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Saint Augustine saith, that Dragons doe abide in deep Caves and hollow places of the earth, and the some-times when they perceive moistnes in the ayre, they come out of theyr holes, and beating the ayre with their wings, as it were with the strokes of Oares, they forsake the earth and flie aloft

—Edward Topsell, The Historie of Serpents, 1608

In the rocks of Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv, rest the last bones of the dragon that Perseus slew to save Andromeda. The skulls of similar monsters litter the Sivalik hills in Northern India, and on Turkey’s Aegean coast the remains of fabulous creatures, which stalked the myths of Heracles, weather from the cliffs to astonish passing travellers.

Heracles’ victory against the Monster of Troy is depicted most dramatically on an ancient Greek krater, or vase, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Here is the beast peppered with arrows by the hero as he rescues the Trojan princess Hesione. It is a very peculiar monster: just a head, white and skeletal, but to the modern eye it is impossible to mistake what we are looking at – a fossilised skull of a prehistoric creature projecting from a rocky outcrop; it is a two-and-a-half thousand-year-old black-figure masterpiece of palaeontology.

The vase appears on the cover of Adrienne Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters, a compelling account of fossil finds in antiquity, which argues that dragons, griffins, cyclops and many other nightmares from the ancient world were inspired by the remains of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. Mayor amasses accounts and archaeological evidence of encounters with giant bones in antiquity, alongside known fossil sites today, which dovetail neatly with the places where the legends of particular monsters first appeared.

In the first century CE, Apollonius of Tyana claimed to have seen dragon skulls in India where today we know the skulls of prehistoric giraffes, elephants and crocodiles are found in the famous Sivalik fossil beds. The Roman naturalist Aelian recorded the discovery of giant bones on the island of Chios following a forest fire and noted that the locals decided they must be the bones of a dragon: ‘From these gigantic bones the villagers were able to observe how immense and awful the monster was when it was alive.’ As for the dragons at Jaffa, biblical Joppa, a story from Ancient Rome tells how the consul Marcus Aemilius Scaurus held victory celebrations during which he paraded an immense skeleton found at Joppa, where tradition said the Greek hero Perseus rescued Andromeda from the dragon. One version of that myth even says that Perseus turned the monster to stone – petrified it, fossilised it perhaps?

W. B. Gerish entertained similar ideas about the origin of the Shonks’ legend. Had those rustics in the Pelhams found some dinosaur fossils under the yew tree? He wrote to the Geological Survey enquiring about a dinosaur find and asked Herbert Andrews, the son of his friend and collaborator Robert Andrews, to walk across the road from his desk at the V&A to find out about the Cetiosaurus on display at the Natural History Museum. The younger Andrews kindly wrote back describing the dinosaur, which had been pulled from the Oxford Clay near Peterborough, but at the end of the letter cautioned, ‘I don’t think it is possible to see in him the Herts dragon.’

But Gerish wasn’t to be put off; he had been collecting cuttings about fossil finds. One about an Ichthyosaurus found in Peterborough reveals what he was thinking: ‘The preying habits of this hungry flesh-eater, with its wide mouth and long jaws so well armed with serviceable teeth, bring to mind the fabled dragons of the ancients and may well be possibly the origin of these myths.’

Was Shonks’ dragon a Cetiosaurus, an Ichthyosaurus, or something else entirely, wondered Gerish. He wasn’t alone in conflating dragons with dinosaurs. In one of his box files there is a tiny newspaper advertisement for a book with a humdinger of a title: The Book of the Great Sea Dragons: Extinct Monsters of the Ancient Earth. The author, Thomas Hawkins, was an unpopular and eccentric collector, amassing fossils in Devon at about the same time the dragon’s lair in Great Pepsells was discovered. Hawkins believed his fossils were the remains of the giant creatures created by God in Genesis 1:21, the Geodolim Tanonim. Where most translators render this as the ‘Great Whales’, Hawkins argued for the far more exciting Great Dragons. In fact most of the dinosaur and ancient reptile fossils illustrated in his book are labelled as dragons (it was published the year before Richard Owen invented the word ‘dinosaur’): ‘Dragon from Lyme Regis. Discovered in 1835’, ‘Head of a Dragon from a village near Bristol’, ‘Dragon Plesiosaurus, from Street, Discovered in 1831’.

These scant remains of Gerish’s fossil research were his attempt to build on an idea that had struck him as early as 1901 when he published his first Hertfordshire St George article in the journal Folklore: ‘As to the dragon, fossil remains of extinct animals have often been found in the clay-pits of Hertfordshire, none of which, however, are of so recent a date as the medieval period. But the story may be very much older, dating possibly even from prehistoric times, and thus handed down from father to son it has become connected in the usual materialistic way with the monumental slab.’

This is oddly muddled. Gerish is not just thinking about the origins of dragon legends in general, but instead seems to have thought that a Cetiosaurus or other dinosaur was slain in prehistory by an impossibly early inhabitant of Brent Pelham and the story was passed down through the ages in the collective memory.

In the hierarchy of reasons Lawrence and the men may have had for presuming they had found a dragon’s lair, number one would be because they found the remains of a real-life dragon. Number two would be something that they mistook for a dragon: large bones? We can be fairly certain that neither of these were in the hole. What other traces of an imagined dragon might have been revealed by the woodcutters’ exertions? Earth scorched black by dragon fire, claw marks, treasure? How about a Roman mosaic of a dragon?

The idea of digging up something out of the ordinary would not have been alien to the men who knew that from time to time dull lumps of metal were pulled from the soil and could be turned into shillings and even pounds: a fabulous golden torque was found nearby a few years before, and some time in the 1830s labourers land-ditching unearthed a skeleton and a Bronze-Age founder’s hoard. It is tempting to surmise that the woodcutters’ attitudes to holes in the ground were conditioned by the fact that such treasure had been discovered in neighbouring fields. Treasure might even suggest the presence of guardian dragons, although the great folklorist and British dragon expert Jacqueline Simpson has pointed out that legends of dragons who guard treasure and those involving a dragon-slayer are not found together in England.

There was nothing in the hole, but in the same way that the Romans who found the fossils in Jappa assumed they had stumbled upon the remains of Perseus, those labourers’ thoughts turned to Shonks because he was their text. There are two explanations for the part fossils played in the formation of monster stories in antiquity: either they started the stories, or the stories of monsters and heroes existed before the fossils were found, but those finds were explained in terms of the stories, and then in time the stories were modified by the finds. Perhaps the monsters took on the guise of the fossils: mammoths begat cyclops, Protoceratops – griffins, and Giraffokeryx launched a thousand dragons.

We know the story of Shonks and the dragon existed before the hole was found. There were no fossils, but superstition, the ancient yew, the dark winter’s morning in a remote spot, and that great rent in the ground – together they were enough to suggest an extraordinary explanation.

It causes us moderns problems when the world of make-believe meets the everyday. We sometimes find it hard to imagine that people really thought these things: that dragons nested in a field. Weren’t they just messing around? Ted Barclay stands in the vestry of Brent Pelham Church holding the remains of an old weather vane and declaring that it is one of Shonks’ arrows. He is having a bit of fun. He does not really believe what he is saying – at least I hope not – but I am convinced those men did believe what they were saying. They believed it, because Shonks was the villagers’ key text, the key to their cosmology. The historian Ruth Richardson has cautioned that to make sense of the past, ‘we must come to terms with our own hostility to superstition’. It had been barely a century since an old woman in Brent Pelham was arrested on suspicion of witchcraft.

The writer Charles Nicholl has argued that Antonio Pigafetta, who chronicled Magellan’s voyages, saw giants in Argentina because he expected to see giants. Why? Because he had read outlandish travellers’ tales about them. In the same way Master Lawrence and the others would have expected to see a dragon’s lair because they had grown up with the story of Shonks’ and seen the dragon carved on his tomb.

We can hardly blame uneducated labourers for seizing upon the stories they knew best when scholars made similar mistakes, defaulting to Homer and the Bible to explain the world. When elephant bones were found with a flint hand-axe by the River Thames, some pointed to the Bible and said it dated from the Flood, whereas classicists thought the Romans brought the elephant to London in the first century CE and it had died in a battle with an axe-wielding Briton. (In fact, the axe is from a period when elephants roamed the Gray’s Inn Road, some 350,000 years ago.) Ask a nineteenth-century labourer from the Pelhams who slew a dragon and they would answer Shonks and not St Michael or St George.

An incident in 1833 attests to how closely the Pelhams were associated with the Shonks legend. The Country Press for Saturday 20 April 1833 contained a case of local excitement from the Petty Sessions at Bishop’s Stortford: ‘for it seemed as if the whole Pelham population had come to town. This arose from a “set-too” amongst the fair amazons of that village, whose pugnacious propensities have been handed down ever since the memorable year of 1086, when Hun, who first tempted, was vanquished by O’ Piers Shonks.’

Unfortunately no other record of this tantalising case has survived, but while it might be too large a claim to say that the Shonks legend was ubiquitous in that place, in those times, he was probably never that far from Pelham minds.

Or had something put them in mind of Shonks that morning?

Was something else going on that made those men eager to find evidence for the legend? Had someone questioned it and mocked the stories? In the 1840s, John Walker Ord interviewed a Mr Marr about the legend of Scaw the serpent-killer in Handale, North Yorkshire. Later Ord would write, ‘Of course we could not gainsay these facts, especially as they were recited with a determination that rendered argument dangerous.’ Challenging a legend had always been risky. In Bodmin in 1113 when a visiting French canon was foolish enough to scoff at the notion that King Arthur still lived he caused a riot. In Brittany at that time, it was said to be unsafe to assert in a public place that Arthur was dead: ‘Hardly will you escape unscathed without being whelmed by the curses or crushed by the stones of your hearers,’ reported Alain de Lille in the twelfth-century Prophetia Anglicana. If it wasn’t dangerous to scoff, it was certainly foolish, and still is – who is to say that the ‘set-too’ among the Amazons of the Pelhams was not because someone was foolish enough to suggest that Shonks did not slay a dragon.

In The Handbook of Folk-Lore, Charlotte Burne cautions the folklore collector to conceal incredulity and amusement and to suppress their smiles when encountering local beliefs and customs. Was the Reverend Soames a little too mirthful about Shonks, and vocal about it too? On the other hand, he may have been sour-faced and prayed the yew down. As the author of the History of the Reformation of the Church of England he would have known that the palming ceremony on Palm Sunday was banned in 1569, yet it continued for centuries on hilltops and in remote corners. The yew was a popular substitute for palm leaves. When Soames preached against Catholic-leaning innovations, did he also try to dispossess his flock of their superstitions, counselling that the yew tree should come down and pouring cold water on local legends about dragons?

The discovery of the dragon hole meant the villages had something to throw back at their parson with all his book learnin’. How could anyone deny the truth of the stories now they had found the dragon’s lair? What do you say to that, Reverend? If the discovery of the hole was a thumbing of the nose at authority, it may help us to understand the long-ago origins of the rest of the legends about Shonks. There are those who think that folk tales and legends were the folks’ response to their struggles against the feudal classes, their struggles for a better life.

In the 1830s, the folks’ traditions were under threat from even greater forces than the local vicar. Old ways of thinking about the world were changing. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology was published in three volumes between 1830 and 1833, while a disciple of Lyell was gathering evidence on a voyage that would completely change the way we look at the world. Charles Darwin was scrambling through the impenetrable forests of Chiloé Island in the winter of 1834, catching foxes by striking them on the head with a rock hammer, and meeting native Christian converts who still ‘pretended to old communication with the devil in certain caves’ and so risked the fate of forebears who had answered to the Inquisition. In the eyes of men of science, the villagers in the Pelhams might have seemed equally suitable subjects for anthropological observation. Such rationalists would have soon explained away the hole in the chalk and derided the existence of dragons.

The way of life for those in the English countryside was changing more rapidly than at any time since the end of the Middle Ages; old beliefs and stories were disappearing as people turned their backs on the fields. The populations of cities like Manchester and Liverpool doubled in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century as labourers left the countryside in search of work. London saw its population increase by over 50 per cent to 1.6 million. This in a country of just fifteen million people. The first railway opened in September 1830 and was the prelude to the laying of 1,000 miles of iron and the synchronisation of clocks to the railway timetables before mid-century. Time itself was changing. The world was changing. Agricultural labourers were living in a countryside that had been pulled out from under their feet.

The agricultural revolution had changed everything. Customary rights of ordinary people were forgotten, enclosure meant they had nowhere to pasture their livestock, nowhere to collect wood or furze. The woods had been fenced for game by the new landlords from London, who were heedless of those customs that had been honoured time out of mind. Customs were replaced by laws.

It is for these new game laws that the social historians John and Barbara Hammond reserve their greatest ire in their classic The Village Labourer. The Laws of England that had shorn people of their rights and replaced their wages with charity, now threatened them with the gallows if they failed to resist the urge to vary their diet of roots by bagging a pheasant for the table. It is undeniable that, like William Cobbett, the Hammonds were purveyors of that particular style of the picturesque we might call the you-don’t-know-you’re-born school of history. Many historians would argue that things weren’t as bad as they claimed, and that enclosure was an essential component of the agricultural revolution that ultimately brought better standards of living to all. Yet it is telling that the man who was the high priest of agricultural progress, the great champion of enclosure, Arthur Young, had second thoughts in later life: he thought the human cost had been too high.

The Swing Riots that began in Kent in the summer of 1830 were as much about resisting change to a way of life as about money. Captain Swing was the name signed to letters sent to farmers and landowners across southern England, threatening arson, machine breaking and murder. They went hand-in-hand with a series of uprisings starting in Kent in the autumn of 1830. Barns and hayricks were burned, the new threshing machines – which ‘stole’ winter work from labourers – were smashed, and unpopular overseers and parsons hauled from parishes in dung carts. The agricultural labourers were demanding higher wages, reduced rents and lower tithes (so the farmers could afford to pay the wages). But it was not just about poverty. One of the complaints of a mob at Walden in Buckinghamshire during the Swing Riots was that buns used to be thrown from the church steeple and beer given away in the churchyard on Bun Day. They wanted the customs continued, but the parson refused. Traditions and customs and rights were ignored. The Furneux Pelham overseers accounts once contained the item ‘paid for ringing church bell for gleaners’. But gleaning – the right to pick up dropped corn during harvest – was being curtailed.

In 1834 there was a total overhaul of the Poor Laws, which would now be administered by Boards of Guardians in the big towns. Change was needed, but at the time it must have seemed like another of the links between a person, the place he lived, and the rights he had in that place, were being destroyed.

Belonging had mattered. Keith Snell looked at inscriptions on 16,000 gravestones in eighty-seven burial grounds to chart the use of the phrase ‘of this parish’ as in ‘To the memory of Mr James Smith late of this parish who departed this life 5th March 1830 aged 63’ and ‘Ellen, beloved wife of Thomas Tinworth of this parish died June 2nd 1888 aged 64 yrs’ – both in Brent Pelham churchyard. People had been proud of belonging, but by the 1870s examples became ever rarer.

Jacqueline Simpson has written that dragon legends ‘foster the community’s awareness of and pride in its own identity, its conviction that it is in some respect unusual, or even unique. That the lord of the manor should be descended from a dragon-slayer, that a dragon should once have roamed these very fields, or, best of all, that an ordinary lad from this very village should have outwitted and killed such a monster – these are claims to fame which any neighbouring community would be bound to envy.’

Those men did not only have a dragon legend to be proud of, they had a dragon-slayer in their village church and an ancient coffin lid to mark his resting place. Little wonder they thought first of dragons when they stared down into that great hollow in the earth.