side by side in Grim’s Dyke Wood are an ancient memory of these woodlands past. Hazels might well have been harvested once every fifteen years, with the standards overtopping them growing as singletons, and felled more rarely depending on the type of tree; oak would have been harvested less often than faster-growing beech and ash. The standards also furnished a yearly crop of beechnuts and acorns that served as an ideal food for fattening pigs—rights for this pannage could even be sold off as a separate contract. When areas were cleared, light flooded into the wood, and a succession of woodland flowers appeared, inviting a host of insects in their train, and thence songbirds of many voices. A rich ecological merry-go-round spun onward through centuries. The dreary pine and larch plantations introduced in the twentieth century as a “cash crop” seem like an insult to time itself.