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Jul 04th
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Piers Shonks was a twenty-three foot tall giant who lived on an island in Shonks' Moat, Peppsall Field. One day, whilst out hunting, he encountered a ferocious dragon and with an arrow killed it.

Piers Shonks

This beast was in fact the devil's favourite and in outrage the devil swore that he would have Piers' soul whether the giant was buried inside or outside of the church.  When Piers was finally on his deathbed, he fired an arrow to determine where he was buried. The arrow sailed through a window in the church of St Mary the Virgin at Brent Pelham and embedded itself in the wall. Thus Piers was buried in the wall of the church and cheated the devil as he was neither inside not outside of the church. Piers' tomb remains to this day. (from The Dragons of the British Isles) Here is another account of the story...

PIERS THE DRAGON SLAYER Piers Shonks, the squire of Pelham, Herts, was a mighty hunter who was always

accompanied on his expeditions by his groom and three faithful hounds. One day, they cornered a terrible dragon in its lair beneath a yew tree in Great Pepsells field. The fight was long and bloody, and Shonks himself was badly wounded, but at last the dragon writhed in its death agony at the hero's feet. Just then, Satan appeared and demanded the squire's body and soul as payment for the death of his creature. Piers replied that his soul was God's, and his body would lie where his arrow fell. With his dying breath, he strung an arrow to his bow and fired it through the south window of Brent Pelham church. It struck the north wall of the nave, and there Piers rests to this day in his elaborately carved 11th-century tomb beneath an inscription which concludes:
'. . . Shonks one serpent kills, t'other defies,
And in this wall, as in a fortress lies'
 
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