The Magic of Coin-Trees from Religion to Recreation

The Roots of a Ritual

Ceri Houlbrook

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319755175
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book traces the history of ritual landscapes in the British Isles, and the transition from religious practice to recreation, by focusing on a highly understudied exemplar: the coin-tree. These are trees imbued with magical properties into which coins have been ritually embedded. This is a contemporary custom which can be traced back in the literature to the 1700s, when it was practiced for folk-medical and dedicatory purposes. Today, the custom is widespread, with over 200 coin-trees distributed across the British Isles, but is more akin to the casual deposition of coins in a wishing-well: coins are deposited in the tree in exchange for wishes, good luck, or future fortune.Ceri Houlbrookcontributes to the debate on the historic relationships between religion, ritual, and popular magic in British contexts from 1700 to the present.

© The Author(s) 2018

Ceri HoulbrookThe Magic of Coin-Trees from Religion to RecreationPalgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magichttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75517-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Coining the Coin-Tree

Ceri Houlbrook¹

(1)

University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK

Ceri Houlbrook

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

A First Encounter

The vast log stretched along the curve of the footpath, remarkable for its size—but more so for the thousands of coins embedded in its bark (Fig. 1.1). They blanketed its surface in uniform lines, faithfully following the log’s curves and crevices, forming ripples and waves of copper and silver. The dull, grainy texture of the wood was almost entirely obscured beneath the layer, the armour, the shroud of metal that glimmered brightly in the sunlight. Other trees surrounding it were also embedded with coins, but they were mere satellites; it was the log that grabbed the attention. The footpath was busy: families, like mine, on day trips to the countryside. Nearly everyone who passed the log stopped. Nearly everyone who stopped added their own coin. They pushed them into fissures in the bark, or hammered them in with handy rocks, before going on their way again. My sister and I, aged 12 and 9, asked if we could do the same. Our parents were probably already reaching into their pockets. They handed us each a copper coin and we made our offerings.

Fig. 1.1

The Bolton Abbey coin-tree, Yorkshire, England (Photograph by author)

The year was 1998 and my family were on an outing to Bolton Abbey, Yorkshire. Surrounding the ruins of the Augustinian Bolton Priory are 12,000 hectares of woodland and riverside paths: a perfect escape from Manchester. It was along one of these paths that I came across my first coin-tree. It would be poetic to claim that this experience set me on course to undertake a Ph.D. 12 years later. That this one coin-tree site made such an impression on my young mind that I decided, there and then, to one day research this custom. In truth, at the time this experience had little impact on me. I can’t recall what purpose I believed the coin-trees had or whether I asked my parents for an explanation; perhaps my mind was on other things as I knocked my coin into the tree. In fact, my whole memory of the day is questionable. It may have been romanticised through the rose-tinted glasses of childhood. Maybe it hadn’t even been sunny.

However, the memory—romanticised or not—obviously remained with me on some level. Over a decade later, my MA nearly completed and the idea of pursuing a Ph.D. in British folk customs recently sparked, I was reading E. M. Forster’s Howards End when I came across the following exchange between Mrs. Wilcox and the novel’s chief protagonist Margaret Schlegel:

“It is the finest wych elm in Hertfordshire. Did your sister tell you about the teeth?”

“No.”

“Oh, it might interest you. There are pig’s teeth stuck into the trunk, about four feet from the ground. The country people put them in long ago, and they think that if they chew a piece of the bark it will cure the toothache. The teeth are almost grown over now, and no one comes to the tree.”

“I should. I love folklore and all festering superstitions.” ¹

Reading this, the memory of Bolton Abbey came back to me. Had this been what the coin-tree was: ‘folklore’ and ‘festering superstition’? Had it been some anomalous modern-day survival from an earlier custom? Perhaps it was some discoloured, even diminished, remnant of the same custom described by Forster, which my research identified as a form of ‘implantation’: plugging, nailing or wedging one object into another in order to effect a cure. ² In the case of Mrs. Wilcox’s wych elm, toothache is transferred from the depositor into the tree via the implantation of a tooth, which represents the disease. The disease is subsequently implanted into the tree.

It turns out that Mrs. Wilcox’s wych elm is far from unique. Across Britain and Ireland, a veritable plethora of trees have been employed for similar purposes. Trees from Cornwall to the Highlands of Scotland have been embedded with a variety of objects, such as human hair, nail-clippings, metal nails and pins and human blood, the depositors hoping for cures for ailments ranging from toothache and warts to ague and whooping cough.

However, as widespread as this custom was, the general consensus appears to be that it has ebbed. Implanted trees are viewed in the past tense. Mrs. Wilcox notes, with a sense of melancholy, that the teeth in her wych elm are ‘almost grown over now, and no one comes to the tree’, whilst Margaret describes the custom as a ‘festering superstition’. From this perspective, the wych elm is a decaying manifestation of a faded, forgotten custom. Indeed, twentieth-century scholars adopt similar stances. In 1932, for example, anthropologist Ruth Benedict stated matter-of-factly that ‘folklore has not survived as a living trait in modern civilization’. ³ It was her opinion that folkloric customs are not features of modernity, and that any survivals are just that: survivals. Festering superstitions.

Is this true? Are contemporary customs mere remnants; do our ritual landscapes hold nothing more than meagre historical residue? Seeking answers to these questions, I took the Bolton Abbey coin-tree site as my primary case study and began researching its history. I’d expected a long narrative of ritual. Perhaps when the log had stood as a tree it had been like Mrs. Wilcox’s wych elm, implanted with objects by sufferers of toothache and other ailments. Perhaps before that tree there had stood another, also subject to ritual activity, and maybe before that there had been a holy well, a Christian hermitage, a sacred grove, a prehistoric burial site. Perhaps the Bolton Abbey coin-tree was the most recent manifestation of magical belief in a long landscape narrative, and when, at the age of 12, I’d hammered a penny into that tree, I’d been helping to preserve a custom backed by centuries, maybe even millennia, of history.

You can imagine my surprise when I contacted the Bolton Abbey Estate and received the following information from the Visitor Manager:

There is no legend or story associated with our coin trees. The first tree was started about 15 to 20 years ago [c.1992–1997]. The tree had fallen across the path and as is our policy the foresters moved it to the side of the path, made it safe and left it there to naturally breakdown. While doing this the forester found a coin on the floor. He simply picked this up and pushed the coin into the trunk. The rest is history as they say. ⁴

I’ll admit to a little disappointment. So the Bolton Abbey coin-tree was simply a modern-day anomaly, sparked by the seemingly random act of a single forester. There was no wealth of history behind it. But surely the idea came from somewhere. As all historians know, nothing emerges ‘out of the blue’; customs do not simply spring forth from a vacuum. Had this forester read about the custom of tree implantation in a book, maybe even Howards End and imitated the practice? Unfortunately, as the forester had retired, I wasn’t able to contact him, and I could find nothing in literature searches on contemporary coin-trees. I had reached a frustratingly dead end—until, that is, I looked beyond my primary case study.

Less than twenty miles west of Bolton Abbey is a footpath running through Little Gordale Wood, Malham—a footpath that is also flanked by trees and logs embedded with coins. It turned out that Bolton Abbey is not an isolated site; there are more. But it doesn’t stop there. A further fifteen miles west and an even larger cluster of coin-trees adorn the woods of the Ingleton Waterfalls Trail, while twenty miles south of Bolton Abbey are the coin-trees of Hardcastle Crags. There are still more over the borders beyond Yorkshire: coin-tree sites in Derbyshire, Cheshire, Lancashire, Cumbria, and Northumberland, and then south, in Bristol, Dorset, Devon, Cornwall, Somerset. And still more over the borders beyond England: sites in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The more I searched, the more I found.

The Coin-Tree Catalogue

The coin-tree catalogue began to be compiled (Appendix A). At this stage, online resources were invaluable. Inputting the terms ‘coin tree’, ‘money tree’, and ‘penny tree’ into search engines produced myriad results: online articles, personal blogs, discussion forums and image-hosting websites, all referring to—and many curiously querying—the custom of inserting coins into trees. Utilising data collected from these online resources, the locations of numerous coin-trees were established. Others were identified simply through word of mouth; relatives, friends and colleagues who had either seen a coin-tree or knew somebody who had. The Lydford Gorge coin-tree, for example, was brought to my attention by my doctoral supervisor, having come across it whilst on holiday, while I was informed of the Portmeirion coin-trees by a fellow guest at a wedding.

More data was collected through direct correspondence with park rangers and wardens, heritage officers and archaeologists. In March 2012, a query was placed on the National Trust email forum, Countryside Chat, ⁵ requesting rangers to make contact if they had any information on coin-trees. This engendered seventeen replies. In May 2012, another request was placed in the Institute for Archaeologists bulletin, and more responses were received, bringing to light further coin-tree sites. As the research was disseminated, via papers at conferences for example, emails began pouring in from scholars and independent researchers countrywide, identifying other coin-trees.

The coin-tree catalogue currently stands at 40 sites across Britain and Ireland (Fig. 1.2, Appendix A), containing a total of more than 200 individual coin-trees. Of the 40 sites, 37 are active: their coin-trees are still currently being coined. The catalogue does not claim to be complete. Its compilation is an ongoing project and it is likely that more coin-trees will have emerged since fieldwork was conducted, and even likelier that more will emerge in the future. The catalogue presented in Appendix A is therefore not intended as a static archive but as a snapshot of a growing compendium.

Fig. 1.2

The distribution of coin-trees across Britain and Ireland

Not all the coin-tree sites are as contemporary as Bolton Abbey, ranging in date from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. However, the majority did emerge during the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Coining the Coin-Tree
• 2. Roots of a Ritual
• 3. The Democratisation of the Landscape
• 4. Contemporary Engagement
• 5. The Mutability of Meaning
• 6. Manipulating Meaning
• 7. Green Monuments and Their Heritage
• 8. Concluding Thoughts
• Back Matter