The Grass is Greener: An Anglo-Saxon Passion - Tom Fort

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among gardening historians to begin with Genesis, which tells us that God created the first garden, eastward in Eden, and Adam the first gardener. The complacent assumption is that the Creator ordained gardening as humankind’s pre-eminent recreation; that in the garden, of whatever kind, he gave a virtuous echo of that first perfect state; and that, by implication, the garden would for ever be a source of solace and spiritual improvement. Should we also presume that in Eden the essentials were provided: not merely the earth, the seed, water and warmth, and perhaps a useful implement or two; but also the aspiration to cultivate that rich soil in a manner pleasing to the eye and refreshing to the spirit?

      The historians seize upon Genesis because it is somewhere to start, like a footpath sign. But scarcely have they taken the first steps along the path than it disappears into the dark, impenetrable tangle of Roman, Anglo-Saxon and early medieval Britain. They halt to scour the old chronicles, searching for a shard of light in the twilit thicket. But they are disappointed. There is enough evidence about life in first millennium Britain to show, for instance, that it was uncertain and often violent, that some held to the faith of Christ, that a minute handful could read and write, that amid the darkness the yearning to create beauty occasionally stirred and found expression. But of glimmers of interest in the garden as a diversion, the chronicles are almost bare. So they blunder on through the wildwood, until suddenly a shaft of sunlight does break through, and where it strikes the ground a sprig of green is visible.

      They rush towards it, falling upon it with desperate relief; and at once begin constructing great edifices. A reference is found in the annals of Ely to the planting by Abbot Brithnod of gardens and orchards, which is taken as proof that a tradition of ecclesiastical horticulture was firmly in place before the end of the 10th century. In some dusty record of domestic purchases, a note is found to the effect that three-and-tenpence was spent on turf for the London garden of the Earl of Gloucester’s curiously named brother, Bogo de Clare, from which is deduced a general enthusiasm among the 13th-century aristocracy for disporting themselves on cultivated grass. And from similarly nugatory smatterings are derived such absurdities as ‘medieval men loved their flowers’. It would indeed be cheering to know that, in those brutish days, some knew their pinks and carnations, cherished mulberry and pear trees, even laid turves and lived long enough to see the grass grow. Perhaps there were knights who occasionally dismounted from their palfreys to pick nosegays for their ladies, and paused awhile, fumbling for a way to express their tender feelings in elegant prose. But we may be sure that feuding, fighting, intriguing, keeping their subordinates in order and promoting their good offices with their lord counted for a great deal more.

      Go back almost two thousand years, to the heart of the Roman empire at its zenith, to Pliny’s garden near Ostia, where you might have strolled between hedges of box and mulberry, listening to your host moralizing about the destruction of Pompeii; or to his Tuscan villa where the terrace sloped to a soft and liquid lawn, surrounded by paths and topiary, shaded by cypress and plane trees. Here, far removed from the noise of war, men’s thoughts could turn to the pleasures of food and wine, and to beauty, the arts of poetry and sculpture, the taming of nature into a garden.

      Go back a thousand years, to pre-Conquest Britain. Here, men laboured to exist, and generally did not exist very long. Sharing their wattle and mud hovels with their livestock and attendant multitudes of vermin, they rose at daybreak, toiled through the hours of daylight on the land, devoured their dismal sludge of beans and stewed vegetables, went to sleep; and did that most of the days of their adult lives. Nor was the existence of their feudal lords much more refined. Their homes may have been bigger, but they were just as draughty, dark and smelly. They ate much the same food and were eaten by the same fleas. True, they did not spend their days in manual drudgery. But the round of banditry, quarrelling, organizing and repelling raids, and the duties of providing and beseeching protection which alone offered any hope of stability in a turbulent world, can have left little enough daytime for anything much beyond sharpening battle axes and watching backs.

      It is likely that a handful among the very richest among Britain’s Roman rulers included ornamental gardens within their villas. Excavations at Fishbourne in Sussex have revealed that, in the centre of a resplendent first-century country house, was a courtyard laid out as a garden, with a walk flanked by ornamental arbours and shrubs, and possibly beds of violets, pansies, lilies and assorted herbs. At a humbler level, the Celtic monks most probably made gardens of a kind within their monasteries and beside their huts; and the greater religious institutions – such as Ely – may well have boasted more extensive cultivated grounds.

      However, it was not until well after the coming of William and his Norman knights that the seedbed was laid on which the island’s first civilizing influences would eventually germinate and flower. It took time to impose Norman order on a barbarian territory infected for centuries by chronic disorder, and much killing and brutality. But the slow, reluctant bowing of the Anglo-Saxon shoulder opened the way to blessings the land had never known, chief among which was an emerging confidence in freedom from invasion. The establishment of a structure of government, however harsh and oppressive it was, undoubtedly assisted the birth of an idea of nationhood, and with that, an aspiration to explore life’s spiritual dimension.

      We shouldn’t make too much of this. For the labouring classes of husbandmen and villeins, life continued to equate to toil. The demands of persuading the ground to provide enough to eat, and of rendering service to the lord, consumed existence. For those lords, life was certainly easier – and for their princes, easier still – but still uncertain and usually abbreviated. They made war, and played at it in their tournaments; adjudicated on the grievances of their retainers; organized the defence of their realms and plotted to subvert those of their rivals. Their chief sport was to chase and kill animals, a diversion which they pursued with terrific enthusiasm. That life might have a gentler, more contemplative side seems to have occurred to few of them.

      But, the Norman order did provide for that side. Through the breach made by the warriors came the monks of Saint Benedict. They had built their great abbeys and accumulated their great estates in Normandy. Now they were invited to do the same in England. It was this engineered monastic revival which caused gardening’s green shoots to show.

      

      I used to know a man – later the editor of a well-known provincial newspaper – who told me in all seriousness that he had investigated a case in which an office worker from Slough had left his home one morning, walked a little way along the road and fallen through an unusual kind of hole into the 14th century. Whether he was lost for ever, or managed to find a way to reascend into our own age, I cannot now recall.

      Were I to suffer a similar fate, and had I the choice among the variety of occupations open to men of the Middle Ages, I think I could do worse than be gardinarius in a Benedictine monastery. Brother Thomas I would be, a person of middling status in the monastic hierarchy, unregarded beside the abbot, the prior, the bursar, the precentor and the other major obedientiaries. Doubtless the monks of the scriptorium, with their noses buried in bibles and psalters, would look down on me, with my rough, weathered hands and attendant odour of fish; although they would be grateful enough when executing their illuminations for the dyes derived from the berries and flowers grown under my direction.

      Mine would be largely an outdoor life, and a most useful one. I would tend and jealously guard the monastery fishponds, watching over the carp, bream and pike, fattening them up with choice morsels until the feast day came and they were dispatched to the table to provide welcome relief from starch. I would, if there were a river, have an eel fishery; and trap them of a dark night in autumn when the migrating urge is on them, for no flesh of freshwater fish is richer or more tasty. I would have charge of the orchards, prune the apple and pear trees, tend to them at blossom time, gather in the fruit. I would know the way of bees and when to harvest their honey. I would know something of herbs and their ways, although their cultivation and medicinal use would probably be the responsibility of a specialist infirmarius. The sight of my vines would gladden my heart, and the thought of the wine they would provide would warm my spirit through the long hours of devotion and contemplation which the discipline demanded.

      The physical well-being of the monastery would depend, in great measure, on me; and productivity and usefulness would surely be my guiding principles. But there would

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