Chapter 1 - A (Disappearing?) World of Opportunity

Summary

In Chapter 1, I identify the range of economic, religious, and social values attached to landscape in Middle English romances. This analysis begins by examining how romances’ descriptions of landscape often concentrate on economically significant topographical features, especially natural resources, and the laborers who manage and harvest them. For example, I examine the hilly iron mines and accompanying settlements of smiths in Sir Isumbras, the working of stone quarries in William of Palerne, and sea harvests in Havelok the Dane. The chapter then builds on these arguments to explain how descriptions of abandoned or ravaged agricultural landscapes in Sir Degrevant and the Tale of Gamelyn betray the anxieties of an increasingly “bourgeois-gentry” readership about the lack of human control over the English landscape in the wake of population decline caused by civil war, the bubonicplague, and the Little Ice Age.