Gone Medieval - Medieval Gardens

Episode Date: July 9, 2022

Gardens and gardening are aspects of medieval life that rarely get much attention. But it was a period when those with a little more land created gardens for leisure and pleasure, a place in which to stroll or entertain friends.In this edition of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis heads to Prebendal Manor in Northamptonshire, a unique house and garden steeped in history dating back to King Cnut. There, Matt meets the "Historic Gardener" Michael Brown to find out what medieval gardens looked like, what plants they grew and how were they tended without the benefits of modern tools.The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie. It was edited by Seyi Adaobi and produced by Rob Weinberg.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Mondays newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Gardens and gardening is an aspect of medieval life that rarely gets much attention. Working the land, growing what you need to feed your family and being bound by the seasons of the year of familiar ideas. But what about gardening for leisure or pleasure? Those with a little more land might want it to look nice to provide their a space to stroll in or to entertain others in? What might those gardens have looked like?

What plants could they choose from? How were these gardens tended without a strimmer or a mower? Michael Brown is known as the medieval gardener. He's written a book entitled A Guide to Medieval Gardens and I was delighted to be able to join Michael on a very windy day at Prebendor Manor near Fotheringay in Northamptonshire. I'd also like to say a huge thank you to Jane at Prebendor Manor for being such a wonderful host and for welcoming us into her home and garden. It's a fascinating place to visit with some fantastic history wrapped up around it. But anyway, I hope you enjoy this tour of a medieval garden. Thank you very much for joining us, Michael. Wonderful, Prebendor Manor Gardens. Yes, the gardens are laid out were based around the idea of Nicholas Colnett's physician Henry V at Adjinkor

and the sort of plants and gardens he may have had, although there's actually no physical evidence for them. It's all hypothetical but based on historical reconstructions and evidence from manuscripts and illuminations. Fabulous. So we're going to have a wonder around Prebendal's garden here. But were there medieval gardeners, as we think of gardeners today, sort of hobbyists who did gardening? Or was it always a practical, functional job? Probably wasn't really hobbyists as such. The way we think about it nowadays is you need your gardens to survive if you're poor. You need your own food and medicines and things like fibres to making clothes and threads. The monks would probably be also having things like medicinal herbs as well.

But for the wealthy there were pleasure gardens and they may be growing exactly the same plants as somebody else is for a practical purpose but these are left purely to be enjoyed. So the earliest reference is Albertus Magnus who describes a garden as having a lawn in the middle with flower beds around the outside which many people have a garden very much the same today. But he says you don't harvest these plants. They're just there to be enjoyed. So we're standing in the turf seat and the trellis supports the roses. And on a warm sunny day, the enclosure will actually hold all the centre of roses.

And it's absolutely wonderful. And on a day like, well, not today, perhaps. On a nice warm, sunny day, you'll have been busy in the hall. You need to relax. You can come out here. There'll be trestle tables perhaps put out food and drink. and a musician perhaps to entertain you and you can simply relax and get away

from it all and for the wealthy at least that's what a pleasure garden is and it's cited just below where the solar block would have been and we know at Rockingham Castle Queen Eleanor had a garden laid out below her room and it was probably only accessible from her quarters something that happens throughout

most of history for the wealthy you can only access parts of the garden from their quarters it's restricting access so this would have been very much the high status part of the garden that was simply to be enjoyed yes fantastic and was there much thought went into how a medieval garden was laid out it has to perform a function but if we've got a nice pleasure garden next to the lord's kind of solar area does that mean that there was lots of thought given to what went where it does seem to be that things

were placed where you would find them accessible at least around the house because we are in the mineral enclosure just here but there would also be things like small pleasure parks or even quite large pleasure parks outside those walls. Fish ponds aren't there just for food. They are there to be enjoyed. Prasendi writing in Italy says you can admire the fish and then you get to eat them. Up on the horizon from here we can see the hedgeline

that's the limits of Fothering Hay deer park. You could have used that for exercise, but Fothering Hay also had a small pleasure park which is probably just purely there for enjoyment. You wouldn't have killed the deer there to be admired. So if we were to move out of the Rose Garden here where would we find ourselves going into so we would have a nice door here a lot to make sure only the people we want came into it there was a poisons bed here for some of our poisonous plants we still

have one or two the monkshoods coming up there at the back very very poisonous why would you have poisonous plants in a garden many of them are medicinal so the hellebores here were used for purging that's to bring your humus back in balance and make you feel better and the ecology comes which is a spiky leaf there coming up. They were a well-known cure for gout, so that would have helped. But many of the point, oh, like, opium today.

I mean, you pop down to boots, you buy your painkillers, it's opium, which is, strictly speaking, poisonous. So, yes, poison plants can have two uses, make you better or finish you off. We were now walking across to a turf seat, which has a tree growing out in the middle, and ladies,

is, there's much of history, like to look pale and interesting rather than being sunburnt and wind-swept like the peasants who work in the field. So on a nice warm day you can sit here in the shade of the tree. And this one's actually a Glastonbury thorn, one of the ones that's said to have been bought over by Joseph of Arimathea on his journey to Glastonbury. Interesting how the idea of getting a sun tan to look healthy and wealthy has changed from the medieval ideal of being very pale. Yeah, I think it probably changes with the industrial revolution when all the workers pale and pasty too from being in the factories all day long.

So to show your high status, you go off and get a suntan instead. Now this is, the garden area here is based on the original planting ideas of Henry the Poet, who mentions about 100 plants on each section. So it's a sort of a cloister-like, because I suspect he's got a cloister garden somewhere in London, and this is where we set this one out. So a lot of the plants, again, practical. We have Daphne Lariola down here, which was still being. used as a purging plant in the early 1900s. Probably not the sort of thing you really want to

take nowadays but it has early flowers. It's evergreen which you don't get much of in many medieval gardens and it's somewhere you can wander around and admire the flowers, break of a piece of lavender, something and sniff that to make you feel a bit better. Was there a strong sensory element to these gardens that everything smelt or felt interesting? Well, it's like gardens today some things smell and some things look pretty but they don't necessarily both do the same or the plant does everything.

So yes, I mean the rose is certainly highly scented with the red apothecary's rose at least but they're very short-lived. They only flower for five to six weeks at the best of times and that's it. Gone. So you want some of the other things to keep going through the year that may be things like lavender's

highly scented and they keep going all year really. really. So it gives you a bit of continuity, but I suspect in medieval times, once it starts getting warm, you go out and enjoy yourself while you can. And most of the pictures show people out in gardens, doing things, reading books, playing music, dancing, eating and drinking, and just generally having a good time. Would there have been a lot of plants in a medieval garden that we would recognise today, or were they very different? Things like mints, oregano, thimes, roses of course, many of the things are the same. One plant we do have over here which you won't see so much nowadays is the mandrake. They probably have only been in very select gardens at the best of times.

So at this time of the year all you're getting is the crinkly leaves coming through. But what you're really after is the root, something like this one. It looks vaguely person-like. according to the Bible, it was good for female fertility, but John Ardern, the 14th century surgeon, says you can give it to your patient who will soon become unconscious. You can cut him with iron, and he won't feel the pain.

It was a medieval anaesthetic as well. Yes, but it was very expensive, because if you dig it up, it screams. If you hear it scream, you die. So you have a dog to pull it up for you, and the dog dies instead. And this one here is the medieval dragon, and you can see that the stems look a little bit like snake skin.

So that was recommended for steak bites, and if you drank it, chances are you wouldn't die. If you didn't drink it, the chances are you probably wouldn't die because most medieval steak bites from across Europe at least were not usually fatal. Did Edison really take credit for things he didn't invent? Were treadmills originally a form of corporal punishment? And would man have ever got to the moon? Without the bra. You can expect answers to all the,

questions and more in the brand new podcast from history hit, patented history of inventions. Join me, Dallas Campbell, as I uncover what really sparked history's most impactful ideas. Each episode, I'll be recruiting the help of experts, scientists, historians, and even a few real-life inventors. Subscribe to patented history of inventions wherever you listen to your podcasts. Was there a strong association with that kind of thing of, it looks like snake skin, so it must be used Yeah, there's a thing known as adoption of signatures. God very kindly gave a clue to what plants could be used for to cure various ailments. We've got the holy thistles here, Mary's Thistles, there's lots of plants that are pretty smelly and often white flowers associated with Mary. So the milky white markings on the veins there are supposed to remind you of the milk of the Virgin Mary.

And then the tunnel arbour, what's left of it now and fray, because the wood won't rotten. would have been like a long walkway covered with roses, vines, honeysuckles and things, and you would walk down through there in the shade out of the sun, down the nut walk, out to a little tree that's seat over there, which is hollowed out inside, so you can sit out and admire the countryside. Even with that, quite a sensory experience with roses and honeysuckle with the smells, but also about keeping the sun off you and keeping in the shade. And here we've got a few of our little tiny remnants of the flowery,

mead with the coast lips coming up and the pear tree against the wall the pears were very popular for cooking. This area over here with a fountain originally had a trellis fence around as in many of the illustrations all raised beds. Now this whole courtyard originally was cobbled at one point so very little of soils in medieval terms you practically did need a raised bed to give you any depth of soil to grow things. So with various different plants here and And of course, the notorious medieval topery, usually shown in three layers. Whether that represents the Trinity not, it's hard to say, but it's never more than three layers in most of the illustrations. Was there an element with topiary of showing off?

Who could have the nicest? It's all this shape in the pictures. So they're not really doing what the Romans did, where it's carved into people, but animals, buildings, and God knows what. That doesn't really come back again till the Tudor period in England. So it's very simple. And this could be grown in a small flower pot, kept in the house. house and the window or sometimes small ones kept in beds and they were usually shown

with a little frame for which they've been trained but actually that was one I trained originally on the frame the rest of all been done freehand it was just by a tree and keep trimming it the frame gives you something to look at while it's growing ice really more than anything else and then across the back here we have the tithe balm whereas this is a later one and that's where most of the things have been stored over winter and beyond that if you look through those doors you can see another field area which doesn't belong to the manor anymore and that was the con degree for the rabbits and so presumably on a manna like this the lord isn't doing any of the gardeners we've got people to do that for him so you've got gardeners and they're

not paid very much no what do we know about the sorts of tools that they might have used would we recognise gardening tools most of them they don't have digging forks and little chowley things as far as we know but the spade is completely made of wood cut from one plank and edge with metal and although people think these are rather inefficient but actually from experiments to the ones I've made they're quite useful tools and they certainly work the matic is like a giant hoe the big blade and that's really good for digging up roots like brambles and whatever and nettles and things and you can use that for making out trenches for putting leaks and if you want for the high-class leaks actually most of the leaks were just broadsown and you don't worry about the white

bits that's very high status too much work for most people So from here you can see the fairly modern fish pond. These were later, but the original fish ponds are actually down at that bottom bit where you can see those trees on the edge of the field there. And they come off of a stream. They go through the next property. And in the river at the far end of the village is where it goes out to. And we have fad eels in that pond.

We haven't put them there. They've just turned up. Far in the way. Good medieval delicacy eels. And we've got the small coppice over there. We know there was a wooded area belonging to the man in the medieval period. So that represents that. That would have been for your firewood, basket making tools, building materials, whatever you need wood for.

And our small pleasure park is this area at the top, which was hedged in once. And that we've got wild cherries there. There's other pounce there. So on a nice, warm, sunny day, you could go out there and sit amongst the shade of the trees and relax. So before the skyline there, it's... this limit of following hay deer part, which of course belonged to the king. And originally here we were allowed one buck in the dough a year from that part. So really it's quite self-sufficient.

All around us, those fields from there, round the back, behind the church and back down to the river, where the manorial fields system. And nowadays, of course, you can't see anybody out there at all. But, of course, back in medieval times, that would have been a very busy area and people who've been out there working throughout most of the day. Are there any plants that we might see in a modern garden that certainly wouldn't have been in a medieval garden? Certainly from the food point of view, there were no tomatoes and no potatoes.

I quite hope people would sort of got by without them in those days. Of course, they didn't know anything about them, but they have sort of taken over the world rather since then. Things like auvergines were unlikely to be in England and there were dried fruits coming in, and things like perhaps the pomegranate. but they would have only been for the very wealthy and of course a host of modern other plants nowadays which have come from other parts of the world when the

Victorian plant hunters were going around collecting and even the Tradskirts in the 1600s the one thing about medieval gardens there's not much in the spring there's nothing really for the autumn there's no croissants and fuchsies to extend the season so it's a very brief period from really late May through June, middle of July it's going downhill fast and by August there's not really an awful lot left to see. Quite a short-lived century experience to be in medieval. Yeah, so if you're out visiting an early period garden you do need to check when it's going to be at its best. We always used to tell people here, ring up to find out if the roses are out because they'll

be out when you think they will be. There was a vineyard here in the medieval period, probably on that slope because it's the south facing slide and somebody was paying half a pound of pepper a year for it so quite an expensive area of land to rent because half a pound of pepper would not have been cheap might talk about peppercorn rents nowadays but as being nothing but in those days that would have been expensive and there was a vineyard at peterborough cathedral not far away and another one at rockingham castle set out by king john so grapes were certainly being grown in the area Grow your own wine in the garden as well. Yeah, self-sufficiency.

Yeah, proper good life. I think we tend to think of medieval folk being much more in touch with the earth and with the seasons than we are today. Do you think a medieval gardener, I'm probably asking the wrong person asking a gardener today, but do you think a medieval gardener would have been a better gardener than someone today? Well, not necessarily better. I mean, they have the same tools. They've got the same thing. They've got to produce plants.

They were more restricted, certainly, because no way. Of course, we can grow things in glass houses and start things off earlier. And even in the Tudor period, they're using hotbeds to extend in the season both directions. But for most medieval gardeners, you were very much at the mercy of the weather. And there's been years when we had the medieval vegetable patch here, and I sat there thinking, this had been medieval times. We'd have been pretty hungry this coming winter. I mean, famine even up into the Victorian period, was common.

So, yes, it was a very precarious existence for most people. And did you still find plenty of that functional element of a garden in a manor's garden like this? Was it still about growing food, growing herbs for the table? Well, there would have been somewhere. Yes, growing food and plants for other practical purposes. I mean, hemp was being grown quite commonly for fibre rather than getting high on. There would have been practical gardens somewhere, but this one was mostly set out to show the pleasure side,

but also some of the other plants that you would have been using as well. we leave them now throughout the year because we want to see them. We don't do the events like we used to, but there used to be a time where we'd go out and we'd collect dye plants from outside, bring them back and we'd actually get the kids helping us out making dyes. We'd do a cooking demonstration using plants straight out the vegetable garden. Oh, wow. And you've obviously, you've written a book on medieval gardens,

which people can go and find and read and enjoy. If someone wants to go and look at a medieval garden, When is a good time of year? When's a good month to get there? Oh, I'd say probably June. But as I say, always phone them up first to find out how the garden's going. Because some years, the roses are early and other years they're late, and you can't guarantee exactly what things are doing in different parts of the country. But yeah, there are quite a few medieval gardens around.

You can go and visit. So, yes, get out there and have a look. And use Michael's book as a companion to guide you around. Yes. That's wonderful. Thank you so much for your time, Michael. Thank you for showing me around the beautiful Prebendor Manor Gardens. I thoroughly recommend a journey here to anybody who is interested.

And thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Thank you. You can join Dr Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode. Don't forget to also subscribe wherever you get your podcasts from and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you have a moment, please drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts, including Spotify now. It really does help listeners find.

us. If you're enjoying this podcast and looking for a bit more medieval goodness in your life, then subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter. Just follow the links in the show notes below and I'll drop into your inbox every Monday with news and thoughts from the medieval world. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hit.