“Since Time Out of Mind.” Asserting Woodland Rights in an English Village

Every year on May 29^th, Oak Apple Day, the people of Great Wishford, a village of about 250 inhabitants in the southern county of Wiltshire in England, reassert their rights to collect wood from nearly Grovely Forest that belongs to the Earl of Pembroke. Holding their banner, they “go in a dance to the Cathedral Church of our Blessed lady in the City of New Sarum [Salisbury] . . . and there [make] their claim to their customs in the Forest of Grovely in these words “Groveley! Groveley!! and all Groveley!!”

The customs consisted of rights to use the woodland in various ways, including collecting firewood. The ritual visit to Salisbury Cathedral, six miles from the village, was specified in a charter of 1602. Hints in the archives suggest that these rights went back at least to the 13th century when the Cathedral was being built. They probably went back centuries before that.

The right said the charter was “an Atient Custom . . . [existing since] time out of mind.”

Time out of mind. What a wonderful phrase.

“Wiltshire at its Quirkiest,” declared the county magazine Wiltshire Life in June 2016.

Quirky? Really?  I bristled.

As a child between the ages of 4 and 10, that is the years around 1950, I counted the days to May 29th, Oak Apple Day, with almost as much excitement as the days leading up to Christmas. My grandfather farmed in Wishford and so I had a day off school, one exciting thing after another to do, and the solemn feeling that purpose and importance underlay the jollity.

Oakapple Day in the mid 20th Century

As a child, I was not even awake when Oak Apple Day began. Before first light, villagers took their tools and began walking the mile or so up one of two tracks up through the downland fields to Grovely.

There they searched for oak boughs with oak “apples” (actually a marble sized gall formed by a wasp).

Every villager searched for an appropriate branch to cut and carry back down to Great Wishford village.

There they fastened one to the top of the tower of the village church, others to the front of each of the cottages, and others they set aside for the processions.

After breakfast, a group of villagers, including the banner carriers, the rector (the Anglican priest in charge of the church), and musician and dancers set off in cars for Salisbury Cathedral.

There, in addition to the shout at the high altar, four women in traditional farm worker’s dress danced under the 700-year old spire that soared 400 , ‘nitches’ (bundles of kindling wood) on their heads to the music of a melodeon player.

A bonanza for the stream of tourists who visit the Cathedral every day.

Once back in the village, the procession began. Nothing much by today’s standards, but as a child I wished I could join the local school children dressed in white who followed the rector and the men carrying the banner of the Oak Apple Club with its emblems of oak leaves and oak apples and the words: “Grovely, Grovely and all Grovely: Strength in Unity.  After them straggled parents with younger children in prams or on tricycles, villagers, perhaps a band, and Morris dancers.

For me, almost the best part was the Maypole dancing in the Oak Apple field opposite my grandfather’s farm house. The different patterns of pastel colored ribbons that children of the village school, trained for months by Miss Mundy, wove as they danced to the traditional folk songs I loved were nothing less than magical.

After that, the adults assembled in a marquee for the Oak Apple lunch. Seating followed the rural hierarchy. At the head table sat the Church of England rector, the doctor, the mayors of the local towns, and other dignitaries. At the first of the lower tables arranged at right angles to the head table sat the big tenant farmers (among them my family). At the succeeding tables sat the key protagonists, the rural artisans and farm workers.

As a child I was not allowed to participate, though I lifted the canvas of the tent to peep in. Years later, in 1981 I was honored to be invited to speak for The Visitors at the lunch.

Then in the afternoon, there were the pretty but unexciting decorated horses to ride on the merry-go-round, the delicious freedom of jousting, sparks flying, with other children in the dodgems, and the thrill of looking across the village and the river Wylye from the top of the big wheel (again not at all big by today’s standards).

The day was topped off by Morris dancers jumping, swinging their belled ribbons, and threading their swords.  

So Quirky? or Quaint? or What?

Part of growing up and aging, I think, is figuring out what parts of one’s life are just part of larger historical currents, which parts break with them. Wishford Oak Apple Day encapsulates the collective memory–often unrecognized, never fully consistent, always with most of the past left out–of a single village about the change from peasant life to the modern urban world.

Peasant life to urban living was part of that vast change that agricultural historian Steve Stoll describes as based on

“an idea that amazed me but that I could not understand, the idea that historical progress required talking land away from agrarians [that is, in Stoll’s words, country people, settlers, peasants, campesinos, smallholders all of whom make their livings by hunting, foraging, farming, gardening, and exchanging for the things they cannot grow or fashion themselves] and giving it to others.” Steven Stoll in Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia  (Hill and Wang, 2017) xiv-xv.

Although I don’t find the idea as amazing as Stoll does, I am interested in how people came to terms with this staggering, fundamental changes in human existence. It is so recent, so rapid: three centuries in Britain, still going on in most of the world today.

So I’m going to follow up my experience with Oak Apple Day with blog posts that ruminate on this event. On woodland and why the rights mattered so much. On the rural as an arcadia for the aristocracy, including the early Earls of Pembroke. On riots, on hunger, on poaching, and other rural protests. On the twentieth century nostalgia for rural England. And, politically, why should we today continue a custom just because it goes back ‘time out of mind?’

• ← Amazing: My Choice of Food in a Medium-Sized American City
• A Small Cautionary Tale about Cookbooks and Authenticity →