The Winter Thorns

The Glastonbury Thorn is a hawthorn tree that blossoms in midwinter. Legends and customs have grown up around it, and its renown is such that it was featured on a Royal Mail Christmas stamp. A garland of blossoms from the tree is traditionally sent to the reigning monarch at Christmas.

The thorn is said to have grown from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea when he planted this on the slope of Wearyall Hill in the Somerset town. This connects the thorn to a wider myth involving a visit by Joseph to Britain, sometimes, it is claimed, accompanied by Christ as a child: the inspiration behind William Blake’s “And did those feet in ancient time…”

It is not the only species of holy tree recorded at Glastonbury.  In Miles Hadfield’s An English Almanac (1950) there is a reference for the date of 11 June, St Barnabas’ Day, to a Glastonbury Walnut Tree that budded and leaved then. This Barnabas Tree seems very little known now, probably quite eclipsed by the Holy Thorn

The winter flowering thorn has been recorded in Britain since the 13^th century. It was originally held to be holy simply because, unusually, it flowered around the time of Christmas. The suggestion made by the antiquarian Vaughan Cornish (Historic Thorn Trees in the British Isles, 1941) is that the monks of Glastonbury discovered one unusual specimen of this kind and then nurtured it and developed the story for pious purposes.

There are in fact now several holy thorns in Glastonbury, including in the Abbey grounds, in the parish churchyard of St John, and in the gardens of Chalice Well. Cornish suggests that the original thorn would have been at the Abbey. 

Less well-known, perhaps, as Cornish explains, is that the Glastonbury Thorn is not the only holy thorn in Britain. There are recorded examples of at least thirty more. Cornish was himself the guardian of one such, the Salcombe Regis Thorn, Devon, and for his book, he wrote to a wide circle of correspondents, including parsons, squires, and antiquarians, to ask whether they had any in their parish. His book chronicles the replies he received. Others have come to light since in folklore surveys.

Cornish suggests that some notable thorns marked Anglo-Saxon hundred-moots or meeting places, while others may be a relic of pagan tree worship—this is because some have folklore associations quite different to the Glastonbury Thorn. But the hawthorn is not generally a long-lived tree, and quite a few examples have disappeared over the years: they have fallen victim to storms, development, neglect and decay.

A notable example of an ancient survivor is Hethel Old Thorn in Norfolk, claimed to be the oldest hawthorn tree in Britain, and to date from the 13^th century—it is now, with a small patch of land around it, a miniature nature reserve. It too is now linked to Joseph of Arimathea, though it was not originally: an example of a piece of major lore overshadowing a more local, older legend. There are other East Anglian holy thorns, in Suffolk, at Leiston and Parham, and in Essex at Billericay, Coggeshall, Stock and Woodham Ferrars.

Some examples are now said to have been grafted from the stock of the Glastonbury Thorn, which may indeed be the case, or this may simply be a further instance of overshadowing by the greater myth. There seems, for some reason, to be a particular concentration of holy thorns in the Welsh Marches: in Herefordshire at Orcop (felled by a storm in 1980), Wormesley, Eaton Bishop, Little Birch, Dinedor and Kimbolton; and in Worcestershire at Alfrick, Hampton, Newland, Ripple and Tardebigge, and a ''wishing'' thorn on the Malverns.

There is or was also one outlier, the Jerusalem Thorn at Paythorne, on the edges of the Forest of Bowland, Lancashire, close to the Buck Inn: the little settlement may even take its name from this thorn.

In some of these cases, the festival of the winter thorn was usually held on ‘Old Christmas Eve’, the night of January 5^th.  This is because of the change in the calendar in Britain, from the Julian system to the Gregorian, in 1752, for greater astronomical accuracy, when some days were “lost”.  Some people refused to let them go, and so still counted the real festival as twelve days later than the modern calendar.

This is not the only example where, in some, especially remote, rural areas, the old calendar was still used to commemorate ancient customs. A Calendar of Old English Customs Still in Being, published by Mark Savage of Upper Basildon, Reading, in 1940 (and attributed by the British Library to one ‘Philip Hogg’), notes the Wormesley custom on Old Christmas Eve, as follows: ‘Visiting the Holy Thorn Tree, Wormesley, Hereford. The belief that this may burst into bloom at midnight on the eve of Old Christmas Day attracts many visitors.’

Usually the ritual involved gathering around the tree to watch for the blossom to appear, but the custom was often associated with revelry, feasting and drinking: so much so that one farmer felled a winter thorn on his land to stop the nuisance of these rumbustious gatherings. It will be no surprise, given the way folklore often works, that he was said to suffer misfortune afterwards. Watches at the winter thorns seem to have continued until within living memory, but it is not clear if any are still observed. 

(Mark Valentine)