by Roger Deakin
By the time we reached the village the rough band was returning to the Town End Tree at the far end from the church, now an oak but reputedly an ancient elm in earlier times. It marks the starting point for the Oak Apple Day procession in the afternoon. Lights were going on in the windows, sending beams out on the mist, and wood-pigeons still slept on the telegraph wires. The church bells pealed, and people armed with billhooks and bowsaws began to appear under the bunting in West Street, heading for the woods.
I went with them, hiking back up the hill with Chris Lock, who writes educational books from his home in the village. Higher up, we emerged from the mist into the early sunshine lighting up the fringes of the wood and entered a wood pasture of oaks with a browse line that was probably the result of centuries of Oak Apple pruning as much as the browsing of cattle. Chris and I joined other villagers already busy claiming their oak boughs. Chris chose his carefully, explaining the finer points of the art to me. Later in the day, the boughs would be judged and prizes awarded by a committee of the Oak Apple Club, founded in 1892 to stand up for the wood rights and perpetuate the May celebrations. A prize-winning bough would be branched like a stag’s antlers, abundantly leaved, symmetrical and, ideally, studded with oak apples, the curious rich brown spherical galls grown by the tree in response to the larvae of the gall wasp.
Instances of such relics of tree worship as this are well documented all over the world. In Cornwall people decked their doors on the first of May with boughs of sycamore or hawthorn, and in the county of Westmeath in Ireland a whole bush was set before the door on May Eve and decorated with spring flowers from the fields. The maypoles set up in villages to dance around would originally have been live new trees brought in from the woods each year. In The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer quotes the North Bavarians, who still bring in a fresh fir tree from the forest every few years, stripping its branches but carefully leaving a bunch of green foliage at the top ‘as a memento that in it we have to do, not with a dead pole, but with a living tree from the greenwood’. Ceremonies such as the Grovely rite were originally performed with the most serious possible intent: to promote the general fertility of every living thing in the parish for the whole of the coming season. People really believed there was a sanctity in the living bough: that it contained the invisible god of growth. It was a kind of sacrament that might bless the house and all who went in and out, and, by being carried in procession round the village farmyards and into the fields at the high point of spring, might impart its power of regeneration and growth to everything it encountered.
The once sacred wood was by now alive with people and talk. Two women posed for a photograph, holding boughs like big bouquets, looking down at the valley: ‘Just look at the mist – we could be in Switzerland.’ ‘I’d rather be in Wilts.’
Most of the oaks, holly and hazels showed signs of the pollarding or coppicing that would have maintained a plentiful supply of underwood, autumn nutting and perhaps holly fodder when the wood was worked and harvested. I went deeper in among the oaks, admiring open glades full of herb Robert, wood avens, the intense blue of bugle and the dusting of yellow pollen on dog’s mercury. The heavy dew and mist had brought out snails in their dozens, riding the chalk, active and questing like little knights in armour. As I followed the flinty track to the very top of the ridge inside the wood, I found more and more holly, ash and mossy old beeches. One giant beech seemed to have collapsed under the weight of its own branches into a clearing in a plantation of larch. It had peeled and split its trunk, as top-heavy mushrooms, half rotten and saturated with water, outgrew their stems. As the sun came up, its beams, embodied by the mist, slanted through the larches on to the bluebell-wood floor. Roe-deer bounded off down a ride, and I found a naturally spiral oak. Another had grafted itself to a hazel in a mock hybrid that seemed to grow as a single tree with two sets of roots.
I was back in Great Wishford at half past eight by the church clock, as the bells pealed and they hoisted the marriage bough up the outside of the tower to hang it off the top like a flag. I joined the neo-pagans in the pub. Having worked up a healthy appetite decking out their houses in oak boughs, they too had adjourned to the Royal Oak for breakfast before piling into coaches to travel the six miles to Salisbury.
At the cathedral, four women in the rural costume as worn by Wishford women in 1825, holding bundles of hazel and oak sticks above their heads, danced a stately measure to the music of a squeeze-box on the lawn of the close. They performed in a square marked by garlands of oak, watched by the Oak Apple Club, assembled beside a large banner proclaiming ‘Unity is Strength’. We all crowded into the cathedral, and the shout went up before the priest at the altar: ‘Grovely! Grovely! Grovely! and all Grovely!’ Asked years ago why the wood is always named three times, an ancient villager is said to have replied, ‘We d’want jist three thirds o’t and noo less.’ But I noticed they didn’t shout the bit about Unity and Strength.
Everyone trooped back for a huge sit-down lunch with toasts, yards of trestle tables and dozens of speeches by local dignitaries in a marquee in the Oak Apple Field. I met my friends Sue and Angela for a picnic on the grass under a blazing sun. Back in 1970, the seventeenth Earl of Pembroke, by now an honoured guest instead of the enemy, stood up at the lunch and told the village, ‘Oak Apple must go on.’ Perhaps the lunch had been rather too good, but the applause must have been deafening. Still not sated with all this ritual and ceremony, the company, now numbering well over a thousand, assembled at the Town End Tree for a post-prandial beating of the bounds in a procession led by a brass band and the four stick-dancers followed by the Oak Apple Club banner, a May Queen, villagers carrying their oak boughs, farmers with painted wheelbarrows and the Bourne River Morris Men. They went all round the village and across the water meadows as far as the parish boundary at the Stoford River Bridge and back. Then the Morris men danced, and there were games and a fête on the Oak Apple Field.
By tea-time I was feeling distinctly weary, not least with the effort of keeping up with the constant challenge of the day’s ambiguities. First, an obviously pagan fertility bough was installed, without protest from the vicar, on the tower of the parish church. More pagan rites were then performed at Salisbury Cathedral, including fertility dances, under the appreciative eye of various local Salisbury dignitaries. A fair cross-section of a constituency that regularly returns a Conservative MP with a comfortable majority then sat down to lunch together and later went in procession wearing oak-leaf buttonholes and carrying green oak boughs under a royalist banner emblazoned with the unmistakably Old Labour slogan: ‘Unity is Strength’. Just to confuse matters further, the day chosen to celebrate the distinctly republican stance taken by the village on the question of Grovely Wood was 29 May. It is known as Oak Apple Day all over the country because it is the anniversary of the Restoration to the throne of King Charles II in 1660, after hiding in an oak at Boscobel in Shropshire. In the original charter, the oak boughs were meant to be cut between May Day and Whit Tuesday, so it seems likely that the feast was deliberately moved in honour of the Restoration.
Puzzling over these ambiguities, I unravelled some of the Grovely story through history. First there was the historical question of the origins of the charter itself. It was drawn up at a meeting of a manorial court held in Grovely Forest in 1603, presumably because the villagers’ rights to collect wood and to cut boughs in May were under some threat. There is evidence of several earlier attempts by the Forest Ranger, in 1292, 1318 and 1332, to prevent the exercise of these rights. On each occasion the villagers fought off the challenge in court. In 1603 the manor and forest had recently been bought by Sir Richard Grobham, an enthusiastic hunter who was to slay the last wild boar in England in 1624. It seems likely that he too was keen to have Grovely Wood to himself.
But surely securing the right to collect merely dead wood, and only as much as could be carried away on foot, was no more than a pyrrhic victory? It was a poor second to what must almost certainly h
ave been the commoners’ original right and custom: to coppice and pollard the living under-wood. This was the ‘lop and top’ that traditionally fired the bread ovens and cottage fires of ordinary villagers up and down the country. The right to dead wood amounts to little more than crumbs from the rich man’s table. As every woodlander knows, dead wood is bulky but light: it makes good kindling and can be useful for the rapid heat burst you need in a bread oven, but has already been half consumed by fungi, bacteria, woodlice and insects. The obligation to ‘go in a dance’ for six miles to Salisbury, although a charming idea in fantasy, carries more than a hint of ‘Let them sing for their supper.’
Whatever the private feelings expressed inside the Great Wishford cottages by tiny dead-wood fires in midwinter, things then seem to have settled down until 1807, when the Earl of Pembroke bought the Manor of Wishford and the forest, and promptly brought an Act of Enclosure upon it to Parliament in 1809. In 1825 there was another attempt to extinguish the rights, by the eleventh Earl of Pembroke, but he was challenged by a young woman of eighteen, Grace Reed, and three others who went as usual to gather wood in Grovely. All four were arrested and taken into custody. Too poor to pay their fines, they were committed to Salisbury Prison, but later released after a popular outcry and the intervention of a lawyer. Again the villagers’ rights were upheld in court, but more disputes followed all through the years of agricultural depression and acute rural poverty, when firewood from Grovely would have been an absolute essential for the cottagers of Great Wishford to bake bread and warm themselves through winter. The disputes over Grovely Wood between the villagers and the Earls of Pembroke were deadly serious and would have dominated the lives of people in Great Wishford during the whole of the nineteenth century. The four women dancing with sticks on the Cathedral Close now came to represent Grace Reed and the Grovely Four who stood up against the Earl of Pembroke.
In his play about John Clare, The Fool, Edward Bond evokes the anxiety of Clare and his fellow villagers around 1815 at the Acts of Enclosure by the big landowners that were robbing them of their rights of commonage, including their rights in woods and forests:
PATTY (nervously). They saw chaps gooin’ round the fields this morning with chains an’ writin’ books. Thass how it all come out. Wrote the river down in the books.
DARKIE An’ the forest.
CLARE You heard a this gall? (she nods) How’d you git rid of a river – (laughs) turn the river off!
PATTY Dam her up an’ pump her out boy!
CLARE Can’t – thass our’s as much as his. An’ the fens. An’ the trees. What’s it mean boy? We’ll lose our fishin’ – our wood – cows on the fen common. How’ll we live? Not on the few bob they pay us for workin’ their land. We need us own bit a land.
DARKIE They take all the land they’ll hev t’pay us proper wages.
But the landowners did not pay proper wages. In August 1826, the year after Grace Reed and her friends were imprisoned for gathering wood in Grovely, William Cobbett set out from Salisbury and rode up the valley of the Wylye through Great Wishford and was shocked by the ruin and poverty he encountered everywhere. He had lived three miles away at Steeple Langford for a while as a boy and had glorious memories of the valley. So he was bitterly disappointed to find the ordinary people so unhappy. When he reached Heytesbury, further up the valley, he met some ‘very ragged’ men and boys at the inn who had come all the way from Bradford-on-Avon, some twelve miles, to gather nuts in the woods. They were unemployed cloth workers, turned out of their factory. Cobbett saved his supper and fasted in the morning so he could ‘give these chaps a breakfast for once in their lives’. ‘There were eight of them, six men and two boys; and I gave them two quartern loaves, two pounds of cheese, and eight pints of strong beer.’ Cobbett is unequivocal about what he saw in the Wylye Valley:
I really am ashamed to ride a fat horse, to have a full belly, and to have a clean shirt upon my back, while I look at these wretched countrymen of mine; while I actually see them reeling with weakness; when I see their poor faces present me nothing but skin and bone, while they are toiling to get the wheat and the meat ready to be carried away to be devoured by the tax-eaters. I am ashamed to look at these poor souls and to reflect that they are my countrymen.
Defying the will of an earl was a dangerous thing to do in 1825. Grace Reed and her friends must have been desperate.
More disputes over the Grovely rights ensued, and by 1892 the situation was so dire that seventy-four Wishford parishioners formed the Oak Apple Club, adopting the motto ‘Unity is Strength’. There was such an upsurge of collectivist political ideas during this period that it is hard to imagine that both the choice of the motto and the formation of the club itself were not directly inspired by some of the many socialist and anarchist thinkers and writers of the time: William Morris, Bernard Shaw, Edward Carpenter, John Ruskin and many others writing in a flood of pamphlets and weekly papers such as Justice and Morris’s The Commonweal. The Fabian Society had been founded in 1884 and the Democratic Federation, whose membership card William Morris designed, in 1882. Its motif was an oak tree, rich with foliage and acorns, in which hung banners with the motto ‘Educate, Agitate, Organize’ beneath the words ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’. The carrying of banners such as the Oak Apple Club’s in procession was, by 1892, a well-established tradition among the trades unions.
Disputes continued over Grovely, with more trouble in 1931 and 1933, but things must have been resolved by 1987, when Lieutenant Colonel C. C. G. Ross published a short history of Oak Apple Day in Great Wishford. Its foreword was contributed by a certain Earl of Pembroke: ‘At a time when so much is changing for the worse in the English countryside,’ writes the Earl, ‘it is heartening to know that Oak Apple Day in Wishford remains unchanged and as solid as it has been for many hundreds of years. The rights which are held by the people of Wishford are still zealously guarded and the near pagan ceremonial which takes place in Salisbury Cathedral is surely unique. I believe Oak Apple Day plays a very important part in the history of English village life and sincerely hope it will continue for “time out of mind”.’
This would surely have brought a smile to the face of Grace Reed and her three friends, not to mention Cobbett. By the end of the day I could no longer tell if I was pagan or Christian, Tory or Old Labour, royalist or republican. But after another visit to the beer tent on the Oak Apple Field, I decided it must be best to be all of them at once, like everyone else in Great Wishford. ‘There must be a lot of wood-burning stoves in Great Wishford,’ I said to the woman next to me as we queued at the bar. ‘Too much like hard work,’ she said; ‘we all have central heating.’
Willow
The day I go over to talk willow with Brian White on his withy beds at Kingsbury Episcopi, a mad westerly wind is blowing across the Levels. I drive down out of Castle Cary, where the evening before had been calm, and I had witnessed a posse of badgers sauntering nonchalantly along the street beneath Lodge Hill, knocking the tops off dustbins like teenagers and rifling them, even pausing to tip over the ice-cream sign outside the newsagents. Emerging early from the snouting dingles of the town at dusk, they went their rounds with impatient efficiency, jogging from house to house like council workers on some lucrative bonus scheme.
Dropping down into the southern Levels off the ridge at Somerton, I pause at Muchelney Church to see the angels in its ceiling, painted in the early 1600s around a plump carved oak, gold-leafed sun. As the church guide primly explains: ‘The angels are wearing Tudor costumes, and, unusually, some are very feminine.’ They are, in a word, topless, and at this time of year one can’t help seeing the ripeness and rosiness of the massed angelic bosoms reflected in the laden apple orchards outside. Why don’t vicars plant orchards in their churchyards? As a symbol of renewal and sweet pleasure in life, what better tree could there be to rise from the dead? I ask two stonemasons descending from the scaffolding on the church tower if they know of the Green Man anywhere round here.
‘Sorry, sir, can’t help you there,’ they reply warily. In fact, as I learnt later, the work on the tower had uncovered an entire bestiary of hitherto unnoticed gargoyles and punkies; half-human, half-animal woodland beings carved in stone, and I suppose the men wanted to keep them to themselves. Reveal them to a stranger, and their magic might evaporate.
All the way to the next village, Thorney, the hedges, generally of elm around the Levels, really are full of thorn. In Kingsbury Episcopi churchyard, up Orchard Lane, the topsy-turvy gravestones reveal the constant shifting of the damp ground. Windfalls tumble about the storm-tossed graves. I am early, so I go a mile up the road and ascend the storybook Burrow Hill, topped with a single sycamore and a wooden swing. It hoists you a few feet above the summit. You sway gently in it, surveying cider orchards and meandering lines of willows or poplars showing the silver backs of their leaves to the wind. Withy beds are laid out between the reedy drainage channels, and tiny cattle lie about the meadows. The still water of a lode stretches off to the east, a buzzard mews, and someone bumps slowly round the orchard molehills below on an old motorbike, inspecting the sheep. My sycamore perch, I notice, has been carved up, skinned and the wound in the bark, about two feet square, painted pale blue, perhaps to repel insects. Flies, especially, are said to have an aversion to pale blue, and it is a traditional colour for farmhouse kitchens. I observe a goat moth caterpillar climb the trunk and skirt along the rim of scabbed bark, duly veering off the blue. It trudges on eight feet to the crown as I watch.
