Hedging with Hamlet and Horatio

How much did Shakespeare know about hedge laying? A considerable amount, according to Trevor Nunn who suggests a reference to hedging may be found in Hamlet's speech to Horatio in Act 5. How much does Trevor Nunn know about hedge laying? I'm not sure it's a great deal, judging by that theory. How much do I know about hedge laying? Somewhere between Shakespeare's knowledge and Sir Trevor's (but probably nearer the latter).


In 1945 Britain had 500,000 miles of hedgerow. Following changes in agriculture, this fell to around 250,000 miles in the early 1990s. The word 'hedge' derives from the Old English 'hagga' meaning 'an enclosure' and some of our hedges are very ancient, a few dating back to the Bronze Age. Most were planted in the 18^th and 19^th centuries following a rapid succession of Enclosure Acts.

The enclosure of open land had begun hundreds of years before and was frequently resisted by the peasantry dispossessed in the process. Much early enclosure was to turn arable land into pasture for sheep, the wool trade being highly lucrative. Tending sheep, however, was much less labour intensive than growing crops, forcing many people into vagrancy. In 1607 the Midland Revolt spread into Shakespeare’s home county of Warwickshire when John Reynolds from Northamptonshire led a protest against the enclosure of common land. A tinker, known as ‘Captain Pouch’, he promised his followers the contents of his pouch would protect them from harm – though after he was captured it was found to contain nothing but a piece of green cheese.

Shakespeare himself became caught up in a later dispute regarding enclosures round Stratford in 1615. This was because in 1605 he had bought a half share in 100 acres of arable land for £440, an enormous sum of money (equivalent to what a school teacher might earn in twenty years). A decade later, wealthy landowners wished to enclose the land and were resisted by women and children who marched from the town and attempted to fill in the ditches that were being dug, preparatory to the planting of hedges. We have no idea where Shakespeare’s sympathies lay in the matter, but it is recorded that the landowners assured him he would not suffer financially through their actions and this appears to have bought his acquiescence. 

Enclosures were hated by the peasants because it denied them access to the open land on which they traditionally had the right to graze their sheep and cattle. The old strip field method of farming had given them a degree of independence, despite their feudal obligations. Enclosed land turned them into dependent labourers. John Clare railed against the system and in The Mores wrote,

Inclosure came and trampled on the grave

Of labours rights and left the poor a slave

Enclosures largely produced the pattern of fields we see in today’s countryside. Enclosing was also a key part of the agricultural revolution that saw vastly improved yields that fed Britain’s growing cities following decades of intense industrialisation – the factories of the north, especially, filled by tens of thousands of workers who had been effectively forced from the land. 

The transition from traditional farming patterns to a more scientific form of agriculture was immensely painful, but one beneficial consequence is our extraordinary network of hedges. These are an enormously important wildlife habitat, providing vital resources for mammals, birds and insects as well as acting as ‘wildlife corridors’, allowing creatures to travel significant distances with continuous  protective cover.

Hedges have been in my thoughts of late because apart from spending more than a week hacking at brambles with a sickle, I also spent a few days planting a new hedge. The original plan had been to lay the one that bordered our new field, but it was so full of gaps in places and so overgrown with ivy in others that it was decided to coppice what was there, and re-plant.

Tom Adams (who’s given great advice from the outset and who felled most of the ash trees that had to come down) tackled the long, north facing boundary that runs beside the lane, while Charlotte Price took the shorter eastern stretch that borders a track. I cleared the brash as they worked and planted just over 100m of new hedge when they’d finished. Some of the saplings were beech and hornbeam that I bought from a tree nursery. Hawthorn, hazel, holly and field maple were transplanted from the old orchard, along with some damson saplings growing just beyond it. The job was unfinished; new hedges need to be in by March 31. Running out of time, the rest will be planted next spring.

The hedging work also turned my thoughts to an anecdote related by Trevor Nunn of the RSC in the Guardian, last year. It’s worth quoting the piece in full.

TN: You know when Hamlet says, "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will"? An actor friend of mine many years ago was in Warwickshire walking down a country lane and he passed two men working at hedging, one of them 20ft from the other one. And he stopped and said, what are you two doing? And one of them said it's quite simple, I rough-hew them and he shapes the ends. Every page has the country boy's imprimatur.

Hamlet’s lines are taken from his speech to Horatio in Act 5 Scene 2. In them, he seems to accept a providential destiny, in contrast to his uncertainty and prevarication earlier in the play. Like the explication of the ‘golden lads’ and ‘chimney sweepers’ mentioned in the David Hockney blog, the notion that the lines were inspired by countryside craftsmen sounded clever and elegant; but the more I thought about it, the less plausible it seemed.

Although skilled work, hedge-laying is relatively straight forward. First of all the light brushwood (brash) is cut from the hedge, along with dead wood and other debris, leaving relatively straight and evenly spaced stems. These are then ‘pleached’ by cutting almost right through them at an angle, at their base, with a bill hook. The pleachers are then laid diagonally between upright stakes which have been hammered into the hedge at 45cm intervals.

In the account told to Trevor Nunn’s friend, two men were working twenty feet apart on the hedge. There isn’t anything particularly strange about that. Hedgers mostly work alone, but it’s not unknown to work in pairs. What I find perplexing is the ‘rough-hewing’ and ‘shaping’ aspect. The only element in the hedging process that needs shaping is the point at the end of each stake, but this isn’t specialist or time-consuming work. I can’t see that it would take one man to rough-hew the end before another shapes it. Most stakes would be 4-6cm diameter hazel poles, and a couple of swift strokes from an axe or bill-hook would be quite sufficient to produce a sharp point.

I asked both Tom and Charlotte (pictured) about this, and they agreed it wouldn’t require two people. Now both are country born and bred, but neither is old and grizzled, with wind-reddened face, whiskery chops, bent back and hands like leather. I know such people, but decided not to them ask about Hamlet and the rough-hewing and shaping, mostly on the grounds that they would think I was mad. So there might be some ancient lore that I’ve missed.

It’s also true that there are about thirty regional styles of hedge-laying, so there might be a different approach somewhere, but as far as I can gather the principles are much the same. We had our garden hedge laid a couple of years ago by Stewart Whitehead, in what seems is ‘Midland’ style with hazel binders woven between the uprights (see pic). This method is generally used in fields with heavier livestock, such as bullocks, to give the new-laid hedge extra strength. In our case it was because there were a few bare patches (since re-planted) and Stewart thought the binding would make the structure more resilient.

Although it doesn’t seem likely it would take two men to rough-hew and shape hedging stakes, there are crafts where different people perform separate functions. Bodgers, for example, used to work in beech woods turning chair legs, stretchers and spindles on pole lathes. These finished items would then be taken in bundles to other craftsmen who would add the seat (typically of elm) and other elements.

The modern usage of a ‘bodge job’ to mean something unsatisfactory or incompetent is thought to derive from the fact that bodgers never actually finished a whole piece of furniture, their work always being taken on by someone else (although it’s also claimed that ‘bodge’ has become confused with ‘botch’ a word said to be medieval in origin, meaning a ‘bruise’ or ‘carbuncle’).

Whatever the truth of that, I’m not sure the anecdote related by Trevor Nunn bears scrutiny. It sounds to me like a neat, academic theory that doesn’t have much to do with the reality of hedge-laying, or anything else. I would also question it being used as evidence that Shakespeare was a ‘country boy’. If it’s unsafe to claim he was a courtier because he seemed conversant with court life, or had been a soldier because he shows knowledge of soldiering, I’m not sure one could say he was a country boy because of his wide range of reference to the natural world (he could have spent his entire boyhood indoors reading books about courtly life, warfare and nature, for all we know). Actually, I’m inclined to agree with Trevor Nunn on that point. Almost every page does have the ‘imprimatur’ of the country boy – I’m just doubtful about the hedgers and their rough-hewing and shaping of ends. A great couple of lines, though.

Ivy League Shakespeare: thoughts on Shakespeare and Marvell while clearing ivy and hacking at brambles.

Last autumn Sarah and I bought an acre of eccentrically shaped piece of land at the bottom of our garden. It has an orchard at one end and pasture at the other, but had been abandoned for thirty years, the orchard overgrown with ash trees and thick with ivy and the pasture dense with brambles.

Almost ever since, I have been stripping ivy from fruit trees, stacking logs, clearing brash, hacking at brambles and planting a hedge. I wasn’t alone. On Boxing Day we spent nearly five hours as a family clambering in branches to cut them free of ivy (Ellen pictured). The work carried on long after Christmas, with lines from Shakespeare running through my otherwise empty mind - particularly Titania’s words to Bottom from Act 4 Scene 1 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream,

Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms.

Fairies be gone, and be all ways away.

So doth the woodbine, the sweet honeysuckle

Gently entwist; the female ivy so

Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.

Her speech is wonderfully sinuous and sensual, in part because the sounds ‘ee’ and ‘wh’are repeated throughout, featuring seventeen times in five lines. Both are soft and lingering, their repetition seeming to wrap and wind around the text. A similar repetition of ‘en’ in the last two lines also gives a sense of the words binding themselves round the speech as the ivy does the ‘barky fingers of the elm.’

It’s a great last line; ‘enrings’ is a reminder of the bands exchanged in the marriage service (with all the symbolism of fingers slipping into rings). Shakespeare explicitly identifies the ivy as ‘female’ while the tree is implied as male. Partly this is because of the phallic nature of its fingers, but also implicitly because the flow of polysyllables which slip from one line to the next ends with the monosyllable ‘elm’ – and in the world of Eng. Lit. monosyllables tend to be regarded as hard and masculine while polysyllables are generally seen as soft and feminine.

On the subject of monosyllables, ‘bark’ is a short, rough, punchy word. It begins with a bullish ‘b’, has a harsh sounding ‘ar’ in the middle and ends with an abrupt ‘k’. Yet Shakespeare softens it with the addition of a ‘y’, deftly turning a noun into an excellently expressive adjective and coining a new word along the way. Good old Shakespeare.

Shakespeare needed a tree with a single syllabled name to finish with five iambs to the line (though he wasn’t always fussy; line three isn’t in strict iambic pentameter form, with a dangling half foot) but why choose the elm to be enringed rather than the oak, or ash, or box, or yew or any other tree with a monosyllabic name? Probably because of its immense height and majesty. Elms typically grew to 30m and given this enormous stature, would have been seen as a ‘masculine’ tree. (Oaks tend to be shorter at15-25m, commonly growing wider as they age rather than gaining height. There is one up the valley from us that is said to be over 1200 years old with a circumference of 12.9m).

Sadly, Dutch Elm Disease killed off 20 million elms in the 1960s and 70s and comparatively few mature trees survive. We have one on our new patch of land, but as it grows to maturity it will die. This crueller aspect of the natural world is evident in the other lines I contemplated as I cut away at the ivy. These were Prospero’s words to Miranda, when describing his brother Antonio’s treachery. For while Prospero retired to his library, ‘a dukedom large enough’, his usurper acquired more and more power until, 

he was

The ivy which had hid my princely trunk,

And sucked my verdure out on’t.

The ivy here is seen as parasitic, smothering and deadly. Yet the two passages together suggest the plant’s dual nature. On the one hand its thick foliage offers cover for nesting birds and its berries food for them to eat - and to the Celts its evergreen leaves were a symbol of continuing life in the depth of winter. On the other, its dense canopy starves the host tree of life, often choking it to death, while its heavy weight frequently causes branches to snap off in strong winter winds.

The same duality is true of brambles since its sharp thorns provide excellent shelter from predators for ground nesting birds and other small creatures while its berries are a source of food in late summer and early autumn. It’s also good for protecting princesses who have inadvertently pricked their finger on a spinning wheel and fallen asleep for a hundred years. Apart from that, it’s just a bloody nuisance, especially when tangling over half an acre of ancient pasture.

While slashing away at the brambles, I have been thinking less about Shakespeare and more of Andrew Marvell’s Mower poems. True, his mower uses a scythe rather than a sickle, but I am still wielding a piece of sharpened metal and feel a sort of kinship. As it happens, we found a scythe lodged in one of the ash trees that had been felled. It had presumably been left in the crook of the tree more than seventy years before. Over time, the flesh of the tree had grown around the blade and carried it high above the ground, the tool’s wooden handle long since rotted away.

Marvell’s nature poems seem to lack Shakespeare’s intimate understanding of the natural world, his chronology sometimes dubious. His mower, Damon, finds the ‘dew distils/Before her darling Daffadils’ though why he should be out mowing in the early spring isn’t made clear, since the grass would only have been cut for hay in the summer, in preparation for the winter ahead. If cutting in late June or early July, it’s equally unclear why the daffodils might be in flower so late.  He also finds,

While, going home, the Ev'ning sweet
In cowslip-water bathes my feet.

We have cowslips in the garden, but as yet I haven’t worked out how to wash my feet in their water. Perhaps I’m taking it all too literally.

Andrew Marvell was born in East Yorkshire, where David Hockney now lives and works. He was a parliamentarian during the Civil War and later became MP for Hull. He’s probably best known for the poem To His Coy Mistress, but is also remembered for two haunting lines that close this verse from a longer poem, The Garden,

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, 
Withdraws into its happiness : 
The mind, that ocean where each kind 
Does straight its own resemblance find ; 
Yet it creates, transcending these, 
Far other worlds, and other seas ; 
Annihilating all that's made 
To a green thought in a green shade. 

It’s the final couplet that has remained with me as I hack away at the brambles. For a poet rather too given to nymphs and fauns and bathing feet in cowslips, ‘annihilating’ is an interesting choice of verb. He doesn’t merely retreat from the world or banish it, he obliterates it totally. It is smashed and devastated. At five syllables, ‘annihilating’ has its own rhythmic vitality and is in obvious contrast to the single syllabled words that follow. These are plain and spare, as if stating simple truth. I suspect it is the regular rhythm of the couplet as a whole that partly appeals as I lay waste to the vegetation, the metre in time with the swing of the sickle.

 

After the violence of the penultimate line, the last is quiet and understated. A ‘green thought’ has a wonderfully serene and synaesthesic quality. It’s hard to define quite what Marvell means by a ‘green thought in a green shade’ but it’s mysterious and beautiful and pondering it passes the hours.