History David Horspool
The joy of amateurs – from antiquaries to the Richard III sleuth
You won’t find the name Piers Shonks among the 60,000 people in the Dictionary of National Biography.
The influence of this minor medieval gentleman on the affairs of state was negligible. Until recently, there was some doubt over whether he existed at all. But his story, or some version of it, has caught the imagination of local historians and folklorists for centuries.
In the incomparable The Lore of the Land, Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson’s topographical ‘guide to England’s legends’, Shonks appears twice. First, as the focus of the entry on the Hertfordshire village of Brent Pelham, where we learn about the tomb he occupies, set into the wall of the parish church, on which the year of his death is given as that of Domesday – 1086. An inscription also outlines Shonks’s claim to fame: ‘he one Serpent kills, t’other defies’. A carving on the tomb shows our man battling one of the beasts. Like St George (who is in the DNB: doubts over existence are no bar), Shonks was a dragon-slayer.
His second appearance in the guide is as an example of another legend: the dying archer who fires an arrow to mark his burial place. In Shonks’s case, this helped him cheat the Devil, who had promised to take his body whether it was buried inside the church or out. As the arrow landed in the wall of the church, Shonks was buried not fully in or fully out, and Lucifer was foiled.
This story instigated by a tomb’s mysteries is the subject of an enthralling new book by Christopher Hadley, Hollow Places. Hadley is not a professional historian, but he is, as he shows in his meticulous and occasionally inspired researches, following a distinguished line of gifted, patient, sometimes brilliant amateurs.
The growth of university history from the 19th century, combined with the march of more ‘scientific’ approaches to scholarship, once seemed to leave little room for Hadley’s kind of history. It used to be known as antiquarianism, a word that became an insult on the lips of the ‘serious’ historian. But it is a calling with a bright future as well as a long pedigree.
Many of the greatest antiquaries were clergymen, some of whose work Hadley draws on. They fulfilled a role described by Bill Bryson (in At Home) as that of a ‘class of well-educated, wealthy people who had immense amounts of time on their hands’ to devote to ‘a range of creditable activities for which they were not in any sense actually employed’. Naturally in rural Hertfordshire, these included collecting tales of the local dragon-slayer.
The earliest antiquaries were, like Hadley, almost as interested in legends as in facts. John Leland, the Tudor traveller and bibliomane often described as the first antiquary, was keen to prove the myths of King Arthur. A century later, John Aubrey, the great collector and topographer who discovered Avebury’s stone circles while out hunting, gathered folk tales and theorised about the survival of Roman customs into his time.
The golden age of antiquarianism was the 18th century, when the Society for Antiquaries was formed, where learned gentlemen met to discuss and donate ancient objects, paintings and books, determined to know more about Britain’s past. Not everyone took them seriously. Batty old geezers fussing over dusty relics were a gift to caricaturists like George Cruikshank and Thomas Rowlandson.
But the collection these men assembled, still intact today, contains some unique treasures, including a Bronze Age shield saved from a cache discovered and dispersed by a group of Ayrshire peat-diggers, presented by a Dr Ferris to the Society in 1791; and a processional cross ploughed up around 1778 on the fields of Bosworth.
The Society also has twinned portraits of the brothers York, Edward IV and Richard III. The one of Richard was the image used, until recently, by the most successful historical members’ club in the country, the Richard III Society. Of course, the highly commendable National Trust is a vastly bigger outfit, but it has never pulled off a coup like the discovery of the bones of a lost king in a car park.
The Archaeology Department of the University of Leicester, packed with ‘proper’ professional scholars, would rightly point out that it was their dig that discovered the king. But they, very explicitly, weren’t looking for him. They were making use of the enthusiastic backing generated by the researches and campaign of a member of the Richard III Society, Philippa Langley, to help conduct a rather more achievable project to uncover a medieval church, Leicester Greyfriars. They knew the story that the king was buried there, but finding him was ‘not seriously considered possible’.
That they hit the jackpot in 2012 was a tribute to their professional skill, but it was also a triumph of committed amateurism. There is more than one way to slay a dragon.