THE MYSTERY OF MAUD’S ELM
Did a majestic old tree grow from a stake driven through the heart of an innocent young girl? Locals to Goths seems to think so, but JAN BONDESON finds that the ‘legend’ is precisely that.
Did a majestic old elm tree grow from a stake driven through the heart of an innocent young girl presumed to have committed suicide? Everyone from Cheltenham locals to Goth songwriters seems to think so, but JAN BONDESON finds that the ‘legend’ of Maud’s Elm is precisely that.
O the old Elm Tree that for ages past, Has bowed its majestic head
To the gentle breeze and the sturdy blast, Still flourished o’er the dead;
And whenever I gaze on its aspect bold, Or give ear to its mournful creak,
Do I think what a tale would it unfold, Could its leaves or its branches speak.
Maud’s Elm was a historic tree of gigantic proportions, located in the Gloucestershire village of Swindon, which is today a suburb of Cheltenham. A legend that predates Victorian times tells that the elm originated as a wooden stake driven through the heart of Maud Bowen, a young village girl presumed to have committed suicide. Later, Maud’s old mother was tied to a stake just by the elm to be burnt as a witch, on the order of the wicked Lord of the Manor, but he was struck dead and the old woman saved from the conflagration. Unlikely, I hear you say. But defer judgment until you have heard the full Legend of Maud’s Elm…
THE LEGEND
Maud Bowen was a virtuous girl living in the village of Swindon, the daughter of an old woman named Margaret who some thought was a witch. One day, Maud was sent into Cheltenham with some spun wool, but she did not return. The following morning, her lifeless body was retrieved from a nearby brook, as an old poem expresses it:
The Swindon maiden lay cold and dead,
A holy calm o’er her features spread,
As though her spirit in peace had fled; No midnight murderer’s stab could be traced, No ruffian’s blow had her beauty defaced. So ‘twas thought in the height of mad despair – She had cast away life and sorrow there.
On the bridge close by was lying another corpse: that of Maud’s uncle Godfrey Bowen, shot through the heart with an arrow; his left hand was still grasping the handrail, and in his right hand were some rent portions of Maud’s dress.
Sir Robert de Vere, the wicked Lord of the Manor of Swindon, made sure that a Coroner’s inquest was held on the two dead people, uncle and niece. Swindon was in mourning for poor Maud, whereas Godfrey was not much missed, since he had been a miserly and cruel man, with contempt for religion. Crispin the Coroner found that Godfrey had been murdered by some person unknown, whereas Maud was branded a suicide, and ordered to be unceremoniously buried in the nearest crossroad:
Alas, for Maud! A horrible doom, Denied her body a Christian tomb;
By malice, revenge and terrible hate, A Coroner’s inquest pronounced her fate, They dug her a grave in the King’s highway, With no kind lips o’er her corpse to pray; They buried her there in the dead of the night While the torches flashed their lurid light.
According to old custom, the corpse of the presumed suicide was impaled:
A stake was from an elm tree riven, And through her spotless body driven.
Miraculous to tell, the elm stake rooted in Maud’s body grew to become a stately tree, known as Maud’s Elm by the mourning villagers, who found it very wrong that the virtuous Maud, once the pride of the village, had been buried in a suicide’s grave. Old Margaret Bowen was evicted from her cottage by the Lord of the Manor, having to live as a penniless tramp. Since she mourned Maud intensely, she used to keep vigil by the elm tree, watering it with her tears. One day, the Lord of the Manor and his suite came riding past on their way to Cleeve church, where the christening of his firstborn son and heir was to be celebrated. When he saw old Margaret keeping vigil by the elm tree, he thought that this human equivalent of Greyfriars Bobby had not yet suffered enough grief and ordered one of his henchmen to remove her from the site and drag her away:
‘What beggar is this that stops my path?’ Sir Robert de Vere exclaimed in wrath, When he saw the form of the widow wild, Bent on the grave of her murdered child.
But just as Hubert the Vassal grabbed hold of the defenceless old woman, an arrow came
according to old custom, the corpse of a presumed suicicde was impaled
flying and struck him in the heart, killing him. The arrow came from a thick forest nearby, but when this was searched, there was no trace of the assassin. Since Sir Robert, who was a superstitious man, suspected sorcery, he ordered old Margaret to be arrested and dragged away to Gloucester gaol, awaiting trial for witchcraft and murder.
A fortnight later, old Margaret stood trial in Gloucester, prosecuted by Sir Robert de Vere. After she had been found guilty of witchcraft and murder, the Judge sentenced her to death and ordered her to be burnt alive at the site of the murder of Hubert the Vassal, at Maud’s Elm in Swindon.
She was taken from Gloucester to Swindon in a cart guarded by officers, seated on a bale of hay that would be used to kindle the flames that burned her alive. A stake was erected and a pile of faggots constructed. Just as the fire was lit and old Margaret began roasting alive, the wicked Sir Robert wanted to mock and taunt the defenceless old woman one more time before she died, but an arrow came flying out of nowhere and struck him in the heart; after uttering some convulsive groans, he fell dead at the feet of the burning Margaret.
A few moments afterwards, the burning pile seemed to have reached its height: when the stake fell with a thud, there was nothing more to be seen but some smouldering ashes. What had happened to old Margaret was anyone’s guess.
As the years went by, the Swindon villagers kept admiring the tall and stately Maud’s Elm, and discussing, with bated breath, the mysterious deaths of Godfrey Bowen, Hubert the Vassal and
an arrow came flying out of nowhere and struck wicked sir robert in the heart
Sir Robert de Vere. The property once owned by the Lord of the Manor passed into the hands of strangers, and the little cottage once occupied by old Margaret the witch stood empty for many years. Nearly half a century had passed since the tragic death of Maud when a mysterious stranger was observed to be sleeping in old Margaret’s deserted cottage, or keeping vigil underneath the elm tree, exclaiming:
With bleeding heart I pluck a young green bough
From that elm tree
Whose obscure root, some fifty years ago Drew the dead blood from thee.
Upon your lowly grave, sweet love, I fling My weary bones;
E’er long we shall meet before the King Of Kings, and Throne of Thrones!
When the villagers asked this mysterious man to identify himself, he said he was the old soldier Walter Gray, once a young Swindon swain who loved Maud dearly. Since she had been equally fond of him, they had hoped to marry. He had been known as ‘Walter the Archer’ for his uncanny skill with bow and arrow. The wicked Uncle Godfrey proposed marriage to Maud, hoping to recover the house belonging to her mother, but she remained true to Walter. Sir Robert de Vere, struck by her great personal attractiveness, had sought to make her his mistress, but once more Maud refused him with great moral firmness. The Lord of the Manor came up with another of his evil schemes, however: he promised Uncle Godfrey a cottage for free if he abducted Maud and took her to the manor house. But when Walter
heard that Maud had gone missing, he sallied forth with his bow and arrows. Hearing a shriek, he could see Maud grappling with her uncle, and Sir Robert standing nearby. He shot Uncle Godfrey dead, but Maud fell into the brook and drowned, and the Lord of the Manor absconded unharmed. It was of course Walter who had clandestinely shot and killed Hubert the Vassal and Sir Robert himself; having exterminated his three enemies, he went out into the wars:
A tear upon his pale cheek strayed, While thus he mourned the Swindon Maid,
‘When thou wert snatched from earth, my sainted Maud,’
All joys were gone;
I sought the wars, the soldier’s bloody trade
But still my heart was lone…
THE LEGEND & THE TREE
Thus is related the legend of Maud’s Elm, repeated with minor variations at least since the 1830s. Walter Gray was called Walter Leigh or Baldwin in early accounts of the legend, which do not name the wicked Lord of the Manor; later versions call the Lord ‘Sir Roger Francton’ and add the embellishments that Maud gained his attention when she was the Queen of the May, and that Walter once defeated Godfrey in a wrestling match.
The earliest account of the legend I have been able to find is in the Cheltenham Looker-On of 11 May 1833; there is said to exist a Tewkesbury pamphlet on Maud’s Elm printed in the 1840s, although no person has ever seen it. The Cheltenham printer Ernest George Built-Leonard printed a mid-Victorian pamphlet of his own, The Tragic Legend of Maud’s Elm, containing the entire pathetic story from beginning to end; a new and enlarged edition was published a few years later, and a third edition as late as the 1920s. In 1889, Mr Alfred W Peachey, of Gloucester, published the three-page The Lord and Maid of Swindon; Or, the Origin of Maud’s Elm. All these obscure publications are quite rare, although several libraries hold copies of Ethel Griffith’s drama The Black Maying; Or, the Legend of Maude’s Elm, published in Cheltenham in 1909.
It is only in modern times that the original story of the legend of Maud’s Elm has been added to and distorted. The successful Goth and Pagan band Inkubus Sukkubus included the song “The Rape of Maude Bowen” on their 1994 album Wytches, adding the inventions that the 15-year-old Maud had been raped by her persecutors and flung into the brook; her defiled body was later “impaled as a vampire” to hide “the crimes of the rich”. Writing in Pagan Voice magazine of
August 1995, a certain Tony McKormack – who seems to be a current member of the band – accepts these inventions as facts, adding some falsehoods of his own, namely that Maud had been stripped naked, that Old Margaret had been tortured by her persecutors until she had gone insane, and that she was tied to the elm tree itself rather than to a stake, ending with the false claim that Maud’s Elm was struck by lightning in 1922 and blown to smithereens.
As late as the 1940s, there were plenty of Cheltenham people who believed the legend was nothing but the truth. Several commenters on the YouTube video of the Inkubus Sukkubus song claim that the song is based on a factual event, and that the Church ought to be deeply ashamed of its treatment of Maud and Old Margaret; they offer to send old photos of Maud’s Elm to those of a doubting disposition.
John Goding, the author of the 1853 History of Cheltenham, confidently claims that Maud’s Elm was now the most famous tree in Cheltenham, after the enormous Piff’s Elm nearby had been recently cut down, a process that took nine sawyers 14 full days of work. By this time, Maud’s Elm was a healthy tree, very lofty in stature so that it could be seen for miles around. It stood at the crossroads to Tewkesbury, Cheltenham, Cleeve and Gloucester. The trunk was 21 feet in circumference, and the footsteps of the many visitors to the tree had laid some of its roots bare.
Many other Cheltenham chroniclers from Victorian times mention the old tree and its legend. There are several photographs of Mauds’ Elm from mid-Victorian times, showing it in a healthy state. A cottage nearby was known as Maud’s Elm Cottage; a garden in the vicinity of the famous old tree was Maud’s Elm Nursery, which produced a fluke potato weighing 32.5oz in 1856; a 17th century thatched cottage next to St Lawrence’s Church in Swindon has been called Maude’s Cottage for many years, in the belief that the heroine of the legend once lived there with her ill-fated old mother.
But evil times would come for Maud’s Elm, the most famous tree of Cheltenham, and its surroundings. A later photograph issued as a postcard before 1905 shows the great old elm ravaged by disease, with only a few healthy branches remaining at the top. The authorities tried to fill its hollow trunk with cement, but this did nothing to restore the health of the ailing tree. After a huge limb had fallen from it on 27 July 1907, the removal of the remainder was carried out on 31 July, using steam tractors to pull it down, since it was considered dangerous to the public. Maud’s Elm Cottage nearby was also demolished a few years later, being in a derelict condition, and Maud’s Elm Nurseries with its prodigious potato is no more.
In May 1943, according to the Gloucestershire Echo, the Cheltenham Corporation planned to plant a Wych Elm at the site of Maud’s Elm, but although a veteran citizen sent them a copy of Built-Leonard’s pamphlet, which he had purchased in Abergavenny more than 50 years earlier, these plans were never acted upon. In 1949, a disgruntled local wrote to the Gloucester Echo urging that another elm tree should be planted on the site, with a plate denoting its origin, but although his appeal ended with the ringing words “We, the people in the vicinity, believe the story to be true, and we also believe that the history of the locality should be preserved”, it was ignored by the authorities.
Today, the original site of Maud’s Elm is treeless and barren, although some council flats nearby and a local bus stop has been named after the famous tree. There was once a ‘Maud’s Elm Terrace’ but it seems to have disappeared; however, Maude’s Cottage next to the church is still standing, in a good condition.
THE MYSTERY SOLVED
The archaic nature of the legend of Maud’s Elm suggests that if the story is at all true, it took place prior to 1700, at a time when corrupted Coroner’s verdicts could not be challenged, suicides were buried at the crossroads, wicked Lords of the Manor threw their weight about without restraint, and witches were burnt at the stake. The story is contradictory and illogical: how could Maud, a young and fit woman, drown in a small brook? Why could people not apprehend Walter after he had dispatched Hubert the Vassal and Sir Robert de Vere? And what really happened to Old Margaret in the end? And why, if the events took place before 1700, is there no record of the legend of Maud’s Elm prior to 1833?
An early account from 1777 names the elm at the Swindon crossroads as ‘Mowle’s Elm’ and on the earliest map of Cheltenham and surroundings, from 1806, it is called ‘Maul’s Elm’, a name it keeps on the 1828 Ordnance Survey map and in the 1832 Stranger’s Guide to Cheltenham. The earliest mention of ‘Maud’s Elm’ is in the Cheltenham Looker-On
of 1833, but this does not prevent this periodical from issuing the following 1839 note, to one of its putative correspondents: “The Address to ‘Maul’s Elm,’ though containing some good lines, is deficient in general interest: we must, therefore, decline its insertion in the Looker-On.”
An article about Cheltenham in the Lady’s Newspaper of September 1847 also provides food for thought: “Maul’s Elm, as it is called, and a companion tree on the Tewkesburyroad, Piff’s Elm, are considered, in the tradition of the neighbourhood, as ancient landmarks; and the curious in legendary lore will find the legend of Maul’s, or, as it is there called, Mauds’s Elm, in ‘The Cheltenham Album’.” From the publication of Goding’s influential history of Cheltenham in 1853, until the present day, the original name of the tree has been forgotten about, and the legend of Maud’s Elm has reigned supreme.
As students of Queen Mary’s Tree in Edinburgh (see FT374:48-51) will be aware, the Victorians were fond of making up legends about particularly old and majestic trees. Scotland has a healthy population of ‘Queen Mary’s Trees’, presumed to have been planted by the tragic Queen’s own hand, 10 of them at last count, whereas in reality she has not been recorded to plant as much as a tulip.
The Queen Elizabeth Oak in Hatfield Park (wholly decayed today) is said to have been the tree underneath which Elizabeth was sitting when she learnt of the death of Queen Mary; an unlikely scenario, considering that her predecessor had died in November. The Queen’s Elm in Chelsea, said to have been planted by Elizabeth I with her own hand, was chopped down in 1745. Of Dick Turpin’s Oak in East Finchley, behind which the celebrated highwayman is said to have hidden when he robbed the Mail in 1724, only a stump remains. The Wilberforce Oak, at Holwood House, Keston, underneath which the celebrated anti-slavery campaigner once debated with Pitt, was blown down in 1991. Wesley’s Elm in Stony Stratford, Buckinghamshire, got its name because the famous Methodist is once said to have preached in the open air. Cowper’s Oak near Olney, underneath which the poet is said to have taken shelter from the sun, is dead and gone today, although the name survives as a pub nearby. A fig tree in the churchyard of Watford was said to have grown from the heart of an atheist lady who had expressed a wish, on her deathbed, that such a tree would grow from her heart if there was a God. Hunter’s Elm in Brentwood, Essex, was said to have been planted to commemorate a local teenage Protestant martyr burnt at the stake by order of Mary I. Latimer’s Elm in Hadley, Hertfordshire, was said to be the tree underneath which another Protestant victim of the same Queen, John Latimer, once gave a sermon to Henry VIII.
Thus there are precedents both for the legendary motif that a tree grows from the heart of a buried person, and that a tree commemorates a person burnt at the stake. There is no doubt in my mind that the legend of Maud’s Elm constitutes yet another imaginary tale connected with a particularly large and ancient tree: Maul’s Elm became Maud’s Elm in early Victorian times, and the fanciful story of the betrayed Maud and the martyred Old Margaret grew into a long and pathetic tale condemning clerical bigotry and the misdeeds of the rich and powerful.
There are brief modern accounts of Maud’s Elm in R Brooks, A Grim Almanac of Gloucestershire (Stroud 2010), pp.53-55, and in R Beacham & L Cleaver, Cheltenham through Time (Stroud 2011), pp.10-11; the tree is also mentioned in J Hight, Britain’s Tree Story (London 2011), p.120. There is a valuable collection of press cuttings, pamphlets and original material about Maud’s Elm in the Gloucestershire Archives, without the consultation of which this article could not have been written.
JAN BONDESON is a retired senior lecturer and consultant physician at Cardiff University. He is a regular contributor to FT and the author of many books on fortean subjects, including The Lion Boy and Other Medical Curiosities (2018), Strange Victoriana (2016) and The TwoHeaded Boy (2000). His latest book is Murder Houses of Edinburgh (2020).