Fifty Faggots

There they stand, on their ends, the fifty faggots

That once were underwood of hazel and ash

In Jenny Pink’s Copse. Now, by the hedge

Close packed, they make a thicket fancy alone

Can creep through with the mouse and wren. Next Spring

A blackbird or a robin will nest there,

Accustomed to them, thinking they will remain

Whatever is for ever to a bird:

This Spring it is too late; the swift has come.

‘Twas a hot day for carrying them up:

Better they will never warm me, though they must

Light several Winters’ fires. Before they are done

The war will have ended, many other things

Have ended, maybe, that I can no more

Foresee or more control than robin or wren.

Edward Thomas wrote Fifty Faggots on 13th  May 1915, shortly after he had brought the faggots to lean against the hedge in his garden at Yew Tree Cottage in Steep. The draft of the poem is headed British Museum where he probably drafted the poem in between researching and writing his commissioned life of the Duke of Marlborough.

He described the event in a letter a couple of days later to Robert Frost when back at Steep, sending him the first draft of the poem:

“One of my reliefs in this week’s work was to write these lines founded on carrying 50 bunts (short faggots of thin & thick brushwood mixed) & putting them against our hedge….Are they north of Boston only?”

The reference to North of Boston, Frost’s second volume of poetry, published the year before, which ET had reviewed very favourably, was because it featured Frost’s poem, The Wood-Pile, to which Fifty Faggots can be seen as a homage and a response.

A faggot was an ancient word for a bundle of things, including wood. A short faggot of wood was 3 ft long and 2 ft in diameter and in this case was made up of thin and thick mixed brushwood.

As ET described the fifty faggots were from Jenny Pink’s copse. There is no precise match to the name in the local landscape but there is a Pinks Copse in Froxfield on top of the hangers, about a mile from his home. It lay just below the ridge of Ridge Top Lane and above Ridge Hanger. Pinks Woods Copse, as it was called in the tithe map of 1839/41 adjoined the hanger and lay between the hanger and Pinks Field. In later maps the two plots of copse and field have merged into one field, just beyond Old Stoner Cottage. In the tithe map Pinks Copse (113)  is shown as a wood, though its use as a wood is not specified then, so it may have already being transitioned into agricultural land.

The copse evidently retained its underwood of ash and hazel in Edward Thomas’s day, separate from the hanger below with its bigger trees of oak on its border, and beech and yew on its hanging slopes. Ridge Hanger was the first of a number of hangers running from east to west above Stroud and Langrish and what was to become the main Petersfield-Winchester Road (now the A272). The others are Strawberry, Lythe and Great Ridge.

Old Stoner Cottage, is the modern name of the neighbouring house. In Thomas’s day it was known as Stoner Hill Cottage and was two residences, only knocked together in the 1950’s. Two families lived there according to the 1911 census - the Barnetts, Thomas was a gardener as was his lodger, Arthur Broad, while Edward Court was a baker with a young family.  The field and copse would have been owned and managed separately but possibly the gardener may have been involved in getting the Thomases their wood supply. Thomas also knew the local gamekeeper, Vidler, who lived in a cottage just along the road at Broadwood, so it may have been through his offices or one of the other woodsman that the brushwood was acquired.

Previously he had also known another countryman, Old Clarke, who also lived  on top of Stoner Hill, close to the copse. who had died in the winter of 1907. Clarke’s sister, Maud, helped the Thomas family at Berryfield, their first house in Hampshire.

He had written a year or so later:

“Old Clarke dead   Slowly sawn off from life - I see him stand in the ditch, his ghost, with a surprised look - why should he have died then, he had got the lambing to do & the hedge by 14 acre to trim - he had his hook in his bare hand & his eyes shone bright. They found him in lane lying with look of surprise for first time - dead.”

The reference to Clarke being “sawn off” could suggest ET associated him with cutting  wood. He may have been the supplier of any additional wood the Thomas family needed before he died, from the likes of Pinks Copse.

Given the number of faggots and the size of each it seems highly unlikely that Thomas had himself fetched the faggots from the copse at the top of the hangers. Much more likely they were carted down and left on Church Road whence Thomas brought them up to his garden.

That said the copse on the south side of Ridge Top lane would have been one he was familiar with. He sometimes walked up Old Stoner Hill (the old coach road) - occasionally on a circuitous route between home and study but sometimes on walks with his children. This hill would have been the nearest from Yew Tree Cottage to get a view from a height, albeit somewhat restricted by the trees. The copse was only a few minutes walk from the top of Old Stoner, along Ridge Top Lane.

Thomas had also been aware of the name of Jenny Pinks for several years. He mentioned it in his introduction to Isaac Taylor’s “Words and Places” published in 1911. Jenny sounds like a local nickname for Pinks copse, perhaps based on a local family with a girl of that name.

Jenny also links the copse with the wren. Wrens had long been called Jenny by country folk, one of a few birds bestowed with a Christian name. The most famous other folk name for a bird is Robin Redbreast, the robin also appears twice in the poem and is often paired with the wren. Both also have an ability to nest in the most unusual places, including a close set pile of faggots, as ET would have known.

There would have been at least one of each, robin and wren, and possibly a blackbird, resident in Jenny Pink’s Copse. So a bird could adapt from natural habitat to a more man-made one - as some of the agricultural itinerants ET was so fascinated by lived and fitted into the natural surroundings they travelled through.

The poem clearly remained in Edward Thomas’s mind as he wrote to Robert Frost over a year later in August 1916, probably from Yew Tree Cottage, when the faggots had nearly all gone:

“My faggot pile is pretty nearly used up, but it wasn’t fair. We have been saving coal by (cooking on) wood fires out of doors, or it would have lasted the war out I believe.” Thus “spoil(ing his) verses on the subject as far as they were a prophesy.”

Sadly there was another element of prophesy in the poem which was to be proven. The possibility of his death in battle was almost certainly in his mind when he wrote in the poem “many other things/Have ended, maybe, that I can no more/ Foresee ..” A few months later his life had been ended.

A walk

Pinks Copse has now been joined with other parcels of land into one big field, above Ridge Hanger. There is no longer any trace of a copse which had lingered on as underwood in ET’s day. It is on private land so only possible to see through the hedge looking south from Ridge Top Lane, just after Old Stoner Cottage - or it can be seen looking west on the path going through the field before dropping down Ridge Hanger from the triangular green at the starting  point of Ridge Top Lane by Stoner Hill.

ET would occasionally walk along Ridge Top Lane, now more of a track, when walking to Froxfield or villages further West, such as East and West Meon.

It’s still a good walk, along the top of the hangers, passing Ridge, Strawberry, Lythe and Great Ridge with views through the trees over to the highest of the South Downs, War Down, and the hills of Butser and Salt. After about a mile there’s a crossroads and carrying straight on into a metalled lane, you reach after a few minutes, Ridge Farm. Here you can do a loop , going left along the track after the farm and heading south towards looming Butser Hill. Reaching another cross paths, you go right down towards Great Palmer’s Copse before keeping right round the side of the wood until a footpath sign directs you up across the field towards a small copse, just towards the western end of Ridge Top Lane.

This copse is described by ET in August 1909 on returning from a longer walk to West Meon.

“At West end of Ridge Lane where path crosses it from Froxfield to Stroud, & on S side

is a slight hollow with ash, & hazel & travellers joy & one tall black poplar that sighs as I lean over gate & look at bare grey green & black dotted Butser & sweep of War Down

agst dull evening sky, & makes one think of an old house here once - especially as a wren chirps in hedge - 6.30pm.”

The black poplar is no longer there but the rest of the copse is - it seems to have a lot in common with Jenny Pink's Copse, located at the other end of Ridge Top Lane.

Following in his footsteps back to the right, along Ridge Top Lane, you arrive at Ridge Farm again and carry on back along the way you came to the triangle beyond Old Stoner Cottage where Ridge Top Lane meets Stoner Hill Road,

Acknowledgements

Edward Thomas field note book copyright - Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York. Transcriptions of the Edward Thomas field note books quoted in this post are available at the Edward Thomas Centre at the Petersfield Museum.

Extacts from ET's letters to Robert Frost quoted from Elected Friends Robert Frost Edward Thomas to one another, edited by Matthew Spencer.

I am very grateful for help and information on the history of Pinks Copse to Fran Box, who holds the Steep History archive and for the history of Old Stoner Cottage to Diana Ensor.