English Voices

by Ferdinand Mount

  And Pevsners, old and new, are just as energetic as Betjeman and Piper in making the glories of Berkshire sound irresistible: the County Hall of Abingdon, for example, as soaring and majestic as the chapel at Versailles of much the same date, is here acclaimed as ‘the grandest in England’. The winding walk from the County Hall down East St Helen Street to the Thames is rightly presented to us as one of the most enticing in any English town: the houses on both sides in the warmest rosy brick or rendered in primrose and sea-grey and dating from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, and at the end the spire of St Helen’s surrounded by three amazing almshouses, again spanning the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, the furthest seemingly about to topple into the river behind it, with the arches of Abingdon’s fifteenth-century bridge reflected in the water: ‘no other churchyard anywhere has anything like it’. Nor, says old Pevsner, is there an ensemble anywhere in England like the fourteenth-century paintings of kings and prophets on the ceiling of the north chapel of St Helen’s. New Pevsner tells us that the interior of the church is ‘unforgettable’ and that its four arcades set asymmetrically produce ‘a curious sliding effect as one moves about’. So it is, and so they do.

  I quote these snatches to show that enthusiasm as well as expertise radiates from every page of the new enriched and enlarged Pevsner. The tour de force comes in its brilliant and intricate account of Windsor Castle, the greatest inhabited castle in England, or anywhere, for all I know. While Betjeman and Piper lazily offload this task by recommending ‘the excellent Official Guide to Windsor Castle (price 1/-)’, Pevsner painstakingly but with great clarity peels back the layers of successive buildings and rebuildings to show us exactly where the Middle Ages end and Wyatville begins – not least in raising the Round Tower by 33 feet, which is why it can be seen for miles. Conversely, even the most patently nineteenth-century bits of the castle are a palimpsest, offering glimpses of Plantagenet and Tudor beginnings, even in the Albert Memorial Chapel, at the east end of St George’s Chapel. Originally intended by Henry VII as a lady chapel and shrine for Henry VI, it is now a Victorian Valhalla. ‘The first look into this chapel is one of amazement,’ says old Pevsner. ‘The room is now dominated by Sir Alfred Gilbert’s masterpiece’, the monument to the Duke of Clarence, the eldest son of the Prince of Wales, who outlived him to become Edward VII. Pevsner can scarcely contain his admiration for the prince’s approval of Gilbert’s ‘exceedingly daring, radically novel monument. The iconographical daring is as great as the aesthetic originality’. Or ‘Gosh’, as Betjeman might have said to camera. This is perhaps the supreme effusion of delight in the whole of Pevsner’s Berkshire. And it is inspired by seeing the most uninhibitedly, outrageously late-Victorian work of art you can imagine. I only wish that Mrs Pevsner had lived to see it, too.

  OLIVER RACKHAM: MAGUS OF THE WOODS

  ‘What a place it must have been, that virgin woodland wilderness of all England, ever encroached on by innumerable peasant clearings, but still harbouring God’s plenty of all manner of beautiful birds and beasts, and still rioting in a vast wealth of trees and flowers,’ sighed G. M. Trevelyan in his Shortened History of England. Such romantic pictures of England at the Conquest have delighted historians for generations – highwaymen lurking in the Wildwood, monarchs with a passion for the chase galloping beneath the immemorial oaks, great forests stretching for hundreds of miles across the country, of which only pitiful fragments now remain – Epping, Wychwood, the Weald.

  These are some of our most potent images of an untamed, irrecoverable past. Ecology has made nostalgia respectable. Alas, scholarly ecology also has a habit of destroying nostalgia’s most precious artefacts. Dr Oliver Rackham of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, has been at it for some years now, in a majestic series of books on ancient woodland. In an earlier work, he described Hatfield Forest, Essex (not to be confused with Hatfield, Herts, the Cecil place), as a unique medieval survival, ‘the only place where one can step back into the Middle Ages to see, with only a small effort of the imagination, what a forest looked like in use’.

  Nestling in that corner of Essex where the M11 meets the ever-growing Stansted airport, Hatfield Forest now bears the dreaded blue footprint on the Ordnance Survey map, marking it out as an accredited leisure resource. Yet it is still the most complete example of a medieval forest that we have, and on a quiet winter’s afternoon (you can just hear the traffic, but only just), it is an enchanting, almost deserted place. No, ‘enchanting’ is not quite right. That suggests strangeness. Better to say it is a natural place.

  Drawn on by this come-hither, the unwary reader may settle himself in for a pleasant ramble through a thousand acres of rural Essex and a thousand years of its history. He is in for a shock, or rather a series of shocks, for there is scarcely a page on which Dr Rackham does not deliver, with a sly ecologist’s smile, a sharp poke at conventional expectations (usually my own expectations too).

  The truth is, it seems, that medieval England was not especially wooded. Most of the primeval forest had been cleared centuries before. And the bits that were wooded were not particularly to be found in Royal Forests, which were established by the Normans to protect deer rather than trees and, on average, contained no more woodland than non-forests. Making an area a Forest probably had less immediate effect on land use than declaring it a National Park today. The Forest authorities neither enclosed woodland, nor made much effort to stop any grubbing up of trees. Again, there was no great dense woodland stretching from Essex to the Chilterns. The Forest of Hatfield was much the same size as it is today and contained much the same mixtures of woodland and open plains dotted with pollarded trees, rabbit warrens and gravel pits. The countryside round about, for as far back as written records go, has always been an intricate, small-scale landscape of hedged fields, winding lanes, ponds and scattered farmsteads. William the Conqueror may have ‘loved the tall stags as if he were their father’, but, apart from that and the manner of William II’s death, there is no abundant evidence of English royalty’s love of blood sports until centuries later. The deer were there for food for the royal table and were mostly hunted professionally.

  Ancient woods were intensely used. The typical wood was divided into quarters by rides and coppiced, cut down to the ground and then allowed to bush out again (the ‘spring’ – a word only later applied to the season of the year), on a cycle of anywhere between eight and eighteen years to provide the underwood, with its myriad uses – hurdles, hop-poles, fences, thatching spars, above all, firewood. Amid the underwood, some trees were left to grow tall to provide timber for building houses and ships. Pigs rootled for acorns. Deer browsed on the leaves. Cattle, sheep, geese and goats grazed on the plains.

  Trees when pollarded or coppiced grow faster (between 3 and 10 feet in the first season) and live much longer. The famous Doodle Oak at Hatfield which survived into this century (what may be a sucker from it is growing today) was planted well before the Conquest. Many of the giant oak ‘stools’ of the ever-broadening stumps of coppiced trees go back at least to the days of Robert the Bruce (an early lord of Hatfield Forest).

  Rabbits, far from being a pest, were delicate beasts newly imported from Sicily and had sweet little ‘pillow mounds’ dug for them – like miniature burrows – to help them survive on the unfriendly Essex boulder clay. A ring of pillow mounds is clearly visible in the warren at Hatfield.

  The melancholy, sinister type of ancient forest is neglected woodland, Arthur rather than Oliver Rackham country. A coppiced wood with its springing quarters, each at a different stage of regrowth, is a light and cheerful spot – no place for the neighbourhood sex maniac.

  Although there were indeed highwaymen lurking, the medieval authorities made anti-highwaymen ‘trenches’ – 200-feet-wide clearings – along woodland roadsides.

  Anglo-Saxon man was fully in control of his landscape and was enmeshed in a web of rights and arrangements, on most of which cash values were precisely computed. His relationship with the lord of
the manor often reminds one more of a modern repairing lease from the Westminster Estate than of the romantic and oppressive feudal loyalties described by continental historians.

  The evidence from the forest tends to confirm Alan Macfarlane’s thesis that medieval Essex people behaved less like archetypal peasants and more like Essex people today, buying and selling everything, including land, for cash and not for barter, hiring labourers and hiring themselves out, bequeathing their property as they pleased. Much of the business of the Forest courts involved exasperated landlords trying to extract a reasonable grazing rent under the guise of fines.

  One more of the old props of Marxist history looks a little shakier. ‘Feudalism’, however defined, begins to seem somewhat less important than it used to. The Norman Conquest may have brought new landlords, but did it really bring a new world? Thirty years ago, in The Making of the English Landscape, W. G. Hoskins first familiarized us with the principle that, in these matters, ‘everything is older than we think.’ Rackham seems to be pushing the process yet one stage further back.

  And behind the myth of the Saxon Wildwood, there is another myth at risk, older and deeper perhaps – the myth of man as a natural nomad, and of his settling down as being a fairly recent and, on the whole, mistaken development, which has gradually destroyed the spontaneity and happiness of his earlier life as a wanderer. Even in dear old Trevelyan, one catches echoes of the songlines: ‘In Tudor times the popular songs of the day give the impression that the whole people has gone a-maying. Did not some such response to nature’s loveliness move dimly in the hearts of the Saxon pioneers, when primrose, or bluebell, or willowherb rushed out over the sward of the clearing they had made in the tall trees?’

  Well, perhaps – if they could spare the time to look up from liming and dunging the soil, digging gravel pits for road-metal, pollarding and coppicing the trees and preparing interminable lawsuits about pannage, avesage, hedgebote, stakebote, estovers and all the other valuable rights and obligations of medieval forestry. They were, it seems, thatchers in every sense. In any case, the clearings had been made earlier and on a vast scale, in fact, as soon as man had developed the flint axe. Neolithic man in England began woodland management too, coppicing and pollarding, as well as pasturing his beasts there. Round our parts, anyway, the itch to settle down and get weaving with secateurs and chainsaw appears appallingly primordial.

  The only records of carefree woodland revels are relatively modern: the disgraceful scenes in the nineteenth century when ‘the idle and disorderly Men and Women of bad character’ from Bishop’s Stortford came out ‘under pretence of gathering Nuts . . . to take beer and spirits and drink in the forest which affords them an opportunity for all sorts of Debauchery.’ Between the wars, there were motorbikes scrambling in the coppices.

  It seems to be not medieval but modern man who has destroyed a great part of the woodland that was standing at the Conquest. The setting up of the Forestry Commission after the First World War and the development of agro-business after the Second were the two obvious calamities, but the general trend towards enclosure, the grubbing up of hedges, and the felling and replanting of woods has been gathering pace for over a century now. Pollarding came to be regarded as ugly, and coppicing as archaic.

  The story of Hatfield Forest has a hero – Edward North Buxton, not the last of that numerous East Anglian clan to do great service to conservation. On his deathbed in 1924, Buxton bought the forest and, resolved to ‘ensure that the Forestry Commission never sets a single foot on a single inch’, gave it to the National Trust. Unfortunately, he did not live long enough to explain to the Trust how to look after it. And they made all the then fashionable mistakes, tidying the place up, selling and clearing ‘dying’ trees, planting exotic trees, many of which really did die, ‘improving’ the grassland. Now, like the rest of us, they know better. Nothing is more subject to the whirligig of fashion than land management.

  This is a wonderful book, a brilliant miniaturization of the author’s great History of the Countryside, by turns acerbic, lyrical and unflaggingly informative. Rackham’s hymn to coppicing should persuade anyone who is lucky enough to own any woodland to join those growers who have resumed the practice, often together with tall trees in a mixed wood. The economics of coppicing as opposed to ‘high forestry’ are disputed. How far do the earlier returns compensate for the much lower value of the wood? But the returns to the countryside are not in doubt:

  The massed flowering of the primroses or oxlips, in the second spring after felling, is one of the grandest sights of English woodland, and in the years when coppicing was unfashionable was all too seldom seen.

  Small birds crowd their territories into the dense thickets of young underwood. The nightingale, which prefers five to eight years’ growth, disappeared from the Forest in the mid-1960s but came back when coppicing was resumed. Coppiced areas encouraged many insects: for example, hoverflies which feed on the nectars of summer-flowering plants, and fritillary butterflies whose caterpillars require abundant violets.

  Although Dr Rackham ends his review of prospects for sensible management of the forest by saying that ‘human nature does not encourage me to be optimistic’, he is not by nature a misery. The worst of the acid rain, he thinks, is over; pollarding and coppicing have been resumed; the deer are prospering; the improved grassland is slowly returning to nature; even the picnickers may assist the rare plants by disturbing the rough ground; the motorbikes have long been banned; the cowslips are back, also the pyramidal orchid; even the elms are suckering defiantly and may yet ‘re-create an astonishing variety of elms to delight and instruct another generation.’ Elm disease, after all, recurs through history and elms ‘like dandelions and hawkweeds, have largely given up sex as a means of reproduction’ and these days prefer to clone rather than mate. As for the Great Storm of 1987, the Forest was on the edge of it and only slightly touched but, in any case, ancient coppices are not much worried by storms. Forest fires? ‘Nobody ever succeeded in burning down a native wood.’ Why shouldn’t Hatfield provide a blueprint for the ‘urban forests’ which the government has established in the former industrial Midlands and the bleaker bits of central Scotland? Could not the ‘last forest’ be the model for the new New Forests?

  Wandering back to the car in the twilight through a grove of hornbeam pollards (to the twentieth-century forester as strange a sight as date palms), I caught sight of the ice-blue lights of Stansted airport only half a mile away and for the first time remembered exactly where I was. No municipal park of cherry and lime could confer such solitude.

  THE LAST OF BETJEMAN

  At the age of thirteen, William Norton, the son of a police sergeant and a Post Office worker, wrote to John Betjeman warning him of the impending destruction of Lewisham’s Victorian Gothic town hall. In no time Betjeman put William on to the recently founded Victorian Society, urged him to organize a petition, wrote him several long letters alerting him to other fine churches in Lewisham and Catford and then turned up at the town hall to be photographed with the boy. Despite all this, Lewisham town hall was demolished. It was still 1961, after all. England still slept. Betjeman at the same time was vainly battling to save the Euston Arch and the great glass rotunda of the Coal Exchange. Who else would have turned aside from those gruelling national campaigns to help an obscure schoolboy in one of London’s dimmest quarters to try and save a grimy town hall by George Elkington (no, I hadn’t heard of him either – his town hall in Bermondsey has been demolished too)?

  It is in these years, Betjeman’s fifties and sixties, that he is transformed from a popular versifier and telly poppet into something approaching a magus. He turns up everywhere with the battered felt hat thrust down over the Roman emperor’s skull, the lopsided, green-toothed chuckle instantly enchanting the ill at ease and seducing the frosty – his catchphrase ‘Ooh I am enjoying this’, uttered with every semblance of sincerity in the most trying circumstances. After hours of an interminable coach trip t
o Bucharest, Betjeman was heard to pipe up, ‘Oh, I am enjoying the boredom.’

  This is the third and final volume in Bevis Hillier’s huge life of the most popular of all poets laureate, and it is a triumph. The job could, I suppose, have been done in a single volume and has been, as Hillier generously points out in his preface, by Derek Stanford in 1961 and by Patrick Taylor-Martin in 1983. Impatient readers may wonder why they need quite so full an account of the early life of Barry Humphries or the history of the quarrying business once owned by the family of John Nankivell, the topographical artist who doorstepped the poet at the Mead, his home on the outskirts of Wantage, and became a friend. We could also have done with less exhaustive accounts of Betjeman’s dinners with camp clergymen and the making of his television films, landmarks in the genre though they were (film producers reminisce about old campaigns more relentlessly than old soldiers).

  But Hillier’s long-distance rambles are always enlivened by his deep but unshowy knowledge of the things Betjeman loved – arts and crafts, architecture and poetry. A more compact version would not, I think, have quite conveyed the impact that Betjeman made all over Britain and Ireland and at every level of class and brow. Thirty years after his death, the alteration in our sensibility that he helped to bring about can still be seen and felt. If we are more tender and attentive to the country we have inherited and less contemptuous of the obscure and unregarded, then he had quite a bit to do with it.