Trees of Leicestershire
I recently came across this superb piece of historical writing by Penny Drayton. In it, she discusses various trees of Leicestershire and Rutland and their significance to ages past.
Her research is outstanding as well as fascinating, and it is with pleasure that I present her writings to you today. Please note the copyright details below, and do not reproduce this piece unless you meet the criteria specified.
Landmark and sacred trees
of Leicestershire and Rutland
Penny Drayton
Almost universally trees have been venerated and believed to be the dwellings of Tree Spirits, sometimes called Dryads. Deliberately planted groves of sacred trees, such as oak, elder, ash, rowan and hawthorn, were probably the earliest man-made sacred sites. Greek and Roman temples with their columns and decorated capitals may be thought of as an architectural continuation of such groves. Tacitus described the sacred groves in Germany during the Roman period. Closer to home, the importance of tree mythology to the ancient Celts is well-known, in part through Robert Graves' imaginative reconstruction in The White Goddess which explores in detail the tree alphabets and related lore [1].
As late as the eleventh century Cnut was proclaiming laws which prohibited people from owning land which was a sanctuary centred on a tree. St Boniface cursed an oak dedicated to Thunor yet the Old Norse place-name element lundr (meaning '(?sacred) grove' but usually corrupted to 'land' in modern spellings) remains common in England as well as Scandinavia. Many hundred moot places have names ending in '-tree', often prefixed by a personal name, and such names may relate back to the ancient sanctuaries around sacred trees; examples from Leicestershire are given below.
Predictably no trees have survived from pre-christian times and even the Gospel Oaks, where the early missionaries preached, have all gone. The surprisingly abundant evidence for sacred trees comes mostly from place names and folklore as this article will attempt to show, even though it is based only on my researches in Leicestershire and Rutland.
It is worth noting that in Leicestershire the characteristic hedgerow tree is the ash. Oaks and elms have always been less abundant than in most other parts of England. It is difficult to explain this; it may be because the soil conditions were favourable to this species, although there are no surviving woodlands where ash is the predominant species. This part of England was probably largely de-forested before the Roman invasion and all trees and woodland can be regarded as managed rather than natural. Hedgerow trees in particular are usually deliberated planted, or at least deliberately allowed to grow by the hedge trimmer.
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