by Adams, Max;
Tide mills employ sluices and a pond to trap incoming tidal water inside a dam. At high tide the sluices are shut; when the ebb reaches the level of the base of the mill wheel, another sluice is opened which directs a jet of trapped water at the wheel, which spins like a turbine. The power available to the miller is variable with the phases of moon and sun, but predictable, and the mill can be employed fours hours at a time twice a day in every month of the year regardless of drought or ice, unless the sea freezes. The technology is sophisticated—it’s a delicate engineering balance between structural solidity, hydraulic refinement and the vagaries of nature. A mill overwhelmed by a fifty-year tide or a storm surge is vulnerable to sudden destruction. Over-engineered, it risks losing significant milling power. It amazes me that the medieval River Lea and its tides produced sufficient power for eight or nine mills. But the discovery that such mills were constructed and maintained in Bede’s day, and that they were successfully operated for centuries, is enough to force a mental readjustment in our respect for a culture that had lost (or discarded) the knowledge to make wheel-thrown pottery and forgotten, for a while, the function of coinage. Since tide mills are unknown in the Baltic or Mediterranean, those seas not having much in the way of tides, archaeologists are forced to conclude that the presence of these turbine installations along the Atlantic fringes of Early Medieval Europe is an indigenous innovation. In Ireland, more than thirty early monasteries boasted such wonders. In England, there was a seventh-century tide mill at Ebbsfleet in Kent. Others have been found scattered through France, the Netherlands, Atlantic Spain and Portugal. They are striking evidence of the ability of religious communities to invest in the sort of capital infrastructure and engineering expertise that seeded the regrowth of commercial activity fractured, in the West at least, by the collapse of the centralised Roman command economy. The mill being shut for the day, I stopped for a few minutes and watched the grey river flow through the open sluice gates, playing to a long-established rhythm as old as the hills, and wondered, as I went on my way, how many of London’s natives or visitors know what treasures lie on their doorstep.
Stratford: I stopped for a coffee and a bun in the terminal of the international high- speed railway hub that has, at least superficially, transformed this traditionally liminal, once marshy land into a European nexus. I sat next to some inter-continental commuter, they with their sleek, shiny luggage and 4G phone, oblivious of their identikit surroundings; me with my rucksack, tent and sleeping bag, writing notes in my journal and checking the map to see how I far I had yet to walk that day.
From Stratford town centre I followed the old road to Leytonstone, that uninspiring north-east London villagey township that looks like so many others: a mixture of stable and transient pavement-fronting stores and fast-food shops, council offices, banks, housing association flats, nursery schools and the odd architectural caprice. Plane trees dotted the pavements at intervals, one for every beauty parlour by my reckoning; For Sale signs and removal vans, satellite dishes and ribbons of parked cars are so familiar that their intrusiveness on life is easy to miss. Everyone was speaking on the phone or texting. London is always changing, always staying the same. It could have been Stamford Hill, Neasden, Acton or Kilburn, they are all one—and most of them have Early Medieval names, the hamlets and farms of people trying to get by, just like their modern counterparts.
Leytonstone, and my urban odyssey, ended with a large roundabout (Woden’s hoopla, perhaps? The Devil’s doughnut?) pierced with underpasses. Here was the A12, the modern route to Romford, Colchester and Southend; on the far side Leyton Flats, a large semi-open tract of heath and grassland, woods and ponds (the result of historical gravel extraction), the beginning of the great royal forest of Epping; behind me, the never-ending sprawl of London. For the next day and a half I walked beneath trees.
Epping Forest is owned and managed by the Corporation of London following a Parliamentary Act of 1878 which protected the rights of its verderers to collect wood for fuel, graze their cattle and set their pigs to pannage in the autumn, and which ensures continued public enjoyment of a landscape already ancient when the Norman kings decided to co-opt it for their hunting pleasure.27 The woodsman in me felt like a child in a sweetshop: here were ancient pollarded oaks and hornbeams by the hundred and thousand: trees which had been cut at head height on a regular cycle over centuries to protect their regrowing shoots from browsing cattle and deer. Pollarded trees tend to live longer than their unmanaged counterparts. They produced straight, knot-free poles every fifteen or twenty years for monastic estates and manors across the medieval landscape of south-west Essex and, no doubt, supplied much of the capital’s voracious need for charcoal. I was sorry to see that only very rarely have these traditional management practices been maintained into the present. A managed forest left to its own devices may be picturesque, but its biodiversity declines year on year; and Britain imports tens of thousands of tonnes of poor-quality charcoal annually, when it need not. Chirruping birds can be heard here, to be sure; and butterflies dangle on invisible strings in sunny glades; but there is much dense canopy and little understorey (its presence being a sign of a healthy wood); and the wildlife I saw was largely of the rat and grey squirrel variety.
In the Early Medieval centuries in autumn, winter and springtime, the woods would have been alive not just with furry mammals, birds and insects but with woodwards and sawyers, barkers, turners, colliers and swineherds: the Dark Age agricultural economy, the construction and functioning of settlement, was dependent on the technology and labour of woodsmanship. Although I was thoroughly enjoying my woodland walk, the greenness and the botanical evidence of former management, my senses missed those tangibles that would tap me directly into a Wood Age that lasted from deep prehistory right into the nineteenth century: the sounds of axe, billhook and snuffling pig and the rasp of the turner’s chisel on his pole lathe; the chocolately whiff of a charcoal kiln tended by its collier; the sappy scent of fresh cut greenwood. Nevertheless, I allowed myself to daydream for a while. Today’s residents of Epping Forest still have the right to collect a faggot of dead wood every day; even if there is not much sign of them exercising their privilege. Nor did I see any trace of the cattle whose rights to graze here are enshrined in the Act of 1878.
The forest may have been here for a very long time, but it is just as dynamic a landscape as any other. It has migrated over the centuries. It used to be closer, much closer, to the City. As demand for high value land close to London grew in the Medieval period, so bites were taken out of Epping’s southern and western edges. In return, more land further out, to the north and east, was brought into forest stewardship: like Tolkien’s Ents, the woods are on the march, the slowest of armies.
My reverie was dramatically interrupted by the North Circular: the notorious A406 Inner London ring road that many a commuter curses daily. A concrete and steel bridge spanned the dual carriageway in a lazy parabolic arc, the dash of traffic below seen through the grill of the parapet as through prison-cell bars. The forest narrowed here—traffic droned in both ears—as the path followed the slender course of the River Ching squeezed between Chingford (of Norman Tebbit fame) and the appositely named township of Woodford to the east. Another couple of miles brought me to a small café at Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge: a cool drink and a snack. Here the heath was sandy and open, picnickers and dog-walkers briefly more common than pigeons and squirrels. After that came Epping Forest proper: nearly two miles across at its widest point and rising eventually to 320 feet above sea level—not exactly Highland, but respectably undulating—the valley of the River Lea, still northbound, sloped away to the west; to the east, running parallel, the more modest River Roding which joins the Thames under the nom de flume Barking Creek and whose acquaintance I would make more closely over the next two days.
Walking under trees for so long induces a sort of dopey contentment in the traveller. Time and distance are distended; trees merge into a green-brown kalei
doscopic backdrop; only the very occasional dog-walker or super-keen runner offers a reminder that the twenty-first century lies within striking distance. Otherwise, I might be unwittingly trapped in a seductive sensory treadmill loop, walking but not moving, victim of my own ambulant fantasy; if I slowed down sufficiently the forest might catch up and overtake me. So much ancient European mythology is predicated on the defenceless becoming lost in the spirit- and baddie-infested woods that one expects at any time to come upon a gingerbread cottage inhabited by cast-off children or lounging, porridge-slurping bears; or the sight of a wolf devouring a poor innocent red-cloaked maiden. In the real world of the forest, nothing is quite so sinister or quite so innocent.
Hidden somewhere in Epping Forest are two Iron Age hill forts whose position along this broad ridge must have been designed to dominate the terrain on both sides and control a key route south towards the Thames—although, oddly, neither lies on the highest point of the ridge. After a certain amount of jungle-bashing I found Loughton camp, a concentric, if not circular set of double ramparts almost completely subsumed by the woods. It seems unlikely that when Loughton and its north-easterly counterpart, Ambresbury Banks, were built, they did not command views on either side—so I suspect that in the Iron Age the woodland was more open than it is today. In the eighteenth century this part of the forest was the hangout of one Dick Turpin, highwayman.
The afternoon was murky, the light poor; and one Iron Age rampart, I find, is much like another. Besides, I was tired. I had crossed London Bridge at eleven in the morning and it was now past five. Epping Forest’s many paths run like braids of a river and it is easy to lose one’s sense of direction; but in the end I managed to find my way out of the trees and into the small village of Debden Green, where I found my camping pitch for the first night on the trail. In keeping with the corporate spirit of the place, the site was owned and run, and very efficiently too, by Newnham Borough Council.
On a mizzly morning I went back into the gloom of the forest, picking a path that seemed to go my way—to the north-east. Hornbeam woodland was still a novelty for me: I am more used to seeing those leaves in hedges. Nor was it the original native species of the forest, for this country naturally belongs to the small-leaved lime or pry, Tilia cordata. It is, or was, a tree much valued by woodsmen for coppicing, since it produces good turning wood and fine charcoal and its fibres were utilised for rope-making and matting. Its flowers make for a very good honey. But there is something splendidly primeval in the muscularity of the hornbeam’s trunks which, with their grey pimpled bark, reminds me of the skin of a gherkin. It is a native only of south-east England, tolerant of the shade of greater trees. The name is pure Old English, beam being a derivation of the Germanic baum, and horn referring to the hardness of the wood—it was traditionally used to make yokes for oxen. The leaves are like a cross between those of the beech and elm, although it is more closely related to alder and hazel. I have a suspicion that the leaves would have been used for winter fodder, as those of elm were.
Trees and woods loomed large in the minds of Early Medieval men and woman. Not only did their daily lives revolve around their arboreal seasons and products; their imaginations were filled with sacred groves, ideas of the tree as gallows or cross, thoughts of ancestral spirits reincarnated, of wisdom, judgement and the World tree, Ygdrassil. Part, at least, of the deliberate transition from wood to stone in church architecture and monumental cross of the seventh and eighth centuries may have been propelled by the Christian church’s deep mistrust of pagan veneration for trees—not just individual species like hazel, yew and rowan; but for trees associated with springs where divination was sought; for sacred groves where unnamed sacrificial rituals might be carried out. Carved wooden images, of which regrettably few survive, carried effigies of spirits or gods. The eighth-century missionary St Boniface felled one such tree, a giant oak, before the appalled gaze of German pagans and proceeded to build a timber oratory with its wood. In the first years of the Augustinian mission to England, attempts were made to burn or destroy pagan shrines, but Pope Gregory performed a spectacular U-turn in his strategic advice to the mission.
I have decided after long deliberation about the English people, namely that the idol temples of that people should be no means be destroyed, but only the idols in them. Take holy water and sprinkle it in these shrines, build altars and place relics in them… On the day of the dedication or the festivals of the holy martyrs… let them make huts from the branches of trees around the churches which have been converted out of shrines, and let them celebrate the solemnity with religious feasts.28
It was not an entirely successful strategy. Well into the Medieval period churchmen still admonished each other and their congregations for indulging in suspiciously pagan practices, such as holding open-air services in the woods. Yule logs, burials with hazel or yew sprigs, Christmas trees and Maypoles all attest a stubborn attachment to our animist past. Trees and woods are deeply rooted in the European psyche.
Even Epping Forest must end (it does so with a tunnel carrying the M25 motorway beneath its roots). Around coffee time on my second morning abroad in Essex I came upon the long, straight High Street of Epping itself. Here, finally, the London Underground (now in fact an overground railway) runs out. Yes, I could have got here in less than an hour with my Oyster Card. The name Epping is early, as most names ending in –ing are. Ing is Old English for ‘the people of’ or ‘the descendants of’. In Epping’s case the ‘Epp’ refers to the high ground of the wooded ridge; but often the –ing suffix was added to a personal name to indicate a clan or tribal affinity. In the year 600 my children would have been Maxings; and if I was regarded as the progenitor of a successful ruling dynasty (I fantasise), all my offspring’s offspring would claim their descent as Maxings. It’s a nice thought. So were coffee and a bacon roll, especially since the mizzle, now that I had emerged from the greenwood, had turned to rain—wet rain at that. I did not hurry over breakfast.
I was not quite done with trees and woods. Heading east now, I quickly found myself back under leafy boughs; and to my delight I passed through a thriving and actively managed coppice-wood of sweet chestnut, its sawtooth leaves shining brilliant grass-green in the rain. The chestnut was an introduction to Britain courtesy of Roman legions who couldn’t live without their polenta or chestnut stuffing. Good for them. The nut is highly nutritious—good marching food—and the wood, which splits easily, is still used for fencing. Looking at my map in the sort of detail that comes from having no other reading material, and being intensely curious about the origins of landscapes, I already had hopes for Essex in the matter of coppicing. I saw how many ‘spring’ names there are scattered across the open farm-and-field countryside of this maligned county. It is true that Essex has many streams, natural springs and ponds; and hundreds of medieval farmsteads were once protected by moats, some of which survive. But ‘spring’ around here often means a coppice-wood—perhaps because of the habit of broadleaved trees to spring back into life once they are cut to stump level. Here are Dolman’s Spring and Round Spring, Long Spring and Kettlebury Spring—each name attached to a small patch of woodland which must in the Medieval period, and probably long before, have been coppiced to produce poles, charcoal, tool handles, barrel staves, fencing and billets for turning. With my fluorescent pen I was able to highlight dozens of them on a single sheet of the Ordnance Survey. Even in such a rich farming land as this, the rural economy spun round the axle of wood and woodsmanship.
SWEET CHESTNUT
Out into the open countryside, then: through the little village of Toot Hill, whose vernacular architecture sets the pattern for the county: white or black clapperboard walls and red ceramic-tiled roofs offset with climbing roses and hollyhocks—charming if the brashness of the in-your-face over-powered four-by-four people wagons didn’t spoil the effect. The rain was becoming more assiduous; leaving the village I picked the wrong path, taking an unwelcome diversion before coming at last upo
n Greensted-juxta-Ongar and its famous church. Famous, because some time before the Norman Conquest (how much time is debated) a church was built here whose walls were constructed of half-round oak logs set in a horizontal sill-beam, a technique rooted in the Early Medieval period. The beam has been replaced over the centuries—it is a knowing sacrificial damp-course which can be removed and replaced without compromising the wall above—but the logs are still present along the south-west and north-west walls of the nave. Greensted, an example of what is called a ‘palisade church’, is a most impressive and symbolic survival of the Anglo-Saxon period, when the first churches of Columban missionaries were constructed of hewn oak ‘in the Irish manner’, according to Bede, before stone became the material of choice. This place is as much a shrine and site of pilgrimage for the archaeologist or woodsman as it is for Christians seeking the unaffected simplicity of an English village evensong. In the manner of many Essex churches, the tower is clinker-built, clad in wooden boards painted white, with a steeple roofed in wooden shingles; the nave and chancel roofs in orange tiles. The vernacular effect is carried up to three dormer windows. Camera out, I was able to shelter from the rain under a suitably iconic English churchyard tree: a yew, that symbol of death and everlasting life, of sacrifice and longevity.29