4 - Medieval land use and the formation of traditional European landscapes

Summary

When medieval Europeans chose how to use land they set physical parameters for their own interactions with the natural world and created the recognizably traditional landscapes of Europe. Landscapes of medieval Europe differed from those of classical or barbarian times, but established the foundation or model for much of what may still be seen across most of the subcontinent. From the late antique discontinuity examined in chapter 2 came seminal shifts in how people lived on and made use of the land.

Most, not all, modern landscapes in Europe derived from medieval ones. The countrysides now visible in Tuscany, on the north German plain, or in Ireland were largely formed during the Middle Ages as a result of how people on the land, in Natura, made use of their surroundings. On top of natural ‘endowments’, landscapes were in the Middle Ages shaped (as are their present-day counterparts) by the productive practices and physical structures of human beings’ cultural heritage. In consequence, over time most landscapes become layered. The term ‘palimpsest’ likens the land to those valued pieces of medieval parchment on which someone wrote one text, another scribe erased it, and then wrote a second, while leaving the first still detectable by a careful observer. Over large areas of Europe a trained eye sees what came before, even though exactly how those surviving traces once fitted into a larger pattern may be grasped only from often rare local texts or fieldwork.