Medieval
Attitudes to Landscape
Article
by Dr Sara Warneke
Part
two:
During
the Dark Ages a new and extremely dangerous enemy moved onto
the stage. The Christian Church, which itself suffered a crisis
during the devastation that followed the collapse of the Roman
Empire, now started (with an exemplary effort) to win the souls
of the Europeans over to the Christian faith. By the eleventh
century most of western Europe had been converted. The shrines
in the woods had been converted to Christian worship, the rocks
and wells that once had pagan deities living in them had been
evicted in favour of Christian saints. The holy trees worshipped
by so many of the pagans had been chopped down to build churches.
Now, to some extent we can only suppose and make some assumptions
what pre-Christian European societies thought about the landscape
and Nature. Landscape itself must have been something to be
subjugated to man's purpose. Nature itself, the elements, the
seasons, must have been far less easy to subjugate - and in
fact pre-Christian man probably tried to pacify rather than
subjugate those gods he and she believed controlled Nature itself.
But what we do know is how Christian society viewed the landscape
and nature - and to a large extent that's why the world is in
so much trouble today (remembering that the industrialized western
world is primarily Christian). The Christian attitude to land
and to nature depends very much on the ancient Jewish view of
landscape, of nature, in the Old Testament. Briefly, the Judo-Christian
tradition, and certainly the teaching of the medieval Church,
was that the landscape has absolutely no value in itself - it's
only value is in its usefulness to man. Not useful to man? Then
no value. Land (as animals) were only put here on earth by God
for man's use. It existed for no other reason. The land, therefore,
should be subjugated to man's use, because that's what God meant
for it.
Consider the story of the Garden of Eden. Fruitful, bountiful,
and contrasting starkly with the desert of the real world when
God threw Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden. In the Garden
of Eden, Adam and Eve, land, beasts, and nature had lived in
harmony. But then Eve gave into the evil temptations of the
serpent, and God cast out Adam and Eve into a desert where thistles
grew, and stones covered the ground. Beasts now were afraid
of Adam and Eve. The desert that Adam and Eve now lived in equated
with the evil introduced into the world when Eve submitted to
the temptation of the serpent. If Adam and Eve (mankind) were
to survive, they had to overcome this evil, they had to subdue
the desert and make it work for them - the evil introduced by
Eve had to be overcome and subdued by mankind; likewise the
land, the desert, that mankind now lived in had to be overcome
and subdued by man in order to make it work for them. God had
authorized human dominion over the earth.
If mankind did not subdue the earth, the landscape, and make
it work for him then he would become a savage, he would lose
any trace of civilization. Thus, when the explorers of the Renaissance
discovered new worlds peopled with savages who had not subdued
the landscape, then it gave the western nations perfect right,
God's right, to then conquer and subdue both savages and landscape.
Man's position as defined by God was to tame the untamed, whether
it be land or beast, and to make both land and beast work for
him. None of us must let the best or the wilderness (i.e. evil)
claim him or her and thus make us savage. Taming the landscape
was an outward expression of the inward fight against evil -
besides, God had given it to us to use as we saw fit. The landscape
was there, not for our appreciation, but for our use, and a
chance to conquer the evil that had thrown humankind out of
the Garden of Eden - a chance for us to become civilized, a
chance for us to demonstrate our civilization.
Let me quote for you some words of an early modern Englishman,
Henry More, musing over the development of humankind over
the medieval period. The vegetable and mineral world, according
to More were only put on the earth (by God) for man's purpose
(More was arguing against the growth of atheism in England
at this stage.) Think how in what hovels we would live, he
argued, if God had not put trees on this earth for man to
chop down and build houses out of. Without metals, men would
have been deprived of the "glory and pomp of war",
fought with swords, guns and trumpets; instead there would
have been nothing but "howlings and shoutings of poor
naked men belabouring one another ... with sticks or dully
falling together by the ears at fisticuffs." Even weeds
and poisons had their purpose, thought More, for they exercised
the "industry of man to weed them out ... Had he nothing
to struggle with, the fire of his spirit would be half extinguished."
I
think it's a safe bet to say that More never had to do a hard
day's weeding out in the fields.
I don't want to suggest that medieval labouring man and woman
went out there and conquered the landscape simply because the
Church told them to do so - they were first and foremost obsessed
with growing enough to keep them alive through the following
year. Nevertheless, the Church's teachings deeply penetrated
into western man's psyche - probably only in the past fifty
years have we begun to question deeply this ingrained attitude.
After the Dark Ages, from the 1000s, European medieval civilization
really took off. The High Middle Ages, 1050-1350, the time of
the splendour of medieval civilization in all its manifestations
- and especially on the land. The reclamation of marshes and
forests from the clutches of nature, begun many thousands of
years before, now really escalated (encouraged, of course, by
Christian attitudes to the landscape).
Between 1050 and 1348/50 the number of people in Europe virtually
doubled, huge tracts of land were cleared, or reclaimed from
where they had fallen into disuse after the collapse of the
Roman Empire. Tens of thousands of Christians moved into central
Europe, converted the Slavic pagans they found there, and started
to cultivate their land in earnest. The great medieval forests
around Europe shrank - not only to feed the hunger for cultivation,
but also to feed the fires of newly developing industry. Medieval
man was now not only subjugating the land, he was starting to
make nature work for him - water and windmills, blast furnaces,
kilns, etc. With the expansion of cultivation in the High Middle
Ages, trade expanded, and industry and manufacturing also took
off. Man had really at this point started to use nature - today
we like to think that we largely control it.
Medieval society had, after thousands of years of human society
trying to subjugate the landscape, really started to transform
and conquer the landscape - and people made it fit their idea
of what landscape should look like. Of course, the landscape
was there for their use - that's what the Church taught, and,
apparently, that's what most people fervently believed - perhaps
still do. It's a theological stand that fit in very well with
daily needs. But medieval man also had a very firm idea of how
he should transform the landscape - he had to impose order on
it. He had to impose civilization on it.
So in medieval and early modern Europe, heavily influenced
by the theological viewpoint, there was a very marked difference
in how people viewed landscape that had been ordered and landscape
that had not been ordered. There was a marked difference between
tamed landscape and untamed landscape.
Medieval man only felt comfortable in a tamed landscape. He
felt enormously threatened by untamed landscape. Civilized
man, after all, imposed order on the evil of the desert. Thus,
medieval man created, or tried to create, a very ordered landscape.
Western man has an absolute fascination with straight lines,
with order, and the safe tamed medieval landscape was very
ordered. Nice, safe, straight lines of crops - or in the typical
S-shape created by the ploughing techniques on sloping land
- but that in itself was order. Gardens were ordered, they
weren't grown any old how. Of course, medieval people were
encouraged in their love of order on the landscape by the
realization that in order lay increased productivity - God's
way of showing man his pleasure?
Nevertheless, the practice of planting grain or vegetables in
straight lines was not just efficient farming practice - which
it surely was - but it was also man stamping his authority,
his order, his civilization, on a disordered landscape. What
was more pleasing to medieval man - the natural scrubland or
the ordered rows of the field? The ordered rows of the field,
and not just because the field meant food, it also made him
feel comfortable - for here, in a world that was often dark
and disordered, was the physical evidence of man forcing his
order on the landscape and on nature.
The medieval landscape of cultivation was increasingly distinguished
by regular forms - square fields, gardens, straight lines. Order,
against disorder. In the time of Henry VIII one of a gardener
planted an orchard at Kent, which, according to current reports,
"was [was planted] so beautifully that [the trees] not
only stand in most right lines, but seem to be of one sort,
shape and fashion, as if they had been drawn through one mould
or wrought by one and the same pattern." (K. Thomas, Man
and the Natural World, p. 256.)
The tamed landscape was a productive, fertile landscape, ordered
in neat rows, where everything had its place and its meaning
and it's usefulness. It's probable that medieval people had
absolutely no concept of the beauty of landscape - it's one
of the ways in which they differ very much from us. If it
wasn't useful, then it had no point. The wild untamed landscape
was regarded with ultimate horror. The ultimate in untamed
landscape were mountains. Of what use were mountains? They
were sterile, unproductive. They were an aberration. They
were horrid, distasteful, nasty. They were degenerate.
My area of research for my Phd was in late medieval and early
modern travel, and as part of that research I read every travelogue,
diary, that I could lay my hands on. For about a year, as
I read and read, I felt that there was something strange about
these diaries and descriptions of voyages, but I couldn't
put my finger on it - then I suddenly realized, there was
no description of landscape. These travellers, pilgrims, diplomats,
merchants, whatever, only made reference to landscape when
it gave them some trouble - and then only briefly. Travellers
today take photo after photo of the landscape - what we regard
as beautiful, majestic (i.e. mountains, deep forests) medieval
man regarded as a deep nuisance at best, and as an evil horror
at worst. Sometimes medieval and early modern people did write
descriptions of the Alps - they were horrid, nasty, unproductive.
They were never, never admired for their innate beauty. (We
might admire the majesty of mountains now, admire their beauty,
but they still represent a challenge - don't we climb mountains
to conquer them? Don't we still have to subdue them?)
Beauty only resided in the ordered, the tamed landscape. You
find description after admiring description of cities, fortifications,
earthworks, canals, roads, fields - but never admiring descriptions
of the untamed landscape. Medieval people had no admiration,
no appreciation, of the untamed landscape. Medieval and Renaissance
poets and playwrights babbled on and on about ordered landscape,
but not disordered, untamed landscape. Deserts were as bad as
mountains for they had no use. Forests were almost as bad, but
not as quite. After all they did provide wood (therefore forests
were only beautiful when they were burning in your fireplace?),
they gave grazing to animals such as pigs, and they preserved
game for hunting - there were protected forests in medieval
Europe, but protected only for their usefulness (esp. hunting)
not for their natural qualities or beauty. Forests, of course,
as dark places, untamed places, were also the natural residing
places of evil spirits and demons. Don't evil witches always
live in a hut in a forest?
To tamed and untamed landscape. (And I should point out that
tamed and untamed landscape should also be divided into day
and night - day was tamed landscape, night was untamed landscape.)
Landscape, or more broadly nature, was always seen as Janus-faced
- two-natured, or two-sided. The good and the bad, the tame
and the untamed, order and disorder. Nature was almost always
seen in the guise of female - after all, land was fertile, it
produced crops, fruits, etc. The good, the ordered side of nature
was the pleasant side - the earth bringing forth useful products
for human consumption. You can read much description over the
ages of mother earth, of her fruitfulness, of her fertility.
But images of women over the ages are two-sided, just as nature
is two-sided. On the one hand the earth mother brings forth
food for man, is the image of fertility, but on the other hand
nature also brings plagues, famines, tempests. Medieval woman,
but more especially woman of the 1500 and 1600s, was both virgin
and witch - in most societies, but especially in pre-modern
European society, women were always seen as being closer to
nature then men. The witch was also the symbol of disorderly
nature, of the violence of nature, of the side of nature that
brought storms, caused illness, destroyed crops and killed newborn
infants. Disorderly women, like chaotic nature, needed to be
controlled. (If I can get back to modern attitudes to mountains
for a moment - don't mountains lose a lot of their mystique
once they have been successfully conquered?) In the witch-crazes
of late medieval and early modern Europe you often find that
disorderly nature, disorderly landscape and violent nature is
often ascribed to the workings of female witches. After all,
don't forget that it was Eve who got us thrown out of the Garden
of Eden and into this desert and disorderly world.
Environmentalism and pollution in medieval Europe: there were
a few debates about the use of land, and there were a few debates
about the pollution caused by man's use of the land. Once trade
and industry started to gear up in the period post 1050 then
man started to transform the underground landscape as well as
the above ground landscape - mining started and began to grow
as an industry. Coal and various metals - tin, copper, iron
esp. But there were opponents to mining. Firstly, some men objected
to it because they felt that they were somehow raping, hurting
mother earth. What if they introduced infection into mother
earth through deep mines? If God, or even nature, had wanted
man to use minerals, then why bury them deep under the ground?
Secondly, some objected to mining because of its effect on the
earth itself - because of the pollution. Their objects were
not based on concern for the environment as such, but its continued
usefulness to man.
There
were many polluting industries around medieval Europe besides
mining - leather tanning factories, cloth manufacturing industries,
and various industries that used chemicals- many rivers were
unfit to drink because of pollution - and remember that one
of the major causes of pollution was the inadequate disposal
of human waste from the cities.
Very finally, and very briefly: is it completely true that medieval
people remained completely inured to the beauty of the landscape
about them (provided it hadn't been destroyed through pollution)?
Did no peasant wander out into the field and think to himself,
golly, what a beautiful day. No doubt - medieval people loved
flowers and grew them to bring inside (no doubt to help quell
the smells of unwashed bodies crowded in together). But I wonder
if any medieval peasant admired mountains, or virgin forests,
or marshlands. They probably were uncomfortable with landscape
that was not productive, or that was untamed. The untamed landscape
contained many dangers - the threat of evil, demons, devils,
witches, and the physical threat of wolves, bears and falling
branches.
Please
also visit Old London Maps
on the web as many of the maps
and views available there have plans and depictions of gardens
from
the medieval period through to the late nineteenth century.
Copyright
© Sara Douglass Enterprises Pty Ltd 2006
No material may be reproduced without permission
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