The Wood for the Trees

by Richard Fortey

  By the early thirteenth century the de Grey name was celebrated. Walter de Grey was one of the most powerful clerics in the land during the reigns of King John and Henry III. John appointed him Chancellor in 1214, and then Bishop of Worcester; he was at the King’s side when the Magna Carta was signed on 15 June 1215. He was subsequently elected Archbishop of York, which made him a very rich man. When Henry succeeded to the throne, Walter de Grey was still an important figure, even effectively running the kingdom for a brief period in 1242 while the King engaged in a disastrous adventure at Poitou in an attempt to recover lost French territories. Walter de Grey’s embalmed body was reverentially laid to rest in the south transept of York Minster in 1255, marked by a mass for the passing of a great man. A succession of de Greys followed with title to the manor at Greys Court. The first Baron Grey de Rotherfield was John de Grey (1300–59), one of the original members of the Most Noble Order of the Garter; he was Lord Steward to the Household of Edward III. The beautiful brass commemorating Lord Robert de Grey (d. 1387) in full armour in Rotherfield Greys’ church records the late stage of the dynasty.

  Whatever great business went on in court or church associated with the big house, the quotidian business of the wood continued with billhook and cleaver, coppice and twine, almost unremarked by their lordships. Trees grew as reputations waxed, trees were felled as reputations waned. The transient vanities of worldly advancement or disappointment left only a few tree rings to measure the passage of ambition in the harder currency of arboreal growth. The trees in the wood read only the truth of the seasons, the gifts of rain, the hardships of drought.

  Even as the medieval prosperity of Greys Court increased, just over two miles to the east a transformation was in train that would redirect the history of the southern Chiltern Hills, our wood included. Henley-on-Thames was created. The town did not grow chaotically from urban predecessors like many others in England, but was planned and laid out from the beginning. It was built on royal land, a morsel of the ancient manor of Bensington (today’s Benson) with a long Saxon pedigree. The exact date of its design is disputed,3 but it is likely that some major work was undertaken in the 1170s, during the reign of Henry II—a monarch known for creating planned towns elsewhere. Henley’s first bridge, at least partly built of stone, was constructed across the River Thames at about the same time. Its founding arch can still be seen in the cellar of the old waterside inn, The Angel on the Bridge, where it now rather ignominiously shelters beer kegs. St. Mary’s church lies at the edge of town close to the end of today’s bridge, and dates originally from 1204, although much modified in the ensuing centuries. Next to the bridge were a series of wharves that would secure the future of Henley.

  The rest of the town plan comprised a rough quadrilateral centred on the same Market Place that is there today. The developed land was divided into long and narrow burgage plots. These stretched behind the shopfronts that faced on to the street, and accommodated all manner of workshops for trades that would contribute to the further growth of the town. The inquisitive walker along the east side of Bell Street can still nose around between modern premises belonging to estate agents or coffee houses or whatever and discover the burgage plots ranged behind, for the original design has endured with remarkably little change. Modern developers scratch their heads to think what they can do with a template designed in the Middle Ages; while they do so, we can be grateful that a “fossil townscape” is preserved in appropriate counterpart to the ancient landscape that survives in the hills beyond town.

  Ancient entrances in Henley reveal long burgage plots behind the houses.

  Extraordinary remnants of these early days can be discovered among the shops and pubs that line the oldest streets in Henley. The modern passer-by would be hard put to recognise them for what they are, although arrays of later Tudor beams are on brazen display here and there. Many more buildings hide their antiquity as if it were a guilty secret. The original constructions were so robust that subsequent builders left old oak struts and beams in place, and simply accommodated them within new designs—but they can still be smelled out. In Bell Street good evidence of a fine medieval hall was discovered, with massive oak beams that a dendrochronologist has dated to 1325, when Edward II was on the throne of England. Blackened beams even attest to former fires that burned openly in long-lost hearths. One splendid, somewhat later medieval building is tucked away behind the big church. Beautifully moulded oak timbers on its exterior suggest that the building was intended to impress; the first floor provided showrooms and warehouses for the leading Henley merchants John Elmes and John Deven in the mid-1400s. It was close to the wharf on its eastern side, where stores of grain, malt and wool adjoined a bustling waterfront. The Chantry House is evidence for a new entrepreneurial class, confident and skilled at spotting business opportunities, and shows how much had changed in local society since early feudal times. The planned town of Henley-on-Thames had become a thriving success.

  The Chantry House, one of Henley’s finest medieval buildings.

  River trade was driven by the needs of London. During the early medieval period, an increasingly prosperous and populous capital city had to be fed and comforted.4 Wheat and other cereals were in constant demand, as was fish, fresh or salted; wood was the only fuel for winter heating; charcoal was required for smelting and for making gunpowder; leather goods and wool clothed burghers and commoners alike. Such commodities arrived at London wharves by boat along the River Thames, as they would have done for centuries; but Henley was created in just the right place at the right time to become a major entrepôt. The river below Henley was readily navigable by large, flat-bottomed vessels known as “shouts” that could negotiate the shallow stretches of water on their way to the capital.

  The Thames upstream from Henley was a lighterman’s nightmare. The great loop in the river past Reading was not only difficult to navigate, but was beset with fish traps and water-driven flour mills. Critical stretches of the river could only be negotiated by way of flash locks—inefficient predecessors of the pound locks employed today—which worked by staunching the flow of the stream with wooden gates. Downstream traffic was floated through when the gates were opened, while upstream traffic had to be winched through the lock at exactly the right moment. Millers resented the diversion of their power source, while local manorial lords had an interest both in the mills and in collecting fees from passing boatmen. There were only four flash locks between Henley and London, but more than twenty upstream on the way to Oxford. The economic case for Henley was made: goods were best loaded and unloaded at wharves alongside the new town. London merchants established premises there, no doubt including the fine halls lurking beneath the veneer of the next six centuries. Property deeds for the town between 1280 and 1350 explicitly list cornmongers and fishmongers among the tradesmen. Granaries were built to safeguard cereal crops brought in from the surrounding hills before export to London, where the merchants owned yet other wharves.

  In this eighteenth-century drawing, Greys Court retains many of its medieval features.

  As for trade in the other direction, goods unloaded at Henley were taken over the Chiltern Hills by packhorse and cart to Wallingford, bypassing that slow, expensive and inconvenient loop in the river, before continuing on to Oxford. Several of these routes had originally been established by drovers centuries earlier. Wagons would have trundled laboriously past our wood as they made their way back and forth over the hills. Our coppicer would have heard the cries of the hurrying muleteers as he bent to his work, and the ploughman, alerted by the groan of axle against shaft, would have paused briefly to watch loads of merchandise lumbering gracelessly along the track past Greys Court. Henley became the conduit through which all commerce flowed.

  The effect of this hubbub on the manor at Rotherfield Greys can well be imagined. A self-sufficient rural economy gave way to one with a closer eye on the market. Wheat became a commodity, and the products of our wood were another. The de Greys were wor
ldly-wise enough to have a stake in the changing economy; our small piece of the Chilterns became part of the wider world for the first time. If the free market favoured wheat, there would be an incentive to grub up woods—using every scrap of beech, no doubt, in the process—and take the ground into arable use, a practice known as assarting. As the medieval population grew, the rewards of arable farming were more tempting. Agricultural methods improved: big pits excavated into the chalk in the lower part of Lambridge Wood may well have supplied lime to “sweeten” fields underlain by clay-with-flints, to increase its productivity for cereal crops. There was even a section of waterfront belonging to Rotherfield Greys right next to the southern Henley wharf, a bonus derived from the oddly elongate Saxon shape of the parish. There was nothing to stop our estate trading wood and grain independently. The old road through the parish runs from the river up Friday Street (now part of Henley), thence up Greys Hill to leave town at a point where the police regularly catch motorists breaking the 30 mph speed limit in their understandable hurry to reach St. Nicholas church a mile away. I don’t doubt that horse-drawn carts struggled up the same slopes half a millennium ago, when there was no speed limit to worry about but ruts aplenty to slow them down.

  Oak

  The growth of Henley required timber. Oak trees provided the only spars, beams and crucks from which substantial frame buildings could be constructed. Oak comes with a set of natural adjectives, all of them somehow chunky and comforting: words like “stalwart,” “trusty,” “stout-hearted” and “sturdy.” Many Englishmen flatter themselves that their characters partake of the same qualities assigned to oak, although species of the genus Quercus are generously spread about the world, and stalwart, trusty chums are rare enough in any currency. John Evelyn in Sylva lauded oak’s qualities as “of all timber products hitherto known, the most universally useful and strong; for though some trees be harder…yet we find them more fragil, and not as well qualified to support great incumbencies and weights, nor is there any timber more lasting.” Oaks mean business, they are not fly-by-nights, nor do they fight shy of any incumbencies put upon them.

  Anxiety about an insufficient supply of mature oaks for the navy was what prompted Evelyn’s famous survey in the first place. Grim’s Dyke Wood has only two mature oaks now, and a third planted by our family with some ceremony, but there are further good trees scattered through Lambridge Wood, and every reason to suppose that they were more numerous in the past than they are now. Oaks were frequently chosen as standard trees with coppice beneath them, and the dominance of beech today may not have been ever thus if oaks had been selectively harvested in the past.

  Trees were taken out of the Oxfordshire woods to make those great medieval halls, and we know that this first happened before the fourteenth century. The frame was always laid out before it was erected, under the instructions of master carpenters. Their scribbled work marks occasionally survive. Although nothing in Henley compares with the masterpieces built in London, such as the roof of Westminster Hall,5 crafting these durable frames was a skill requiring exquisite judgement and knowledge of materials. “Green” wood was preferred for structural work, because when it contracted during its subsequent seasoning, this tended to seal and tighten the whole frame. Additional oak was used for doors and windows, and sawn planks for floors in the best houses. Walls were often no more than “filling in” with wattle-and-daub, or with bricks laid herringbone fashion in later dwellings. The real work was always done by oak.

  It is impossible to imagine life without oak timber in the pre-industrial age. The stalwart friend of the carpenter was also raw material for the cooper’s barrels. The wheelwright needed oak spokes, and shipbuilding was unthinkable without oak to furnish both strength in the hold and luxury in the captain’s quarters. Oak was the employable tree, an indispensable resource, imbued with its special qualities of reliability and endurance. Oak probably reached its literary apotheosis after its golden age had passed. I call as evidence a later version of “Heart of Oak” presented by Reverend Rylance on 16 April 1809:

  When Alfred, our King, drove the Dane from this land,

  He planted an oak with his own royal hand;

  And he pray’d for Heaven’s blessing to hallow the tree,

  As a sceptre for England, the queen of the sea.

  Heart of oak are our ships,

  Heart of oak are our men…6

  The sturdy oak has morphed to become the most vital part of the internal anatomy of the true Englishman. King Alfred the Great would likely have planted his supposed oak at his redoubt in Wallingford, just a few miles from our wood, in curiously psychic anticipation of a naval supremacy that would follow five hundred years later—although admittedly it is true that half a millennium is not an exceptional age for an oak that has been left to mature through its whole life cycle. Today, truly ancient oaks are mostly found scattered in what remains of medieval wood pasture around great houses, where they have been forgotten by time, or used to mark estate boundaries. I think of Chaucer’s ancient trees from The Knight’s Tale:

  With knotty, knarry, bareyne trees olde,

  Of stubbes sharpe and hidouse to biholde.

  Oak (left) and beech bark compared.

  Jackie and I have discovered some hollowed-out oaken Methuselahs along the old highways over the Chiltern Hills leading towards Oxford, and around a pond at a high point there where sheep and cattle must have been watered on their way to market; but there is nothing like them in working woods like ours. Oak is too useful to be allowed to grow old gracefully.

  At the Museum of Rural Life in Reading, black-and-white archive films show oak craftsmen at work. A local cooper demonstrates deft precision born of long apprenticeship and years of practice in turning a bundle of oak staves and a few iron hoops into a barrel or tun that can last for many years. He embodies an everyday miracle combining sympathy for wood with hand–eye coordination, and his sureness of touch leaves a do-it-yourself duffer like me awash with awe. In old Henley he would have been much employed in making kegs to transport fish, and later in manufacturing beer barrels and wine casks; with the original implication of the Latin manus and fecit—“made by hand.” Turned beech was used for the bungs, so our commonest tree had its own small part to play. The fact that Cooper is still such a common surname proves the former ubiquity of the trade. It is as well that the best wines and whiskies still enjoy residence in oak barrels, or the cooper’s craft may well have vanished by now. That of the cartwright (not an uncommon surname either) or wheelwright is more endangered, but probably not as much as the ghost orchid. A wooden wheel requires a whole parade of the trees from our wood: wych elm for the hub, ash for the felloes—the curved sections making the outer wooden rim of the wheel—and reliable oak for the spokes. I wonder whether our wood could ever have been under contract to a wheelwright.

  Those who compare oak with hearts or barques or courage always seem to forget the tanning. Medieval serfs, freemen and grandees marched on leather boots; jerkins made of leather covered their torsos; merchants carried their money in leather pouches; even common soldiers were mostly protected by leather armour. But the journey from an animal skin to leather was complex, tanning being the most crucial part of it; and tanning required oak bark. Tanneries stank. They were placed at the edge of town. In Henley, Friday Street was (formerly) at the boundary with Rotherfield Greys parish, and the poor souls of our parish received the pong from the tannery. After scraping off the bad meat and bristles, which must have been malodorous enough, skins were steeped for a long time in a ghastly potion involving chicken or even dog faeces, with urine as an optional extra. This immersion induced chemical changes in the skins that took the process to the next stage; they were then doused with oak-bark liquor, which contains tannins to complete the rather marvellous transformation of tough hide into supple leather.

  It seems astonishing to me that this process was discovered at all, but I have inspected a urinarium in Pompeii where human effluent was sto
red for the tanners’ use a thousand years before Henley was founded. It was a profitable business, too, so tanners could indeed become stinking rich; one of the finest double-fronted houses on Friday Street is the tanner’s house. The Stonor papers tell us that the bark was bought on the standing tree, which was stripped off on felling: the timber went one way, the bark another—and more than three dozen trees were needed for an average tanner’s year.7 The very best bark was regularly harvested from oak coppice on a twenty-year cycle. I can find no overgrown coppice stools in Lambridge Wood, but I can be perfectly sure that when an oak standard was felled its bark did not go to waste. It went to leather.