by Sylvia Kent
About five o’clock she came to Colchester and stopped at the house of Mr Enew, where she was received and waited upon by Mrs Enew and Mrs Ribow ... Mr Great of Colchester had the honour of presenting to her Majesty, while she was at Mr Enew’s house, a box of candied eringo-root.
Eryngo roots, boiled or roasted, taste rather like chestnuts. When candied, they have a liquorice flavour. The Greeks are supposed to have eaten the stem and root, which they boiled or ate raw. Although candied eryngo root was no longer made commercially after 1865, in Colchester the recipe has been preserved and a label on a box in the Holly Trees Museum reads ‘Eringo Roots Candyed and sold by Charles Great in the Old Twisted Posts and Pots in Colchester’.
Alcohol
Wine is a very necessary thing in most families, and it is often spoiled by mismanagement of putting together. For if you let it stand too long before you get it cold, and do not take great care to put your barm upon it in time it summer beams, and blinks in the tub, so that it makes your wine fret.
From the eighteenth-century Essex Domestic Cookery Book.
Alcohol has always played its part in feasts and festivals. Although the Romans in Essex were known to have planted vines 1,000 years earlier, it was following the arrival of the Normans in 1066 that wine-making flourished again in Essex. When facts and figures were being collected for the Domesday Book in 1086, there were already nine vineyards established. One of the most productive belonged to Sweyn FitzWymarc in Rayleigh; it yielded over 2,000 gallons of wine in a good summer.
The Saxons fermented honey to make mead, which their kings drank from silver-edged mazers. There were many different mead varieties, including metheglin and melomel. Hyppocras, a honey-based wine often served hot and flavoured with cinnamon, sunflower seeds, ginger and pepper, was much in vogue in medieval England. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer wrote of one of his characters:
He drinkest ipocras, claree and vernage, Of spyces hote, t’encresen his corage.
Even today, many people enjoy making mead if they have access to large amounts of honey. At the Essex Amateur Winemaking Federation, the annual mead trophy is presented to the best exhibit of mead.
For centuries, Essex folk drank ale produced by maltsters and brewsters. The lady of the house – the ale wife – seems to have been proficient at the craft. Often she carried on the brewing business after her husband died, using methods still familiar today. She used malted barley (germinated and roasted), water and yeast, often flavoured with herbs or nettles. Because the boiling process killed off bacteria, ale was less dangerous to drink than water. A second fermentation produced a less alcoholic drink known as small beer, which was considered to be far more healthy and was given to children to drink. Ale was originally distinguished from beer, which was brewed in the same way but with the addition of hops, which not only gave beer its bitter taste but more importantly acted as a preservative.
The strength of ale was important. Many Essex innkeepers feared a visit from the ale-conner. He was the dreaded inspector of ales, appointed by the manorial authorities, whose job it was to call on innkeepers when a new batch of ale was ready for sale. In earlier centuries, it was tradition to set out a bush or ‘pole’ of ivy once a new brew was ready. The ale-conner, wearing sturdy leather breeches, would pay an unannounced visit to the inn and demand a jug of ale. He would pour some of the ale onto a wooden bench and then sit in the puddle he’d made. There he would stay drinking for a while, but would be careful not to change his position. At the end of the testing time, he would rise from his seat. If the liquor was impure and the sugar had not been properly fermented, the aleconner’s leather breeches would stick to the bench. However, if the brew was well fermented, the ale-conner would be able to rise easily – proof of a good, strong ale. The punishment for selling bad ale or knowingly giving inaccurate measurements could be an hour or so in the village stocks. The old method of assessing the quality of the brew continued in Essex inns until hydrometers and technological brewing improvements made the job more accurate – and certainly less messy.
Inn signs have been the subject of song and story ever since 1540, when each innkeeper was ordered to hang out a sign or forfeit his livelihood:
Hops, Reformation, bays and beer,
Came in to England all in one year.
It was the Flemish weavers fleeing from the Low Countries in the sixteenth century who introduced the cultivated hop which was being used by French brewers to preserve and flavour their ales. They came to Braintree, Coggeshall, Weathersfield, Colchester and the surrounding towns and villages. Although hops grew wild in our countryside, there was a cultivated hop garden at Ingatestone Hall which was doubtless used by Lord Petre’s own brewer, who in one year made at least thirty-two brewings. Each brewing filled thirty-two kilderkins (barrels), each holding 18 gallons, at a total cost of £75.
The old ale-conner.
William Cobbett, the eighteenth-century writer who often visited Essex, had very definite ideas about drinking beer. He preferred it to the newfangled tea, which he despised:
The drink, which has come to take the place of beer, has, in general, been tea. It is notorious, that tea has no useful strength in it; that it, besides being good for nothing, has badness in it, because it is well-known to produce want of sleep in many cases, and in all cases, to shake and weaken the nerves.
William Cobbett, Cottage Economy (1821)
The Weald of Kent produced hops for 400 years and was considered to be the finest place in England in which to grow hops. But just after the Second World War, when some of the Kentish farmers’ hop fields became infested with a virulent hop disease, an Essex farmer, Robert Goodchild, was asked to experiment with growing hops at Codham Hall Farm at Great Warley. Robert planted several thousand cuttings of Fuggles hops on a 2-acre paddock near his farm, on the hillside facing south, now part of the M25 motorway. Backed by the Hop Marketing Board and Whitbread’s, Robert’s efforts produced more than 5,000 bushels. He won two major awards at the Brewers’ Exhibition at Olympia in 1954 and 1957, competing against Kentish growers. Robert’s success with hop-growing entered him in the annals of farming folklore.
Farmer Robert Goodchild and his family in his hop field.
Essex hop pickers, 1954.
Hops are still grown in Essex Gardens.
Essex beer has always had a good reputation and has been brewed by Ridley’s at Hartford End since 1842. The other old county breweries have gone, even the huge Ind Coope brewery at Romford. Gray’s have kept their forty-nine pubs in Essex, although their once lovely old brewery at Chelmsford has been transformed into a shopping complex. There are some small firms brewing beer, most notably Crouch Vale at South Woodham Ferrers and John Boyce’s Mighty Oak at Maldon.
SIX
CURIOSITIES
They were strange and wonderful things...
Thomas Traherne (1637-1674)
Every county has something special about it – legends, customs and those extraordinary little places unique to that particular part of the country. Essex presents many faces to the world, with its mixture of large towns, villages and coastal resorts. Many are well known and well exploited for the tourist trade, but nestling quietly in nooks and crannies of the Essex countryside are many odd, unexpected and curious treasures with an interesting tale to tell.
The Magic of Stones
Before the birth of the study of geology, people must have had an explanation for some of the strange features found in the Essex landscape. Across the county, there are many unusual stones to be found, both large and small. As a child, Kathleen Curtis in Colchester was given a penny by the local farmer for every bucketful of stones she collected from the field. Other farmers believed that there was no real point in collecting stones, as the land would ‘only grow more’. One tale tells of a Colchester farmer whose old uncle kept a ‘mother-stone’ on his window sill, believing that pebbles were its offspring.
Essex has many puddingstones, so-called because they resemble
giant plum puddings, containing small browny-red pebbles like currants. They were once believed to be imbued with magical and medicinal powers. Technically known as conglomerates, they vary in size from a few centimetres across to about 2m and resemble concrete. When Pope Gregory’s missionaries attempted to convert the pagan Britons to Christianity in AD 596, the holy brothers did all they could to discourage devilish stone worship, yet superstition has lingered on in some parts of the county even today.
A Colchester farmer and his wife in 1880.
Large stones were often built into the base of churches, such as those at Broomfield, Fyfield, Dunmow and North Stifford. A line of boulders stretches from the river Lea towards Epping Upland, Marks Tey, Waltham Abbey and Ugley Green. Some believe the stones were used as markers by the early tribes of East Anglia.
An interesting story surrounds the huge stone found in the churchyard at St Botolph’s at Beauchamp Roding. In centuries past, when the villagers started building the church, they chose a site near the village, dragging down the huge stone that had stood on top of the hill. Next morning it had gone and was back on top of the hill. Undaunted, the stalwarts dragged it down again, only to find it back on top of the hill. After this had happened for the third time, the villagers gave in to divine intervention and built the church on the hilltop.
Ancient stones gave their names to some local towns and villages. For example, Leytonstone means ‘the stone at Leyton’. In 1780, Philip Morant wrote: ‘On the road to Epping is Leyton Stone, most probably from one of the Roman military stones placed there.’ Alphamstone near Colchester probably takes its name from the large stone built into the west wall of the nave of St Catherine’s church, which is believed to date back to the Bronze Age. There is also Ingatestone, whose great stone or boulder was brought down during the last Ice Age and is now split into two pieces which are positioned at the junction of Fryerning Lane and the High Street. A large stone which can be seen at Newport is known as the Leper Stone. Some believe it was the spot where villagers left food for the lepers; others say that it was used for cleaning coins that might have been handled by the lepers before being passed to the stallholders of the market nearby. The cleansing water was contained in the hollow top of the stone.
The mysterious Beauchamp Roding stone.
The stone at Leytonstone.
Ancient stones at Ingatestone.
Churches
I like that ancient Saxon phrase, which calls the burial ground God’s Acre.
(Longfellow)
The ceremony and rituals surrounding the burial of the dead are fascinating and give us an insight into the life and death of some of our forebears. Colchester Castle Museum has the tombstone of Marcus Favonius Facilis, believed to have been a member of the invading Roman army who died while serving at Colchester in the early years after the conquest.
Abbeys, priories and monasteries were the centre of religious life before churches were built. The first church buildings were erected by wealthy landowners, which is one of the reasons why many churches were built relatively close to existing manor houses. Only priests were buried in the churchyard originally. The rich were encased in elaborate tombs within the church and the poor had to make do with a simple shroud and burial in a hole in the ground.
Colchester Castle.
Greensted church; the oldest wooden church in the world.
As land began to be used up for burial, charnel houses were built to store the redundant bones extracted from the churchyard. At the north-east corner of the churchyard at St Peter’s church in Colchester, there is a charnel house built of brick, with a vaulted underground structure for depositing bones. Only the steps leading down to the entrance of the charnel house are now visible. It was built in the early sixteenth century, when the vestry above it was added to the church.
St Andrew’s church at Greensted, near Ongar, has long been famous as Europe’s oldest wooden building. That record still stands and research based on tree rings has dated the timbers to between 1063 and 1103 – a reminder that Norman buildings, like Saxon, were constructed mostly of wood.
Maiden’s Garland
At St Michael’s church in Theydon Mount, near Epping, hangs a maiden’s garland. This eighteenth-century relic is part of the funerary custom practised when the deceased was an unmarried girl who was believed to have led an unblemished life. Often known as a virgin’s crown or krans (meaning chaplet or wreath), it was made from rosettes of fine paper fixed to tiny wooden sticks that crossed each other at the top. Although the method of construction varied from village to village, a favoured technique in Essex was to fix the paper flowers to a circular wooden frame made from hazel or willow to resemble a crown. Suspended from the centre was a white paper glove or handkerchief. The name of the girl, her age and date of death was written thereon. After the funeral, the garland would be hung above the family pew or from a hook on a beam in the church.
Wanstead Watch
In Wanstead’s church of the Virgin Mary, a large tombstone marks the burial vault of Sir Joseph Wilton, an eminent eighteenth-century sculptor, and his family. This is a Grade II listed tombstone which is meant to represent the entrance to the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. Sir Joseph was a founder member of the Royal Academy. It is rumoured that the box was used by watchmen during the time when the resurrectionists were stealing newly buried corpses to sell to medical students or hospitals for research.
Hornchurch
On the eastern gable of the chancel of St Andrew’s church at Hornchurch, built in 1391, a Highland bull’s head of stone with copper horns is displayed. This is possibly the only one of its kind in England. Some historians say the emblem represents the ancient trade of currying and leather dressing connected with the village, whose main road was known as Pelt Street, with Tanner Street close by. In 1158, Henry II endowed a priory whose motherhouse was designated the Horned Monastery.
Wanstead church of the Virgin Mary, with its unusual monument.
St Andrew’s church, Hornchurch, with its famous bull’s head.
Philip Morant, the eighteenth-century Essex historian, suggested that the bull’s head and horns may have been the crest of the religious house of Savoy, but this has not been verified. In the fourteenth century, the motif appeared on the Hornchurch priory seal but by this time the village had been known as ‘Hornechirche’ for over a century. Incredulity and sadness met the news that the famous bull’s head had been stolen in July 1999 but with due ceremony a replacement was erected on the eastern gable in 2001.
Green Man
The symbol of the enigmatic green man can be found all around Essex. From Herongate to Little Braxted, the Green Man is one of the most popular pub signs in the county. He pops up in national folklore and many people delight in spotting his foliate face staring down from ancient buildings, water spouts, church doors and pews, carved ceilings and corbels. The term ‘Green Man’ was coined by Lady Raglan in 1939, when she included it in her article for the Folklore Journal. In The Quest for the Green Man, John Matthews writes:
Green man has been with us for a long time. He has been worshipped, carved, painted and sculpted out of branches and ferns, praised, reviled, studied, filmed and sung about.
No one knows who this mysterious figure was. He has oak and vine leaves growing from his mouth, eyes and ears and sometimes camouflaging his entire face. Maybe he was the wood spirit so often referred to in folk tales – a John Barleycorn character. He is always with us and has certainly been a favourite motif of woodcarvers and stonemasons for centuries.
The Green Man at Herongate.
The Green Man can be seen looking down from a roof boss in the timberframed belfry of All Saints church at Stock. He is there at St Mary the Virgin church in Kelvedon, where he hides outside the west wall. At St Laurence church in Blackmore, there are two similar fourteenth-century Green Men with foliage framing their faces, and at St Giles church in Mountnessing, he stares out from a capital on the north aisle. He is there – everywhere.
Inscriptions
There are some interesting memorials in Essex churches. An inscription at Great Burstead churchyard seems to have been the favourite of many monumental masons:
Remember man as you pass by,
As you are now, so there was I,
As I am now, so you must be,
Therefore prepare to follow me.
After a later burial in the same plot, the following lines were added:
To follow you, I’m not content,
Until I know which way you went.
It seems bizarre to find a connection to slavery in the quiet Essex countryside. However, in the corner of Little Parndon churchyard lies the grave of a black slave, Hester Woodley, who died on 13 May 1767, aged sixty-two. She was slave to Mrs Bridget Woodley, who on her death passed the ownership of the slave, together with her belongings, to her daughter. It is interesting to note that Hester bore her mistress’s surname, a common practice in the days of slavery.
A gravestone bearing a rather odd inscription can be found at St Osyth churchyard. Although badly eroded, one can still decipher the most important part – the date:
Here Lieth Ann The
Wife of Will R
Who Departed This Life 17th Day of Feb
in ye year 1734/5
When using the old Julian calendar of pre-1752, it was customary to count the year from March to March. It was therefore common practice to add the next year to the tombstones of those who died in the month of February.
In the old churchyard at Pitsea Mount, near Basildon, a gravestone reads: ‘Ann Freeman died 20 March 1879. Here lies a weak and sinful worm, the vilest of her race, saved through God’s electing love, his free and sovereign grace’. What did this woman do to deserve such an epitaph? Answer: absolutely nothing. This is a traditional epitaph and not specific to Ms Freeman. It turns on the doctrine of original sin for which one is not personally responsible and from which one is redeemed by divine grace. Eighteenth-century hymn writers delighted in referring to human beings as worms – it comes from scripture: ‘I am a worm and no man; a reproach of men and despised of the people.’ (Psalms 22.6).
