'The Business of Money Hangs in the Hedge'

“. . . they presently voted that the King be desired to put all Catholiques out of employment, and other high things; while the business of money hangs in the hedge.”

So writes Samuel Pepys in his diary on this date, Oct. 27, in 1666. What interests me is less the anti-Catholic bigotry that raged in England in the seventeenth century, which is well-known, than that concluding expression, “hangs in the hedge.” The OED gives a straightforward definition: “to be put on one side, to be ‘on the shelf.’” We might say “put on the back burner.” In other words, not to explicitly dismiss something but to defer it, put it off. Hedgerows can be impassably dense ecosystems (they slowed the Allied advance through Normandy) of hawthorn, blackthorn, hazel and other vegetation. Anything might “hang in the hedge,” tangled in the tight weave of branches, as though on bales of barbed wire.

When I think of England, a country I have never visited but that long ago took root in my imagination, I see an anachronism, a green and pleasant land dating from Shakespeare’s time and even earlier, a landscape of hedgerows and fields of wild flowers. I think of Titania wooing Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

“Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms.

Fairies, begone, and be all ways away.

[Exeunt fairies]

So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle

Gently entwist; the female ivy so

Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.”

The English natural world itself becomes seductive, and Shakespeare is its chief laureate. I think first of the hedgerows, some dating from the Bronze Age. Hedge is rooted in an Old English word meaning a fence of any sort, living or otherwise. I suspect hedges and hedgerows are firmly planted in the English collective memory. Oddly, the landscape I’ve seen that most closely resembles my vision of a nonexistent England is the largely hedge-less Hill Country of Texas in the spring.