The cries of these rowdies would have carried to our wood from the other side of the valley, and escaping deer would likely have fled towards Greys Court. It is even conceivable that unbridled looters purloined feed for their animals from the neighbouring estate, for the Knollys were well known to be devoutly Protestant. Well-armed Royalists had also garrisoned the next big property upstream, Greenlands House, half a mile onwards from Fawley in the Marlow direction.
Some relief was at hand. A force of Parliamentarian horse and foot under the command of the Earl of Essex occupied Henley on 23 January 1643, and the “Henley Skirmish” happened later that night. The Royalists retreated back towards Reading. The whole action eventually cost a dozen lives. With Roundhead troops billeted on the town, and Essex occupying Phyllis Court on its northern edge, the townspeople were likely as harried now as they had been when the King’s men were in command; demands for provisions and levies to further the campaign were unrelenting. St. Mary’s church by the bridge, for four hundred years a place of worship, was demoted to become a stable for horses. Earthen fortifications were thrown up about the town. The Roundhead soldiers who now occupied what was left of Fawley Court were no better behaved than their Cavalier predecessors, and Bulstrode Whitelocke complained indignantly of the damage they did to his woods.
The river trade, Henley’s lifeblood, became perforce sporadic at best, not least because the King’s troops occupied redoubts both upstream and down. It was a time of violation and privation in equal measure. The death rate in Oxfordshire as a whole more than doubled as disease and malnutrition took a further toll. Finally, after several attacks and the expected retaliations, the Royalist forces downriver at Greenlands House surrendered in June 1644, on condition of safe passage to Nettlebed with their arms and horses. They must have retreated past our wood, passing along the Fair Mile and onwards up the old route towards Bix at the top of the hill. A poacher taking advantage of the disordered times and lying low in Grim’s Dyke Wood would have heard the clatter of horses’ hooves and the coarse cries of the carters encouraging their charges up the steep and rutted road that broached the Chiltern Hills above Assendon, a thoroughfare so ancient that it had been carved into a deep holloway. The old route to Oxford carried a melancholy procession of dispirited Cavaliers; and still the Civil War was far from over.
If that same poacher had been in the wood on 27 April 1646, he would have witnessed an extraordinary parade passing the other way. King Charles I had escaped from Oxford in the guise of servant to two friends who were now his travelling companions. The trio crossed the Chiltern Hills from Nettlebed, en route to Henley and Maidenhead. Their future plans were still nebulous. The King had sacrificed his lovelock—symbol of the Cavalier—and was dressed in a Montero hat.4 With the help of a false Parliamentarian pass, the disguise worked well enough to get the party past the roadblock into Henley; tipping the guards twelve pence may have helped. Nonetheless, the experience must have been humiliating for one as vainglorious as Charles. His admirer John Cleveland may have been overstating the case when in his poem “The King’s Disguise” he described his hero as “The Princely Eagle shrunk into a Bat,” or even “A pearl within a rugged Oyster shell.”
Nonetheless, the experience of being “so coffin’d in this vile disguise” symbolically marked another stage in the King’s ousting that culminated in his execution by the axeman on 30 January 1649. As early as the summer of 1646 Sir Bulstrode Whitelocke, by then Governor of Henley, had mobilised local people and troops to dismantle the military works in town and reopen the bridge across the Thames. It must have been a profound relief to merchants and artisans alike to see the end of quarterly assessments for taxes, and arbitrary requisitions of this and that, not to mention the removal of the ruffians among the soldiery. During the Commonwealth and the Restoration, normal trading life could resume.
A seventeenth-century soldier sporting a Montero.
Our wood had borne silent witness to history being made in the valley below it, and now returned to its traditional employment. The value of beech wood for fuel continued to rise. The diarist Samuel Pepys referred specifically to the trade in Henley around 1688, noting that “beech woode, [which] is said to burn sooner, clearer, freer from sparkle, and to make a better coale, yt will keep fire longer than those of oake, though oake last longer in ye burning than beach [sic], the measure and price being…ye same or near it.”5 As Secretary to the Navy Board, Pepys was intensely aware of the importance of timber in all its manifestations. Dr. Robert Plot had observed that “in the Chiltern Country they fell their Under-wood Copices commonly at eight or nine Year’s Growth, but their Tall-wood or Copices of which they make tall Shids, Billet, Etc, at no certain time; nor fell they these Woods all together but draw them out as they call it, almost every year.” Coppiced beech had to be cut to the right lengths for the London market; the brush bound into faggots, perhaps to supply the brickworks at Nettlebed or Reading; hazel poles harvested for local use in building or fencing. There must have been discussion about whether to take down one of the big trees soon, or wait for the market to improve. Even the return of plague to the capital in 1665 hardly interrupted this routine, though the Henley bargemen were forbidden to import goods from London for a while. The cycles of woodland regeneration went in harmony with an ebb and flow of wildlife, the clearings full of summer butterflies, and regular felling encouraging a wealth of wildflowers; only a remnant of this biological richness still prospers.
There was real money to be made from woodland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When Sir Bulstrode Whitelocke consolidated his estate in 1637–38, he bought what is now Henley Park, to the east of our wood on the other side of the Fair Mile, which at the time comprised mostly woods and coppices, and continued to be managed in the traditional way. In the 1630s Sir Bulstrode sold ten thousand loads of firewood from his total estate to a woodmonger in London, netting him a profit of £3,000, a huge sum by any measure. In 1672 Bulstrode settled Henley Park on his son William, who then proceeded to convert much of the woodland to arable land. He leased the park for £2,000 to John Cawley, rector of Henley, and to John Taylor, with permission to clear the woods; a hundred acres was grubbed up and sold on for a handsome profit. By the second decade of the eighteenth century Henley Park extended to about four hundred acres of enclosed land, comprising patches of woodland remaining on the steeper parts, and elsewhere open ground that had been cleared, presenting a landscape generally like the one we still see from beyond our wood.
A large bite was taken out of Lambridge Wood at a similar time, and it came within a whisker of our piece of it. Just to the far side of the barn and cottage at the northern end of Grim’s Dyke Wood a thin strip of several fields extends towards Henley on the flanks of the hill. This forty-four-acre patch was once woodland just like our own. In 1658 William Knollys of Greys Court granted a ninety-nine-year lease on the wood as it then was to Thomas Goodinge of Henley, gentleman, for £22. In 1681 William Hopkins left £300 in his will to be invested in land as charity to the poor of St. Mary Magdalene, the parish church of Oxford, “to be laid out in bread, and given every Saturday at evening prayer.”6 The piece of woodland near Henley became the basis of the Lambridge Charity. The proper administration of land charities requires the oversight of many Feoffees (trustees), and this generates a paper trail from the first, in contrast to our own piece of woodland, where plausible inference is all I have. One of the more legible indentures of 1797 tells us that the Feoffees, all Freemen of Oxford, included John Parsons, mercer; Thomas Pasco, druggist; Thomas Wyatt, baker; William Hayes, bookbinder; James Costar, tailor; Edward Rusbridge, cordwainer; Thomas Looker, grocer; and William Winter, upholsterer—thus providing a neat encapsulation of the state of business in the county town.
The forty-four acres yielded income for the needy for nearly two hundred years, and the Oxford Record Office, housed in a deconsecrated church on the Cowley Road, has a great sheaf of papers recording changes of lease and the
occasional bankruptcy. Among them is a somewhat scrappy fragment dated March 1707 that tells us of “An agreement between Rbt Waters of Henley & Philip Seale & William Brookes of London for the Roots and Runts grubbed & to be grubbed on the estate called Lambridge.” The roots, and indeed the runts, were converted to charcoal, and £3 was paid for the privilege of doing so. The felling and sale of the beech wood itself, much of which was the business of the Waters family, was followed by thorough clearance, and only then was the land fit for farming. By 1770, a ten-year lease granted by the Feoffees to James Brooks of Henley, gent., of “three closes of arable land called Lambridge,” proves that clearance had proceeded further, but up to the nineteenth century the phrase “which were once woods” is still appended on documents to the description of the forty-four acres of land, even after a farmhouse was built near the top of the ridge just below the trees, well to the east of our piece of Lambridge Wood.
Charity boards in St. Helen’s church, Benson.
The memories of woodland past evidently linger on. Lambridge Hill, as it is called on the Ordnance Survey map, still looks like a piece of land snipped out of a patch of green forest. The charity was wound up in 1882 with the sale of the farm for £14,000 to Colonel W. D. MacKenzie, then owner of the Fawley estate, thus bringing that estate still closer to Greys Court. Today, the much-elaborated farmhouse is occupied by a reclusive envoy from somewhere in the Middle East who has fenced off the former woods and later arable farm as a private deer park. I reflect that our own piece of woodland again had a narrow escape. If the eighteenth-century clearance had proceeded just a smidgen further, our precious link with deep time would have been irrevocably severed.
After the Great Fire of London in 1666, Britain’s greatest Renaissance man, Sir Christopher Wren, set about designing the rebuilt St. Paul’s Cathedral. Work on the architect’s masterpiece began in 1675; Wren’s son laid the last stone at the top of the lantern in 1710. One of the consequences of the great conflagration was a new appreciation of the importance of building fireplaces with efficient flues. The demand for wood as a domestic fuel continued, but coal would begin to be regarded as a more efficient source of heating, leading eventually to a change in demand for one of the routine products of Lambridge Wood. The easterly part of the wood was then part of the Badgemore estate (later the home of the banking Grotes), which leads to another local connection with the Great Fire. Wren’s master carpenter was Richard Jennings, and the same year that the cathedral was “topped off” Jennings bought and remodelled Badgemore House and, according to Emily Climenson’s 1896 Guide to Henley, had the bricks and scaffolding remaining from St. Paul’s brought upriver to do so. A little piece of one of England’s greatest buildings found its way to our neighbourhood. A remarkable scale model of the west front of St. Paul’s belonging to Jennings found its way into Shiplake church—even though Jennings himself was buried in St. Mary’s church in Henley. It is now back in the cathedral. In 1712 Jennings and Wren were close allies defending a lawsuit brought against them by the Dean of St. Paul’s alleging financial mismanagement, from which they emerged largely exonerated.
I too share an esoteric connection with Sir Christopher Wren. He was one of the Founding Fellows of the Royal Society, the oldest academy of science in the world, which was formally established with a lecture that Wren gave in 1660. On election, a new Fellow has publicly to sign a big book in Indian ink. Wren’s signature is on page one. I signed the very same book when I was elected a Fellow in 1997; out of sheer nervousness I made an inelegant blob. I have a bond with Richard Jennings through a signature that he must have known better than I.
Rot and Renewal
It is still quite mild for November, but several days of cool rain have left a legacy of general sogginess. The old rotting log that sprouted sulphur polypore, or “chicken-of-the-woods,” back in springtime is looking ever more decrepit. It has fallen into two chunks, and any shreds of bark it once retained have disappeared. The wood beneath has not decayed evenly, but has broken down into a series of grey ribs made of harder heartwood, like a scrawny neck; some of the wood elsewhere has become almost crumbly, already on its way back to soil. I push my finger into it to test it. Then I take one half of the log and roll it over and away a short distance; beneath it is a hidden world. At once there is intense activity among many small creatures—they are scurrying away from the light as quickly as they can. They are suddenly visible to potential predators, and their instincts to flee the light are instantly on alert. Woodlice are the dawdlers among them; they amble in a mechanical fashion, like so many tiny wind-up toys, as they hide in crannies on the ground where the log had rested—and the soil is indeed a mass of holes and runways resembling a hidden labyrinth. A couple of bright-brown centipedes are off quick as a flash to hide under stray beech leaves, all scuttling limbs and alert antennae. A shining black ground beetle takes off with equal alacrity. An earthworm (Lumbricus) whips itself into feeble coils. I have disturbed this unlit habitat with my sudden intrusion, exposed a little world secreted within the larger world of the wood, itself just one of many ecological realms within one small island. I need to get closer to this living dungeon with its dark secrets.
On the underside of the log, now lying exposed to the world, are two whitish irregular patches smaller than my hand. They resemble parchment pressed on to the surface of the rotting wood. Both are fungal fruit bodies of amorphous form: they digest wood. Such fungi lurk on the underside of damp wood where humidity is high, feeding off the materials that make up the cell walls of the wood. They are the unappreciated heroes of decay, planing off the lower surfaces of logs until they sink inexorably year on year towards the ground. My lens reveals that one them is actually composed of a complex maze of minute creamy walls. Schizopora paradoxa is one of the commonest of these “resupinate” fungi, and secretes enzymes that allow it to digest tough lignin—only fungi can do this vital trick.7 When it has finished its work on small branches elsewhere in the wood, they weigh almost nothing; they have become ghosts of their former selves, and like all self-respecting ghosts they are white (at least, the wood is white), which is the tint of the cellulose left behind. The other patch is a much smoother species of Hyphoderma performing a similar task. When I examine these patches under my microscope back home, I soon see that much of their surface area is devoted to shedding spores, and from the way the spores are borne (on four-pronged cells called basidia) I recognise that these species are, despite appearances, related to conventional mushrooms. They are fungi that have given up looking like mushrooms in favour of lying doggo in the dark: “white rotters” to those in the trade. Although there are none of them on this particular log, “brown rotters” digest cellulose and leave the lignin, so that the infected wood becomes red-brown, dehydrated and cubically cracked; several examples are found on my conifer pile. Between them, these inconspicuous fungi recycle just about all the wood in nature.
They are also at the base of a food chain. A strong magnifying glass reveals another world. The surface of the fungal sheet has what look like black, moving punctuation marks wiggling upon its surface. I recognise them as tiny mites (Xenillus), diminutive relatives of the spiders. There are several species of these minute creatures; some even carry spikes on their backs like fantastical monsters recruited from Star Wars. They are grazing on fungal material, including the spores. Equally small creatures are alongside the mites, looking much paler and elongate; they have six legs like any conventional insect, but are flightless. If disturbed, they are liable to “ping” out of view because they have an escape mechanism that gives them their common name of “springtail.” Science calls them Collembola, and how exactly they relate to the flying insects is still debated, although they have been regarded in the past as a primitive group that had not acquired the useful piece of aerial apparatus of their distant cousins. No matter: they are among the most abundant animals on earth—in damp vegetation there may be as many as 100,000 per square metre—and the world under the log pr
ovides them with all the detritus and bacteria they need.
These tiny animals are about as small as I can comfortably make out in the wood with my naked eye, and to see any details magnification is essential. Mites and springtails are food for other creatures, though probably not for a large, pulsating grub that looks like the larva of a fungus-eating beetle. I get a momentary frisson when another tiny animal runs in under my glass—it looks exactly like a reddish scorpion. As my sense of scale reasserts itself, I remember that it must be only a few millimetres long, but just for a moment my heart went pit-a-pat. Now I notice that it doesn’t have the sting in the tail either, though it does carry a fine pair of pincers at the front. I don’t doubt that it would make short work of mites and springtails. This fearsome, if diminutive, predator is a pseudoscorpion, Chthonius ischnocheles, and demonstrates that the complexity of the name is inversely proportional to the size of the animal. It has been the subject of a scientific paper specifically based in Lambridge Wood,8 where two other pseudoscorpions (Neobisium muscorum and Roncus lubricus) are recorded. Chthonius is derived from the Greek for “subterranean,” so it is an appropriate name, if hard to get one’s mouth around. It inevitably recalls H. P. Lovecraft’s sinister and deeply buried civilisation of Cthulhu.
And indeed we would find the dark world under the log quite alien, for the hunters there lock on to chemical smells detected through the slightest twitch of an antenna; it is a lightless realm of stealth and subterfuge. Here live centipedes, a group of fearsome predators: with specialised limbs around the mouth, they incapacitate their prey using their special venom claws before shredding their victim to pieces. The red-brown runners I notice scurrying for cover are classified in Lithobius, with three species in the wood, of which the largest, the banded centipede Lithobius variegatus, bearing striped legs, is a good indicator of ancient woodland in Oxfordshire. These legs stick out like oars from a Viking ship bent on pillage, but unlike any ship you have ever seen, the body can flex. The back end of this animal is confusingly like the front, because the centipede’s antennae are mimicked by a pair of “caudal furcae” located close to its back end.
The Wood for the Trees Page 20