Saturday's post about hazel copses (see here) got me thinking about where I live. It's a village called Hazlemere, about 3 miles from High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, and set in the beautiful Chiltern Hills. In fact, the boundary of the designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty is just a two minute walk away from my house.
According to A History of English Place Names and Where They Came From by John Moss, the name Hazlemere means 'Pool where hazels grow.' A Dictionary of British Place-Names by David Mills seems to agree. Which is a bit odd. We are on top of a hill, nowhere near a river and there are no bodies of water anywhere in the village. It turns out the books are both wrong. The name is actually a corruption of 'Hazel Moor' as the village grew up on a large expanse of common land between Wycombe and Amersham - about 4,000 acres and 4 miles across. In 1784 a traveller described it like this: ‘The soil is various, loam, clay flints, gravel, etc. upon which grow furze, fern, brambles and trees of no value.’
Trees of no value? Hardly.
As I wrote about in the previous post, the copsing of hazel provided a very useful resource to smallholders.
There's an awful lot of mythology tied up with the hazel tree, which I won't go into here as it's not that kind of a blog. I'm more interested in old lore and customs than in tales of ancient gods or mystical beings. Hazel twigs were and still are used to dowse for water, of course, and Halloween is known as 'Nut-Crack Night' in some places as, traditionally, young lovers roasted hazelnuts over fires. Apparently, you could get a heads-up on the future of your relationship by seeing if the nut roasted whole or split into two.
Folklore has always linked the tree with fertility. A prolific show of hazel catkins is meant to herald a wave of pregnancies, as per the old saying: ‘Plenty of catkins, plenty of prams’.
Rather like oak, hazel was seen as a protective tree - possibly because of their use in constructing hurdles, fences and even buildings. In the East of England, people gathered hazel boughs and twigs on Palm Sunday and placed them in pots of water around their windows as protection against thunder and lightning. And The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) recommends a hazel wand cut ‘upon the Sabbath daie before rising’ to use as a charm against witches and thieves. In 17th century Wales, bodies were buried with hazel rods to protect them from witchcraft.
Hazelnuts are, of course, delicious and nutritious though you'll be lucky to gather any from the wild before the squirrels get to them.The Cobnut and the Filbert are the two main species with the Cobnut being the more common of the two. The Cobnut has a papery sheath that doesn’t usually cover the entire length of the nut, the Filbert has a sheath covering the whole nut although conditions and environment can affect the sheath size and length.
The Druids believed that eating hazelnuts bestowed wisdom. I did read that the phrase ‘in a nutshell’ - meaning to condense important information into its essence - is a reference to this. However, that seems very unlikely. It doesn't appear in literature until relatively modern times. Shakespeare got close when, in Hamlet, we find the line: 'I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.' But the phrase, as we now use it today, actually didn't appear until the 19th century. Thackeray was one of the first to use it in print in his The Second Funeral of Napoleon (1841), where he writes: 'Here, then, in a nutshell, you have the whole matter.'
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