History/mythology Hollow Places
Christopher Hadley (William Collins, £20)
EARLY ONE morning in the 1830s, workmen were uprooting an ancient yew near Brent Pelham in Hertfordshire when the tree fell unexpectedly, exposing a huge cavity and evoking superstitions of ‘Piers Shonks’, who slew a dragon and defied the Devil. So begins a sensitively intelligent excavation into Hertfordshire history, the English imagination and omnipresent myth.
The cavity is supposed to be the dragon’s grave—the first of many ‘hollow places’ explored in the earth, in historical accounts and in ourselves. Mythology glides into geology and palaeontology as we visit Purbeck, where Shonks’s slab was quarried, and recall that dinosaur fossils were once seen as dragons’ bones.
Where there are dragons there must be champions, ergo Hercules, Cadmus, Beowulf, St George—and Shonks, whose surname suggests great stature. Versions of the story make him a Christian knight, superhuman archer or defender of ancient liberties, or all these simultaneously. His tomb is in the church’s wall and this, too, makes him anomalous—a protector, or needing protection?
Mythic motifs intertwine like foliage around the face of a Green Man and ghosts stir even in the quiet Home Counties —an unsettling truth known even to those who tried to exorcise them in the name of God or ‘rational’ modernity.
To conventional historians, Shonks is a signatory to dull 13th-century legal deeds, yet he ‘survives’ outside such frames of reference, paradoxically preserved because of the impossibilities yoked to his name. The enchantment-hunting author traces the dragon-slayer’s progress through bestiaries, tree lore, chivalric literature, county history, Norman law, trial by combat, the Dissolution, Puritan vandalism, agricultural ‘improvements’ and early antiquarians. He enlists Matthew Paris, John Aubrey, William Cowper, M. R. James and others to show there is always more than one ‘reality’ or single story.
Myths, he finds, are really memories; they shaped history and recur, holding truths about our deepest hopes and fears, perhaps especially in a postChristian country when ‘we have
Mythic motifs intertwine like foliage around the face of a Green Man
lots of hollow places and less and less to put in them’. Shonks lies in the grave, but battles on forever, far beyond the borders of Hertfordshire and the heavy bonds of earth. Derek Turner