Clay and After
Lonny van Ryswyck has come to the wood with spades and buckets and strong plastic bags. We have found a place at the edge of the large clearing that seems suitable. Brambles are a nuisance hereabouts. From their established woody stocks new leading shoots have arched over and down and taken root, eventually to interlock in a low-level jungle that will shade out all the weaker herbs. These shoots can be yards long, and are fully protected by thorns. I lash about me with my pick to uproot the invaders. The new blackberry vines pull up easily enough, revealing bunches of starkly white roots wherever they have touched down. A space is soon cleared. Lonny digs down into the orange-brown clay-with-flints, to bring up great gobs of the sticky stuff. The goo is filed in plastic bags to be taken back to the Netherlands, there to be baked into tiles. She pronounces that the clay is “so beautiful.” Lonny’s studio has worked on the polder clays of her native region, rendering in her furnace every farm into its unique ceramic signature, manufacturing a subtly different tile for each property, some deeply red or orange, others with greenish or greyish tints, according to the precise chemical composition of the local material. In this way, she has produced a wall of tiles that encapsulates a whole landscape. So these few bagfuls from our own morsel of Oxfordshire will provide the material for our woods’ own special earthen identity. When the small reddish tiles arrive, they take pride of place in the collection.
There is a long tradition of brickmaking in our area. Just beyond Lambridge Wood towards Greys Court, the name of Brickfield Farm leaves little room for speculation. Very old bricks are not standardised. Neat bricks, smaller than we are used to, make an outbuilding at Greys Court housing the donkey wheel that once brought up water from a well hewn deep down into the Chiltern chalk. They display deep, warm, almost crimson-red tones. Transport was the most important limiting cost in medieval times when buying in all kinds of goods; if raw materials were available locally, then they would be employed to save haulage. There were good local clays. Sand from pits in Lambridge Wood was combined with lime, burned from local chalk using charcoal from the woods, to provide the ingredients for mortar. So all the ingredients for brick buildings were readily supplied from within bounds of the Greys estate. John Hill has discovered the circular base of the old kiln a short distance south-west of Lambridge Wood.
Just up the road on the high ground in Nettlebed, less than three miles from our wood, brickmaking became an industry. A huge, bottled-shaped brick kiln located uncomfortably in a modern residential close is all that remains of centuries of this craft. Nettlebed bricks were said to be the first of their kind made south of the River Humber since the Romans departed. The Stonors were lords of the manor of Nettlebed during the medieval period. Their incomparable family papers record that Thomas Stonor began to add to the manor house at Stonor Park in 1415. During 1416–17 Thomas purchased no fewer than 200,000 “brykes” and employed “lez Flemyngges” (Flemish people) to build the chapel at the house. These artisans had brought over the necessary skills from the continent and settled down as brickmakers near Nettlebed; £40 was paid to Michael Warwick for the contract to supply the bricks, but another £15 had to be added to transport the load by cart a mere three miles to Stonor. Two hundred and fifty years later the omniscient Dr. Robert Plot commented on the toughness of the Nettlebed product, attributing it to a peculiar virtue of the clay. Coppiced woodland doubtless kept the kiln ovens burning all the while.
The Nettlebed brick kiln.
Bricks from later firings gave local houses a particular signature, since from the eighteenth century brick sizes were roughly standardised. These “Nettlebed blues” have warmly red sides and blue-grey ends. They are frequently employed in walls to impart a chequerboard effect by alternating stretchers and headers. Houses enhanced in this fashion can be recognised all around Wallingford and Henley-on-Thames, and give many vernacular buildings in this small part of Oxfordshire a delightful but unobtrusive regional identity.
By a curious nomenclatural coincidence, the local big house in Nettlebed, Joyce Grove, was occupied in the early twentieth century by a banker, Robert Fleming, who had nothing to do with bricks, but was the grandfather of Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, a brand as enduring as brickwork; moreover, “Flemish Bond” is the bricklaying style favoured by those using Nettlebed blues.10 In 1894 a sale catalogue for the disposal of Stonor lands described Nettlebed as having “an inexhaustible reserve of clay,” but inexhaustible or not, no Nettlebed bricks were made after the 1930s. The former clay pits have now almost entirely reverted to secondary woodland. Bricks today usually originate from vast clay pits near Peterborough.
The most readily available and ubiquitous local building stone is flint. It is virtually indestructible, and very hard, but it has problems. Flint does not bind well to mortar. Many flints are not solid, like the stone eggs Dr. Plot described. They can be roughly shaped—or knapped—but this is laborious work. A common building style throughout chalk country combines the deficiencies of flint with the virtues of brick, the latter being used to make corners, and to frame doors and windows, while flints of varying shapeliness set in mortar comprise the walls around and between. The best flints are newly dug from the chalk, but respectable ones brought up by the plough will suffice. Traditional brick-and-flint cottages are common in Chiltern country, and are usually charming rather than grand, the former houses of farm labourers and not gentry. Thatched roofs that a Saxon would have readily recognised were once common, but sadly are becoming rarer as fires and insurance premiums take their toll.
Sale notice for clay and sand rights, Nettlebed.
Flints were used in grander style in castle walls, as they were in the oldest parts of our wood’s manor, Greys Court. Such walls have to be thick to do their job, so masses of flints were jigsawed together in mortar with any other stony materials that came to hand. Medieval flint churches are also the rule, but here the quoins are made of stone rather than brick. At Swyncombe, tucked into the secret valley where Wigod bagged boars, the diminutive and ancient flint church of St. Botolph has limestone blocks on every corner and surrounding the doorways. These stout blocks are not local—they come from Normandy. It was easier to bring them from Caen in the north of the Anglo-Norman kingdom than to import them from around Bath, for example. A special factor here is that until 1404 Swyncombe was part of the important abbey of Bec in Normandy. A similar style of making ancient churches is repeatedly found throughout this part of Oxfordshire. Limestone fonts and stoups were probably all part of the same deal. The walls, however, are from down the road and all around the fields: a mass of rubbly flints, grey and speckled, rough as old oak bark. The overall effect is a building wonderfully at ease with the landscape in which it sits. Its origins may lie still deeper, for the way the flints at the base of the walls are laid in herringbone fashion suggests Saxon handiwork. All the parishes in the manor of Bensington had Saxon forebears, including our own, Rotherfield Greys. The Normans soon replaced the original wooden churches or modest flint constructions they found there. However, like the employment of woodlands, in this “fossil landscape” almost everything roots back to Saxon times. A thousand years passes easily in the land of rothers and swyne.
Kneeler in St. Botolph’s church, Wigod’s hunting area.
Flint-knapping
James Dilley comes to the wood to look for Mesolithic flints, but he fails to find any worked implements on our patch. However, he does find some good-quality flints to show off his skill in knapping. Most of the flints in the wood have a kind of white or brown crust on them. It is the interior that is important. The darker and more uniform it is, the more useful it will be. Flint is hard, but also brittle. If hit in exactly the right way, a flake will split off it, with a curved fracture surface. If you have ever broken a thick piece of glass, you will recognise this conchoidal fracture, and flint is effectively nothing more than silica glass. Before attempting any work with flint, it is as well to wear some eye protection to be on the sa
fe side, and to place a thick cloth over the thighs to prevent any sharp shreds going the wrong way.
In the wood, a suitable stone with which to strike the flint is at hand—one of the rounded liver-coloured sandstones that are scattered over the forest floor. Once a good-looking flint has been found, a good hard tap with the stone detaches a flake or two. Repeated taps in the same direction may even produce some long strips that might make a scraper. The flake often already has a very sharp side, so it is easy to appreciate how a useful tool can be easily acquired. Making anything more sophisticated requires more time and much more skill. A smaller stone can be used to tap off delicate flakes along a cutting edge, for example, and if worked from both sides something like a knife can result. An additional tool that James produces, a club made from deer antler, is surprisingly effective at removing small flakes. The antler is far softer than flint, but sharp percussion exploits its brittleness. An hour or two spent in this pursuit is guaranteed to increase your admiration for “Stone Age” technologists.
6
September
Gold!
A singular golden brilliance floods Grim’s Dyke: September sunlight thrown at a low angle through tree trunks that act as a series of pillars or bars. The leaves still provide a full canopy, so the generous light penetrates only in patches that are landlocked pools of incandescence. A hanging mist is a hint of autumn in waiting. As I walk through the darkness of the holly glade, the far prospect is one of golden paradise seen from the underworld. Then I find my own gold: no Iron Age hoard, but just as much shining treasure. My own chanterelles! They glow like trapped sunbeams by the path that runs through the centre of the wood. Small, bright-yellow mushrooms shaped like funnels push through the beech litter over a patch three yards across. They are the colour of egg yolks, or the stamens of saffron. They have a brightness that seems almost suspiciously enthusiastic among last year’s dull leaves. I am momentarily torn between leaving the chanterelles (Cantharellus cibarius) to decorate the pathside or scooping them up and carrying them home as golden booty. They have already shed millions of spores, so their reproductive mission is complete: the prize is rightly mine. They go straight into my basket.
The evening light is now fading fast, but still illuminates white porcelain mushrooms sprouting from a pile of felled beech logs that our neighbour has stacked close to the barn. If the chanterelles presented as unrealistically yellow, these clusters of mushrooms glow too white to be true, as if they were some other-worldly china replica of the real thing. Their caps drip glutinous slime that picks up glints from the sun’s last rays. Every bit of the porcelain fungus (Oudemansiella mucida) is eerily white—the gills beneath the cap, the ring that decorates the stem. It is said that the caps are edible if the gluten is washed away, but I am not tempted. I am reminded of scientific research on this particular mushroom. The porcelain fungus defends its domain within the dead beech trunk on which it feeds by making chemicals (strobilurins) that repel fungal competitors—a kind of molecular face-off. These same chemicals have proved unusually effective as ecologically friendly fungicides; they are used everywhere to fight off harmful moulds that might otherwise damage crops, and without poisoning benign creatures. There are some golden rewards that are hidden from sunlight.
When I climb into the better light provided by the car, I discover another gift from the wood. Enchanter’s nightshade seeds have stuck in their dozens to my trousers, looking like so many little greenish insects. The least spectacular of our woodland flowers, creeping unheeded under brambles and where bluebells enjoyed their brief glory, this modest species probably finished flowering in July. These tiny, paired seeds are the last part of its life cycle. Richard Mabey explains that its rather wonderful name is a translation from its botanical Latin equivalent, Circaea lutetiana, which has to do with the Greek enchantress Circe.1 In the sixteenth century Parisian botanists were of the opinion that this plant was the source of the potion that the witch used to turn Ulysses’ crew into pigs. Lutetia being a classical name for the forerunner of Paris, this becomes “Circe’s poison of the Parisians,” a glamorous name for such a simple herb (in fact, it may well be non-poisonous).
However, its seeds are something of which a magician would not be ashamed. Under my hand lens I see that the green, swollen clubs are coated in a mass of tiny white hairs, and that each hair is hooked at its tip. After the unspectacular flowers have done their job, the seeds hang pendulous at the tips of pin-like stalks, and must easily detach to hook a ride on any passing animal. As far as they are concerned, my socks and trousers are just the furry transport required to spread them to a new patch. For a moment I wonder at the perfection of the design, and feel a sneaking sympathy for those who believe in a Designer; the attention to detail does indeed seem so awesome. Everything works at such a small scale, even down to the molecules that can scare off competitive moulds. Is this not an exquisite collaboration greater than we can comprehend? A divine plan? Yet I know that this “explanation” is a spell spun by a deceiving enchantress. The wood is a complex weave of adaptations. Every feature of every organism has been tested by natural selection. An enchanter’s nightshade seed that failed to produce those most perfectly “designed” hooks would succeed less well in propagating itself. A porcelain fungus whose chemical shield failed would soon be selected out of the population. The enchantress would have me leave behind the very rational faculties that reveal the wonder and pleasure of understanding nature. For the scientist the analytical process does not diminish the splendour of what he or she sees. Every detail added is an extra stanza added to a great epic poem, one that is never complete, nor yet ever tedious in its particulars.
I brush off the seeds of the enchanter’s nightshade rather carefully before I drive home. If the plant establishes itself in my garden, it will become a pernicious weed.
Manor and Town
Our wood became part of one of the manors of Rotherfield shortly after the Norman Conquest in 1066. The estate is recorded in the great tally of the Domesday Book twenty years later as held by Anketil de Grey, and various de Grey descendants held court there for more than three hundred years, during which time their name became appended to the parish. Another prominent family, the Pippards, managed a similar trick further to the west, thereby labelling the village of Rotherfield Peppard as it appears on maps today.2 Domesday also tells us that the estate was valued at £5 to the lord, that it supported twenty households (twelve villeins and eight bordars), had seven ploughlands, twelve acres of meadow and four-by-four furlongs of woodland. It was already presenting a mixed landscape, rather as it does today. There never was a village of Rotherfield Greys in the cosy, clustered-round-the-green sense; it always comprised scattered farmhouses and workers’ cottages, all looking towards Greys Court at the centre.
Today, only curtain walls and three towers remain of the medieval castle that the de Greys built, but their flinty bulk still impresses where they are aligned opposite the later Tudor mansion as tattered but defiant relics of serious times. One of the ancient towers has been incorporated into a seventeenth-century dower house, and must command one of the most enviable views in the south of England, over flawless rolling countryside. By contrast, a medieval traveller glimpsing the original castle from across the same valley would have found it quite intimidating.
It is likely that Greys Court was surrounded by wood pasture, at least after 1200; an open park studded with mature trees where deer could thrive alongside other livestock. “Ploughland” was used for arable crops, and is certain to have been on the good farmland lying north of the big house that is still partly employed for that purpose. The area occupied by woodland was actually rather less than it is now—I estimate about 135 acres. There are, of course, no maps of the estate from these early days, so there will always be some uncertainty about land use, but it is reasonable to suppose that the woodland lay furthest from the manor towards the edges of the property, beyond the worked fields, and more or less where it is today.
The parish of Rotherfield Greys was one of those long, thin strips of ground that had been established in Saxon times. At least five miles long and never more than a mile wide, and often much less, it extended eastwards to include its own Thames river frontage. This would become more important as trade grew beyond the immediate area, but from the first it provided a private fishery for the lord’s use. The parish included a range of woodland, grassland and productive agricultural land sufficient to support a slowly increasing population, all the way from the high “waste” ground at Highmoor to the rich meadows along the Thameside. Lack of water in the more elevated ground led to the construction of several ponds, and eventually to the excavation of a few deep wells.
The feudal system demanded duty of work from the tenants, and as the Greys’ manor was kept “in demesne” through much of the Middle Ages the peasantry were bound in thrall to the lord of the manor for generation after generation. They worked the fields, tended the animals and respected the trees. These anonymous serfs were more familiar with our wood than anyone else. The Luttrell Psalter (c. 1330) allows a glimpse of them: dressed in plain, pleated, coarsely woven tunics, with chausses clothing their legs and a simple hood, or chaperon, covering the head. Toil and religion dominated their lives. Only saints’ days permitted them brief respite from labour. In the wood, they coppiced and felled as necessary, making bundles of faggots for fuel, posts for fencing, repairing tools with ash handles, maybe secretly smuggling home a piece of beech wood to craft a simple bowl. Some tenants had rights to gather brash for fuel (known as woodbote), and there was a requirement on the part of the lord to release wood to repair dwellings (housebote), but almost everything in the lives of tied men was specified by a list of obligations and duties. They would have been appalled to see how much fallen wood just rots away today. We do not know how our peasantry fared during the terrible civil war period known as the Anarchy (1135–54), but as confrontations between the rival claimants to the throne, Stephen and Matilda, were played out in siege and slaughter at Wallingford (1153) so close by, it is unlikely that they would have escaped the general suffering. Hobbes’s famous phrase on the effects of warfare could have been coined specifically for this dismal period: “the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” Even the gentry suffered.
The Wood for the Trees Page 14
