Think Elizabeth I, or Blackadder II

'Fresh April / The Old Awakening Oak' - Luke Andrew Scowen on Flickr

Ah nightmares; I’m behind on the blog and for no good reason at all. I had a noble theme—and did my research in good time—but that’s all gone now. I have the notes, I have the interesting facts gleaned the appropriate outlets, but the thread that was to tie it together failed me. I will learn from this, no doubt, one decade or two from now. You people will just have to read it and hope for the best.

Phytophthora ramorum—or Sudden Oak Death, as it has been named in America—was to be my topic. However, while America has had serious problems with the disease since the late 1990s—particularly California, where it is present in 14 counties—in Britain the Forestry Commission has so far determined from tests that Quercus robur (the pedunculate or English Oak) and Quercus petraea (Sessile Oak) are more resistant. The disease poses a more immediate threat to other species of tree in Britain, such as beeches, as well as shrubs like viburnums and rhododendrons. There is also of course bleeding canker, currently threatening the horse chestnut population. This year has seen countless avenues of the trees felled because of the disease.

All of this left any further discussion of the oak rather pointless, and yet...if you hadn’t thought about bleeding canker or Phytophthora ramorum so far today then I have already done my reawakening work here. So perhaps looking at the oak for just a little while would be all right. What follows is my attempt to give a neat set of concise paragraphs about something that interested me, namely the oak tree in Britain’s culture and history, and the most interesting bits of Oak: A British History by Esmond Harris, Jeanette Harris and N.D.G. James. I have tried to include all of the information I wanted to here and the book has ended up featuring rather heavily. However, it is a damn fine text and I see no sense in allowing its wisdom to remain separated from your eyes and minds.

The Oak in Britain

Quercus robur, the English Oak, is the larger of the two oaks mentioned above and was once heavily used by the navy, hence the pet name the Glory of the British Navy. The many skills and complexities of using oak in shipbuilding through the centuries should get you inspired to learn a trade, or improve on your own gifts, which I’m sure you have. If nothing else you should feel damned guilty that you are incapable of even comprehending the numerous anticipatory skills, knowledge, calculation and decision making that went into every tree:

• planting (planting, folks, with mind to using the timber some 200 years later in some cases) an acorn and nurturing it in situ or in a ‘nursery bed’
• planting other trees around to protect the young oaks
• rearing oaks in tight rows for straight wood (think planks/the deck) or spaced apart in hedgerows for curved wood (think the futtocks—the ‘ribcage’ of the hull)
• selecting the right tree, matching the angles needed for particular timbers of a ship to individual branches
• chopping it down
• transporting it (in the days of oxen haulage it wasn’t unreasonable for a single oak being dragged from Sussex to the royal dockyard at Chatham to take two or three years to travel, because once the rain started the oak would be covered up and not moved again that year)
• cutting it up, negotiating any medullary rays in the wood
• drying it out, which could take months to years

Then came the myriad ways of carpentry, shipbuilding and daily maintenance/repair of the finished vessels.[1]

Of course it didn’t always work in such a neat system; for centuries huge chunks of forest came down before people listened to those calling for large-scale planting programmes to replenish stocks of oak. In 1593 (Think Elizabeth I, or Blackadder II) to repair four Royal Navy ships required 1740 mature oaks—about 2000 tons of oak wood. At the same time a large warship took around 2000 oaks to build, each at least 100 years old and stripping 50 acres of woods or more in the process. At the end of Elizabeth’s reign in 1603 the total navy tonnage was 17,110. Note also that for every ton of finished ship, two tons of green oak was needed (Harris et al, pp.109-110).

There was a fairly dire shortage of oak by the reign of Charles II (1660-1685). With insufficient centuries-old timber available younger trees were used for shipbuilding, which meant that in 1684 Samuel Pepys could write in his diary that he had spotted brand new naval vessels sitting in the harbour—having never been to sea—with their hulls rotting (Harris et al, p.114). This was also the time (1666) of the great fire, and you can probably guess which wood was the only timber allowed when replacing the roof, doors, window frames or cellar floor of any London house, due to its perceived fire resistance (Harris et al, p.113).

And then there is the oak’s appearance in folklore. Oak is, believe it or not, the species of tree most often hit by lightning, although this may have more to do with the amount of oaks found in the heavier storm areas than any special feature of the trees themselves. Authorities believe that—if all other factors were equal—in a grove of trees containing every species a tulip tree would be the likeliest target.[2] With or without these qualifiers, the oak’s propensity for getting itself struck by lightning led it to be associated with Jupiter—synonymous with Zeus—the god of thunder (Harris et al, p.131).

There we have it, folks: lightning and divine wrath. Not acorns or squirrels or Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716-1783) delicately placing oaks within his compositions—that sugary supra-nature created by his sort: planned ‘natural’ landscapes built to look at their most perfect from the windows of the client’s vulgarly over-embellished house. No, oaks are tough, built like a brick wee-wee house, real wrath of god stuff, and for the druids the place of human sacrifice—among other things. Druid rituals held oak trees sacred, particularly oak trees on which mistletoe grew—the Golden Bough of Virgil’s Aeneid (19 BC). Harris et al explain:

‘Such areas were set apart as hallowed groves. In these the priests conducted their religious ceremonies and performed their mysterious rites, some connected with the belief in the transmigration of souls, some of which included human sacrifices. It was their belief that when a mistletoe grew on an oak, it was of heavenly origin and was a clear indication that the tree had been favoured by the gods. The way mistletoe grows ensures that it has never been in contact with the earth and consequently it was endowed with celestial and mystical powers.’ (Harris et al, 133)

Some oak timber itself never touches the earth (at least the next example hasn’t for 600 years). The hammer-beam roof of Westminster Hall—which dates from 1394—is 238 feet long and 68 feet in span. It has survived Guy Fawkes (1605), the 1834 fire that largely did for the rest of the Palace of Westminster (hence Charles Barry’s Houses of Parliament now being there), the Fenians bombing it in 1885, the Luftwaffe dropping incendiary bombs on it in 1941 and an IRA bomb going off in it in 1974. Keen-eyed news spotters may have seen a group of Greenpeace climate change protesters sitting on the apex of that very roof on the 11^th/12^th of this month. There, we have at least returned the oak to this month’s news.

There is a lot more to the oak, and taken out of isolation there is a lot more to the interrelationships of various types of trees historically and currently. But even from here you can think of the implications to lifestyle, architecture, health, politics, warfare, commerce, culture and ritual. Yes do think of that, as so many trees have to come down through disease or construction. It’s not simply about the death of nature—for we plant new trees in our sustain-abulous world—it’s also the passing of customs and industry that the older trees stood amongst.

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[1] (The information that informed this narrative list was taken rather irregularly from: Esmond Harris, Jeanette Harris and N.D.G. James, Oak: A British History, (Bollington: Windgather Press, 2003) pp.17-39, 41-75 & 117)

[2] Robert E. Cripe, ‘Lightening Protection for Trees and Related Property, ’Journal of Arboriculture, V (1979), 145-149 (p.147).