The Wood for the Trees

by Richard Fortey

  Chanterelle Potatoes

  This is what happened to those chanterelles: a simple way to get the most out of their flavour. Potatoes absorb the juices released from the mushrooms as they cook. Like all wild food, quantities vary according to how many chanterelles you have been lucky enough to find, but they should be about half the weight of the potatoes. I lightly cook a small sliced onion or shallot in olive oil until it is soft. Then I add sliced, lightly cooked floury potatoes and brown them a little, and next the chanterelles, coarsely sliced if they are big ones. I cover the pan at this point to help them “sweat” over low heat, and particularly in damp weather they will release a lot of fluid. When this has happened, I remove the cover and allow the liquor to reduce satisfactorily. I do not like the potatoes to wholly dry out—a juicy tackiness is about right. This part takes about eight minutes or so. When served with a couple of rashers of good bacon, this dish is all that is needed for supper.

  7

  October

  Nuts

  It is raining beechnuts. They fall to the ground with a succession of clicks, like a metallic version of a cloudburst. Beechnuts cover the ground till it is crunchy to walk on. The lower branches still hang on to the husks—or cupules—that enclosed the nuts. Cupules are small, gaping woody purses divided into four lobes, all shiny and smoothly brown on the inside, and coarsely hairy on the outside. They will loiter around on the ground long after the nuts have disappeared. Every nut is a three-sided cylinder, designed so that four nuts can snuggle together within the cupule as they ripen. The crop is abundant this year. Grey squirrels will be the principal beneficiaries, damn them, but then, so will wood mice and many kinds of birds. Wood pigeons will spend the winter scratching around to discover nuts they missed in October.

  Not every polished brown nut has a kernel—some are just pretending, and prove to be empty. But when most of the plumper ones are peeled with a fingernail, a pale, yellow-brown, faintly three-lobed little kernel can be released without much trouble. It tastes good too, but it would take hours to gather and peel enough nuts for a decent snack. As I kneel to pick up more of them I am distracted by a fallen beech leaf with two tiny, yellowish, hairy towers perched on top of it. They look like microscopic versions of shaggy boots. I am alert to galls by now, and sure enough this is another one, stimulated into growth by a tiny midge called Hartigiola annulipes. It is much easier to collect and identify the gall than the insects responsible for it. As with habitual criminals, their modus operandi always gives them away.

  The Chiltern Society is arriving to clear and reinstate the public footpaths through Lambridge Wood. Over many years people have just wandered around the beech woods, creating their own habitual ways. The Society is there to put them back on track, following the old rights of way. In charge of the operation is Stephen Fox, burly and effective, and a bit bossy, as he needs to be. The team of volunteers is comprised of senior citizens and is a very jolly bunch, fit and game and jokey. Picks and mattocks, saws and strong clippers are all supplied. “We all have to be a bit nuts to do this,” says one amiable white-haired lady wielding a billhook. Among their number are a retired doctor, and a man who worked for the BBC. The Rights of Way Officer of Oxfordshire County Council is there to see fair play. They chop down small trees blocking the path and grub up brambles obscuring the proper track. Felled holly branches are laid alongside the path both as a way of defining it and to allow their spiny leaves to deter wanderers. “Unofficial” paths are blocked off with more serious pieces of timber. A robin bounces along behind the party to see what edible tidbits are turned up during the clearing. It is surprising how fast the team progresses through the woodland, all the way up to the end of Grim’s Dyke Wood. “We like to get to the pub in good time,” explains the man formerly from the BBC.

  I was worried that determined locals would just continue to follow their old routes, and would resent “busybodies” telling them what to do. A path along the part of Grim’s Dyke that passes through our wood is a case in point: it is not a right of way, but people have been using it for years, partly because this option is drier during the soggy winter months. The correct path, now clearly indicated by the Chiltern Society with a smart new signpost, runs nearly parallel a few yards away; and it can get quite wet. Sure enough, a determined walker soon removed all the branches providing a barrier at the end of the spurious track on the dyke. Jackie and I moved them back again. So began a kind of war of attrition, which continues. We moved some more serious branches from a felled tree to provide a more serious barrier. By the end of the following week they too had been moved again by our mystery walker. So for the ensuing month we staggered through our wood carrying branches we could barely lift. That would fix it. This time the spars were so heavy that they were swivelled, rather than lifted, to reopen the track for our unknown interloper. I began to understand the psychology of an arms race. I had ideas about moving whole trees that nobody could shift, using big machines: the ultimate deterrent. The competition was clearly driving me nuts.

  Then I came to my senses. Public footpaths are one of the most precious features of the English countryside. The right of people to walk where their forebears walked for centuries past is an important principle to defend. I have defended it myself in parts of Wales where farmers are cavalier about putting bulls in fields crossed by footpaths and allowing their stiles to collapse, and I have scars to prove it. Our little wood is almost circumscribed by three footpaths. I had already discovered that dog-walkers kept deer under control, so there were advantages to having passers-by. On the other hand, Lambridge Wood is protected as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) for its ancient beech woodland.1 This imposes regulations about what I can and cannot do—for example, I am not allowed to fell a big tree without first getting approval from Natural England and the Forestry Commission. It is illegal for people to come into my wood and dig up bluebells. I have a duty to protect rare species: the Dutchman’s pipe growing near Grim’s Dyke needs me to care about it, and the dyke itself is an ancient monument that deserves to survive for another thousand years.

  We get mad at cyclists who use our footpaths—cycle routes are in a different category from pedestrian rights of way. For their part, some cyclists are cheerily oblivious to the distinction. On one occasion I threw myself in front of a miniature jeep grinding noisily along one of the paths. Tolerance has its limits (the driver backed off with moderate grace). What I really want to do is to alert the joggers and the cyclists to the delights of examining the details of the habitat they pass through so quickly and with so little regard. I want people to stop and read its biography from nature, to enjoy it as I do. Who knows? Maybe I could even convince the persistent log-shifter to abandon old habits.

  Greys Court Affairs

  The history of our wood and the story of Greys Court are intimately entwined. But even an estate like Rotherfield Greys cannot be fenced off from the outside world, as its game park might be from the privations of the peasantry. The early medieval period was one of increasing population and growth in trade. This accompanied a long phase of benign climate. If it had continued, woods marginal to the estate could well have been grubbed up and taken into arable use. The fourteenth century threw everything into reverse. The Great Famine of 1315–17 saw a succession of wet summers and implacable winters. Cereal crops failed. Seed corn was eaten in desperation. Starvation and the diseases encouraged by it took a huge toll; up to 20 per cent of the English population is thought to have perished. Cannibalism became a common crime. Global climatic change was caused by vast quantities of volcanic dust and gas released into the atmosphere by the catastrophic eruption of Mount Tarawera in New Zealand. Our wood was inexorably linked to events at the other end of the world. In the hard currency of tree girth this led to three years where little heartwood was added, just thin and measly growth rings that dendrochronologists use to recognise as a signature of those desperate years.

  The Black Death followed in 1348–49, when bubonic pl
ague swept through the land, respecting neither privilege nor estate. The historian Simon Townley estimates that Henley fared particularly badly because of its close connections with London—up to two-thirds of the population may have died. Afterwards, entrepreneurs moved back quickly, turning tragedy into opportunity. William Woodhall appears in the town records in 1350, was Town Warden two years later, and by his death in 1358 had a trading business stretching through south-east England. Henley kept its reputation as a commercial centre, and by the fifteenth century had enhanced it still further. From the narrow perspective of our wood, years of disaster meant that there was no pressure from population growth and so the forest was safe from clearance (assarting). It continued its useful life, its links with the past unbroken. But by now it should be clear that there were also links that connected our small piece of woodland in Oxfordshire with what was happening in the wider world. These links remain: they bind the whole biosphere together in common climatic cause. Viewed this way, the estate is global.

  Generations of de Greys survived the difficult years, based at the manor house, which had by now lost any worthwhile function as a castle. The land was worked on through season after season, sustained by strict routines, but when labour became scarce after the ravages wrought by hunger and disease, statutes were passed to ensure that no advantage accrued to the workers. The interests of lords and merchants were, of course, protected. During a succession of minority heirs to Greys Court between 1399 and 1439, the old buildings became run-down. Later in the fifteenth century the title to the manor passed by way of marriage to the Lovell family and their relatives for several decades. Francis, Lord Lovell, was responsible for breaking the long lineage of manorial rights stretching back to the Norman Conquest. He elected to support Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. For this treasonable action his estate was forfeited. This is a summary from an Inquisition held on 2 March in Henley-on-Thames in 1514, the fifth year of King Henry VIII’s reign: “Francis Lovell was convicted and attainted by a certain act of Parliament held at Westminster 7th November 1485…Jasper, Duke of Bedford occupied the manor from the time of the attainder until the time of his death, to wit 21st December 1495.”2 In 1503 King Henry VII granted Rotherfield Greys to Robert Knollys (pronounced “Noles”), Gentleman Usher of the King’s Chamber. By 1514, Henry VIII required the payment of just a single red rose at midsummer as settlement of the manor upon Robert and his wife, Lettice. The Tudor zenith of Greys Court was to follow.

  Robert Knollys’s son Sir Francis (1512?–96) was deeply embroiled with Tudor royalty. His sincerely held Protestant views were in tune with the age, except during Mary Tudor’s brief Catholic reign (1553–58), when he was obliged to flee to Frankfurt. He married Katherine Carey in 1545; she was the daughter of Mary Boleyn, and both a first cousin and a good friend of the future Queen Elizabeth. When Francis and Katherine were en route to exile during Mary’s ascendancy, the Princess Elizabeth had written advising her to “think the pilgrimage rather a proof of your friends, than a leaving of your country.” Mary Boleyn had been a mistress of Henry VIII before he married her younger sister, Anne. Recent research has offered support to the idea that Katherine was the illegitimate child of Henry, born during his affair with Mary.3 Mary’s story became the basis of Philippa Gregory’s 2001 novel The Other Boleyn Girl, and the movie of the same name. Whatever her paternity, Katherine was fecund. Francis Knollys recorded details of her fourteen births in a Latin dictionary that has recently come to light. Her offspring line up in alabaster tribute around the splendid Knollys monument in the chapel appended to the parish church at Rotherfield Greys.

  The Knollys thrived at the royal court when Elizabeth became Queen. Katherine was Chief Lady of the Queen’s Bedchamber. Francis became Gloriana’s close adviser, a Privy Councillor, a Vice-Chamberlain, and Treasurer of the Royal Household from 1572 to 1596. He was required to guard Mary, Queen of Scots at Bolton Castle in 1568, which must say something about the confidence Elizabeth placed in him. His Oxfordshire career was as remarkable: joint Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire in 1560, and High Steward of the City of Oxford in 1564. None of these appointments were without their perquisites. Portraits show a slightly stiff, confident, serious courtier. Francis remodelled Greys Court to the best standards of the Elizabethan age, demolishing much of what remained of the medieval castle, and creating the fine, triple-gabled house that greets National Trust visitors today. Red bricks made from clay dug from the Greys Court fields built further housing ranges to the west, and a deep well ensured a constant supply of sweet water from the chalk. Greys Court now had all the hallmarks of royal approbation, and the sense of security that comes from wise career decisions. The woods at the edge of the estate were not threatened.

  Families do not necessarily follow the course their parents might wish for them. Francis’s eldest son, Henry, had more than a dash of the black sheep about him. In 1575 he became quite the buccaneer with his ship The Elephant. Three years later he tried to join Sir Francis Gilbert on his colonising expedition to America with his brother Francis Jr., but instead they set sail early to capture plunder from a famous pirate. The expedition departed without them. By 1581 Henry Knollys was in trouble again for attacking Portuguese ships on behalf of the pretender to the throne in Lisbon, against the explicit orders of Elizabeth. He died in the Netherlands under unknown circumstances. His elder sister Lettice was born at Greys Court on 8 November 1543. When she was seventeen she married Walter Devereux, Second Viscount Hereford (and later Earl of Essex), with whom she had five children. In 1576 her husband died, allegedly of dysentery, in Dublin, where he had spent much of the previous three years. The beautiful Lettice was already embroiled in an affair with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who happened also to be the favourite of Queen Elizabeth. Lettice and Robert married privately at Wanstead in Essex on 21 September 1578. The Queen was furious. It was twenty years before Elizabeth would allow Lettice into her presence, and she is famously reported to have dubbed her a “she-wolf.”

  None of this seems to have overly concerned the wilful daughter of Greys Court, who outlived all three of her husbands, dying at more than ninety years of age, a remarkable achievement in Tudor times. As for her connection with our woods, it is known that she loved hunting, and it seems plausible that she honed her skills in the chase at her childhood home. I like to think of her stalking through our woods in search of deer, maybe intuiting the techniques of evasion that would serve her well later. She hunted with her younger brother, William, who became much more the son of the father, holding positions at court at the end of the sixteenth century. He was famously vain; indeed, he has been fingered as the model for the character of Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. He was responsible for the erection of the exuberant monument to his father in his own parish church. William’s effigy with that of his wife sits on top of the elaborate canopy covering Francis and his family, as if he were kneeling before a desk with a book in front of him. The image is oddly touching.

  Henley-on-Thames was now booming. In the period 1568–73 one-third of all grain bound for London came through the town’s wharves. Most of this was wheat for bread, but local entrepreneurs realised that “added value” could be released by malting barley in the town, which rapidly became one of Henley’s important trades. The arable land and woodland mix that had been part of the character of the Chiltern Hills since Saxon times got a new lease of life. As London grew, the demand for fuel rose commensurately. During the middle part of the sixteenth century the price of wood rose by more than 70 per cent. In 1559 the London mayor and aldermen were allowed to ship in no fewer than six thousand loads of wood stored at Henley and Weybridge. Beech wood was particularly popular for fuel, and no tree in the Chiltern Hills needed to go to waste. Much of the wood was harvested from coppices on a ten-to-fifteen-year cycle to provide billets and bavins, which were standardised wood measures. Billets were three feet four inches long with a circumference of ten inches, and were particularly suitable
for burning in the wide hearths of the time, where open spits were the rule. Bavins were three feet long with a circumference of twenty-four inches; we might now describe them as large logs.

  By 1543 there was already anxiety about wood supplies, which led to one of the very first pieces of conservation legislation, the Statute of the Woods. It was decreed that young trees were to be left to regenerate after any woodland clearance, and fines could be imposed for grubbing out woodland to extend agricultural land. Beeches grew faster than oak trees, so the good profits to be made from firewood may have prompted changes in forest management that led to the dominance of what we now regard as the typical Chiltern tree. An irregular line of laden carts creaked over rustic tracks along the Assendon Valley from Stonor House, or over the summit from Nettlebed, before gratefully reaching the flat, straight road along the Fair Mile on their way to stack up by the Henley wharves. Except for the “standards” left for longer-term cropping—oaks for ships’ timbers, perhaps—the Tudor coppiced woods would have seemed scrubby compared with the soaring beeches we see now. Whether Lambridge Wood received this treatment is impossible to say for certain, but its proximity to the straightest road into Henley is good reason to suppose that it did. The earliest published map of our area, by Christopher Saxton, dates from 1570, but the portrayal of land use is schematic at best; emparked areas around big houses are shown, and would not have been felled. It is altogether probable that another phase in the life of our wood had begun.