What Price Firewood? Oak Apple Day (1 of 3)
Every morning I walk in a bit of woodland near our house in Austin, Texas. Apart from a few splendid oaks, it’s mostly second growth.
Standing dead trees
What astounds me, each and every day, is the amount of dead wood, some trunks still upright, the trees killed by several years of drought, others blown to the ground. It’s a huge fire hazard, needless to say.
Fallen dead branches
More important, in many parts of the world, this wealth of fuel wouldn’t survive more than a few hours.
Fallen, tree, Austin, Texas
It certainly wouldn’t in villages in Central Mexico where I lived until a couple of years ago.
And it wouldn’t have done in the England of my youth.
One of my earliest memories is trotting alongside my mother on the ritual afternoon walk. My sister sat up in the, well, it can only be called by its original name, the perambulator.
The kind of perambulator that my mother used to gather kindling on our afternoon walks
The perambulator was like a small row-boat, except that it was rusty black, perched on four substantial wheels. We had inherited from my aunt who had inherited from who knows who, but even in those days it was a real antique.
Much more important than providing transport for a one-year-old however, was that the deep well in the middle was ideal for transporting kindling. My mother constantly scanned the hedgerows for any scrap that might have fallen and not yet been seized by one of the villagers.
The cottage we were living in for a year had no electricity, no running water, and no furnace. Such heat as there was came from the one fire in the living room. To cook and to get hot water, my mother had to light the stove and the boiler. And although my grandparents provided the wood, kindling was in short supply.
This was true of all the other cottages in the village. In those chilly days following World War II, running water and electricity were still rare in rural England, central heating not even dreamed of.
When a year later we moved to our own farm, it was months before we had running water (piped from a spring up the track) or electricity (for the dairy and, oh yes, we’ll do the house while we are at it). It was years before we had central heating, long after I had left home and set out on my own.
Every fall, a day was set aside to cut up fallen wood to supply us and the farm workers for the winter. The rotary saw whined all day, we children were kept inside because of the danger, and by the end of the day the farmhouse and the cottages each had a stack of wood to supplement the coal we also bought.
Stack of firewood for the winter
Luckily by then my mother had an electric stove. However pretty the flames, firewood was heavy to haul and left ashes that had to be riddled out in the morning. The fireplace heated only one room and that inadequately. Glasses of water frozen by the bedside and chilblains were just normal winter occurrences.
The scarcity of fuel and the effort that went into finding it made a huge impression on me.
And so when in school aged 9 or 10, I was asked to write an essay about someone I admired, I chose Grace Reed, a woman I’d read about in W.H. Hudson‘s A Shepherd’s LIfe; Impressions of the South Wiltshire Downs (1910).
The fat green hardbound version was a favorite of mine. Then what drew me was that this was a real book not about some distant lands but about the people and the countryside that I knew so well. Now I still turn to it as a compelling account of the hard times that agricultural laborers in Britain went through in the nineteenth century.
W. H. Hudson, A Shepherd’s Life (1910)
Grace Reed (1806-1894) had lived just five miles from us in the village of Barford St Martin, which I sailed through every morning on the top of the double-decker bus that we took to and from school.
Barford St Martin. Bernard C. Gotch’s illustration for A Shepherd’s LIfe
When Grace Reed was just 19, in 1825, she had stood up to the Earl of Pembroke who had tried to prevent her and the other villagers from collecting firewood from Grovely, the ancient woods that he owned above the village. The right to firewood was a fighting matter there.
The right to firewood from Grovely was just as fraught in Wishford, on the other side of the woods, my grandparents’ village where my mother had collected kindling. One of the biggest events of the year in my early childhood was Oak Apple Day, celebrated on May 29th, to assert the right in the face of the Early of Pembroke, to collect wood from Grovely.
Bridge over the Wylye, Great Wishford
Here’s how W.H. Hudson tells the story.
Grace Reed was a native of Barford St. Martin on the Nadder, one of
two villages, the other being Wishford, on the Wylye river, the inhabitants of which have the right to go into Groveley Wood, an immense forest on the Wilton estate [owned by the Earl of Pembroke] to obtain wood for burning, each person being entitled to take home as much wood as he or she can carry.One of the main rides through Grovely Woods today (with wood neatly stacked and ready to be cut and moved). Wikimedia
The people of Wishford take green wood, but those of Barford only dead, they having bartered their right at a remote period to cut growing trees for a yearly sum of five pounds, which the lord of the manor still pays to the village, and, in addition, the right to take dead wood.
It will be readily understood that this right possessed by the people of two villages, both situated within a mile of the forest, has been a perpetual source of annoyance to the noble owners in modern times, since the strict preservation of game, especially of pheasants, has grown to be almost a religion to the landowners.
Now it came to pass that about half a century or longer ago, the Pembroke of that time made the happy discovery, as he imagined, that there was nothing to show that the Barford people had any right to the dead wood. They had been graciously allowed to take it, as was the case all over the country at that time,
and that was all. At once he issued an edict prohibiting the taking of dead wood from the forest by the villagers, and great as the loss was to them they acquiesced; not a man of Barford St. Martin dared to disobey
the prohibition or raise his voice against it.Grace Reed then determined to oppose the mighty earl, and accompanied by four other women of the village boldly went to the wood and gathered their stick and brought them home.
They were summoned before the magistrates and fined, and on their refusal to pay were sent to prison; but the very next day they were liberated and told that a mistake had been made, that the matter had been inquired into, and it had been found that the people of Barford did really have the right they had exercised so long to take dead wood from the forest.
As a result of the action of these women the right has not been challenged since, and on my last visit to Barford, a few days before writing this chapter, I saw three women coming down from the forest with as much dead wood as they could carry on their heads and backs. But how near they came to losing their right! It was a bold, an unheard-of thing which they did, and if there had not been a poor cottage woman with the spirit to do it at the proper moment the right could never have been revived.
So it’s not so surprising that Grace Reed was my childhood heroine. Nor that the whole background to Oak Apple Day, still celebrated every year in Wishford at the end of May to reassert this ancient right, was something that I have mulled over in the course of my career as a historian. More of that in future posts.
Lovely story, thanks Rachel. I’m sure the world is full of these stories of small acts of bravery & it’s great to hear them. While a lot of people are unaware, it is illegal to take dead wood here in Oz as many native birds and animals make their home in it.
Thanks, Amanda. And yes, a young woman, perhaps unaware that just a few years later any protester would be sent to a hulk and then to exile in Australia, was terribly brave. That’s, I suppose, why I identified so completely with her. She was like me, no clout, no power. But I always wondered. Could I have done this? And my answer was usually no.
Such a lovely, interesting post, Rachel. I have never heard of Oakapple Day, and to be honest, I’ve never thought that much about firewood, or its use in more recent times. It is inspiring, and it does make one think to hear about such acts of bravery.
Interesting and insightful. Would you think the real reason the Pembroke estate owners tried to curtail the customary practice was to prevent poaching? Or perhaps it was that clear shooting was hindered with the possibility of people being in the underbrush to gather wood.
I knew a gent in Yorkshire who told me that burning of wood is regulated quite strictly now due to pollution concerns, even in the country. This is true also in Canada where I live. Thirty years ago, in the winter even in the city (Toronto in my case) they scent of wood smoke was fairly common but today I never notice it, I think the by-laws put an end to most of it.
Gary
I think to prevent poaching and to assert the rights of private property. I’ll write more about this in the next day or so but one way of looking at the eighteenth and nineteenth century in England is to see it as the establishment of private property where previously there had been common rights.
It may well be that wood burning is now regulated in England. I haven’t been there in winter in so long that I simply don’t know.