Talking billhooks
Richard Negus on the history and beauty of these hand-crafted tools
The Hebrew word ma·ʽatsadhʹ translates as ‘a metal implement used for shaping and cutting wood’. It first appears in the book of Isaiah, written sometime around 800 BC. Examples of this tool, predating the Old Testament by at least four centuries, have been unearthed in Egypt. Archaeologists now agree the very earliest ma·ʽatsadhʹ, or as we know them, ‘billhooks’, were Assyrian, and were used in the fertile plains between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which is said to be the site of the original Garden of Eden.
Some 3000 years have passed since the billhook first appeared, yet most days I still rely on one to help me pay the mortgage. The English billhook is an indispensable tool for professional hedgelayers like me. It is true that much of our cutting and clearing, when laying modern hedges, is carried out with a chainsaw. Yet, the billhook, used with an expert hand, provides a cleaner cut than any tearing petrol or battery-powered saw ever will.
There are still a few smiths making beautifully hand-crafted tools, frequently using recycled farriers’ rasps or old ship-steel. It is said that billhook blades made prior to 1945 are of a superior quality to those produced later. This is because of postwar radionuclide air contamination, which weakens steel; remarkably the majority of this pollution still stems from the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It is possible to buy modern mass produced billhooks, but their blades refuse to take a truly honed edge and are of insufficient quality for professional use. Therefore, most of us rely on vintage tools.
My shed is filled with old billhooks, all stored and wrapped in oily hessian potato sacks, each differing slightly in style and weight. The collection has grown over the years, accrued either as gifts from old countrymen or purchased from farm auctions and antique fairs, often for not very much money at all. I have repeatedly trialled this collection of aged steel, eventually selecting the trio for my first team.
The youngest, a single edged Southern style hook, was made in 1941. A crow’s foot symbol, indicating that it was made for the British Army, is stamped into the metal near the wooden pistol grip handle. It is nose-heavy and a touch too weighty for all-day use. However, it is perfect for brutally bludgeoning through hefty hawthorn or hazel stools, which are knotted by age and a lack of management. The next was made by the pre-war Black Country toolmaker, ‘Brades’. This is, in truth, a spar hook and looks a bit like a scaled-down sickle. It was designed and forged to half, quarter, and point-up rods of hazel into thatching spars, which are used to fix the ridge on a thatched roof. Finally, my favourite billhook, which I use daily, dates back to the 1920s and was crafted by an unknown Leicestershire blacksmith. Michael Dixon, the man who taught me to lay hedges, gave it to me over 30 years ago. I love it, as much as a man can love sharpened steel.
Curiously, it is not made in a Leicestershire pattern but in Staffordshire style. Accordingly, the lightweight, short handled billhook has an edge on both sides of the blade. One is essentially a flattened axe head that I have ground and wet-stoned to a gut-hollowing degree of savage sharpness. On the reverse side, a classic bird bill outline bulges. This blade is longer, curved to protect the sharpened edge should my cut be wayward and hit the ground, equally with a twist of my wrist, the proboscis of the bill helps me bend a cut pleacher into line (a pleacher is hedgelayer’s jargon for a hedge-shrub’s laid stem – laying the stems means that the hedge thickens up to become better for wildlife and better for keeping livestock in). The billhook, ancient and arcane though it may be, is perfection in ergonomic design.
The billhook wasn’t always a tool of peaceful toil. Peasant levies were repeatedly raised to fight in the foreign wars so adored by mediaeval English monarchs. Why bother, the quartermasters thought, in spending good money on forging swords for these part time yokel/soldiers? They were already proficient with blades and had ready access to a deadly arsenal, hanging from nails in the outbuildings of their houses. The billhook became the standard personal weapon for infantrymen in the Hundred Years War (between the late 1340 and the early 1450s). The sharpened blade, so proficient back on the farm at cutting through hazel and thorn, was found to be equally adept at slicing through French chain-mail, French muscle and French bone. As the National Armories in Leeds notes, the addition of a hook on the opposite side to the cutting blade enabled ground-based troops to skewer cavalrymen and topple them out of the saddle. Remarkably, this savage spike is still seen on Cambridgeshire and Kettering style billhooks, as is a fierce forward-facing sabo (a sharp bullet-shaped piece of metal) on Suffolk and Norfolk pattern tools.
Over time, English armies became more professional, the peasant soldiers went back to being peasants and those who remained as military men saw their agricultural billhook evolve. The handles lengthened, blades became pronounced and the hooks and spikes became elaborately barbaric. These new billhooks of war were renamed halberds — and they are still in use, carried by the 73 men and women who comprise the Yeomen of the Guard, the official ceremonial guard to the monarch, which was established by Henry VII after the Battle of Bosworth field and which is still extant today.
There are at least 54 patterns of billhook and over 30 recognised regional hedgelaying styles. This diversity reveals the eclectic nature of our national hedgerow network, as inspired by the parochial vagaries of Britain’s soil. These eccentricities, when combined with equally inconsistent quirks of landscape and climate, affect agricultural practices – the hedge, after all, is an agricultural device, planted and then managed to keep livestock where it should be and to provide shelter for animals and crops alike. Each tool reflects a unique terroir and its singular hedgerows. For example, the hefty long-handled and heavy-headed Yorkshire billhook is designed to cope with the windblown ancient hawthorns of the dales. My dainty Staffordshire-style tool meanwhile, with its Japanese katana-like blade, was crafted for use on the multi stemmed lines of blackthorn that ribbon the ridge and furrow grasslands of the Shires. It is pure luck that my pre-war Leicestershire-made blade also suits the modern hedgerows of my Suffolk homeland. Over 80% of the hedges we lay in East Anglia are youngsters, planted in the past twenty five years or so, replacing the hedges grubbed out in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.
There is a popular narrative that we have ‘lost’ our hedgerows. And with this loss, it is assumed, so went the hedgelayer and his billhook. This is far from true – English hedges have forever been in a state of flux, reflecting booms, busts, and changes in farming and the wider economy. We hedgers and our billhooks have clung on in there; although in truth there are too few of us working these days to keep up with demand. In the past three decades or so the hedge has experienced a renaissance, now seen as so much more than overlooked lines of briar and thorn that bisect our agricultural landscape. As a result my work diary is filled, my aged whetted billhook and modern chainsaw are always busy. People sometimes ask me how I write when I am in the fields most days and I tell them that I write in the cracks. I write when it’s too dark to lay hedges in the winter before dawn or I write when I come home, physically tired but with a head full of thoughts.
The hedgerow is now prized as a vital wildlife habitat and corridor, as a filter ensuring clean water and a carbon sink, as well as all of its traditional agrarian roles. Yet you cannot have healthy hedges, filled with wildlife, flower and fruit without rotational management, be that through laying or coppicing. It is only thanks to these management practices that our unique network of hedgerows flourish.
Therefore, it is no idle boast to say that the billhook, and the artisans who wield them, are in large part responsible for the continuing beauty of the English countryside, our very own Garden of Eden. You’ll have seen a billhook, probably well-rusted at some point in your life, laid out on a table in a junk shop or half-concealed among a clump of briar and nettles while out walking, left there long ago by a long-dead hedgelayer but these tools matter. To understand the billhook is to understand something of Britain.
Richard Negus’ Words from the Hedge will be published by Unbound in May 2025