Patrick Comerford
We are preparing and rehearsing for the Advent and Christmas services in the choir at Saint Mary and Giles in Stony Stratford. One of the carols we have been rehearsing on Wednesday evenings is ‘The Crown of Roses’, with words by the radical Russian poet Aleksey Nikolayevich Pleshcheev (1825-1893), translated by Geoffrey Dearmer, to a setting by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893):
When Jesus Christ was yet a child
He had a garden small and wild,
Where he cherished roses fair,
And wove them into garlands there.
Now once, as summertime drew nigh,
There came a troop of children by,
And seeing roses on the tree,
With shouts they plucked them merrily.
‘Do you bind roses in your hair?’,
They cried, in scorn, to Jesus there.
The boy said humbly, ‘take, I pray,
All but the naked thorns away’.
Then of the thorns they made a crown,
And with rough fingers pressed it down,
Till on his forehead fair and young
Red drops of blood like roses sprung.
Pleshcheev was a radical poet and part of the Petrashevsky Circle, and he was once arrested alongside Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Many of his poems have been set to music by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.
The carol’s translator, the poet and BBC editor Geoffrey Dearmer (1893-1996), was the son of the Anglican liturgist and hymn-writer ologist Percy Dearmer and the artist and writer Mabel Dearmer. Many of Dearmer’s war poems dealt with the overall brutality of war and violence.
The carol is a moving story of Jesus as a young boy quietly cultivating a peaceful beauty only to have this stripped bare by humanity, leaving only
… thorns they made a crown,
And with rough fingers pressed it down,
Till on his forehead fair and young
Red drops of blood like roses sprung.
Crowns of thorns are usually associated with Holy Week and the Passion narrative leading up to Easter, and not with Advent and the period leading up to Christmas. But earlier this week I was at a meeting of local Milton Keynes clergy in Saint Mary’s Church in Shenley Church End, and there I came across a story of flowering thorns or a flowering thorn bush that also has associations with Christmas rather than Holy Week and Easter, all close to a children’s play area.
Shenley Church End in Buckinghamshire is a village south of Stony Stratford and that has become part of Milton Keynes. There, a few hundred metres south of Saint Mary’s Church and the Old Rectory and off Shenley Road I found Holy Thorn Lane. Hidden away, in an almost-hidden and fenced-off dip of land off the lane, between a children’s play area and the half dozen or so houses on Sheepcoat Close, is a Holy Thorn bush or Glastonbury Thorn.
The thorn is a straggly bush rather than a tree, and appears to have about four rather slender trunks. This probably indicates that it is, indeed, ‘ancient’, the original trunk having split and rotted away, leaving younger trunks still growing. Looking at the spacing of the trunks, this disintegration of older trunks may have happened several times over the centuries.
The Glastonbury Thorn has been in Shenley Church End for so long that local lore says it was grown from a staff planted by the Pilgrim Fathers more than 400 years ago, before they sailed on the Mayflower in 1620.
An explanatory plaque inside the railed-off area seeks to tell its story:
‘Glastonbury Holy Thorn
‘This ancient thorn bush is believed to
have been grown from a cutting from the
famous hawthorn bush at Glastonbury.
The Glastonbury thorn bush is said to have
miraculously grown when Joseph of
Arimathea planted his staff in the ground.
According to Avalon Legend, following
the Crucifixion, Joseph came to England
bearing the Holy Grail. This bush, just like
the original Glastonbury Thorn, is said to
flower around Christmas Eve and crowds
have gathered each year to witness this.’
Everywhere the Pilgrim Father stopped on their way from Glastonbury, the legend says, they planted one of these thorns. Someone once took a cutting from the bush and planted it at Shenley. But the cutting had many siblings dotted across England, including Quainton, Eaton Bishop, Woodham Ferrers, and Kingsthorne and Orcup in Herefordshire.
In days gone by, access to the Glastonbury Thorn in Shenley involved a trudge across fields. A 19th century writer noted, ‘This “Holy Thorn” stands in a field by itself, and is partially railed round by old palisading. Each Christmastime it is said to burst out into bud. … in this neighbourhood no one disputes the fact that it does so. In the good old coaching days people used to, so I am told, make a point of visiting this particular “Holy Thorn” at Shenley, the field where it is being but a few hundred yards from the old Watling Street.’
In those days, people camped by huge bonfires waiting for the bushes to flower. More recently, developers wanted to root up the bush and build houses. But they were challenged by local people, a preservation order was in 1978, and it is now surrounded by a metal fence, and the nearby primary school is called Glastonbury Thorn School.
The Shenley Church End thorn tree appears to receive little care or attention. It is said to have an internal diameter of 2.15 metres and an external circumference of 8 metres, but its age has never been estimated.
The trunks of the Shenley tree continue to produce flowers or flower buds in winter. When I visited the bush earlier this week, it had no buds – but there are still 40 days to Christmas.
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