This earthly paradise corresponds with that encountered by the travellers in Boccaccio’s Decameron in the gardens of the Villa Palmieri near Florence – ‘a meadow plot of green grass, powdered with a thousand flowers, set round with orange and cedar trees’.
The historian is properly grateful for these fragments. But, in the absence of any surviving medieval English garden, any detailed description of one, or any comprehensive work of instruction from which to make sound deductions, it is tempting to make much – perhaps too much – of the inherently unreliable evidence presented by poets and painters. This is not to suggest that Chaucer and lesser mortals were engaged in deliberate deceit. But, in general, the purpose of art and literature was not to record the world as it was, but to present a brighter, more beautiful, divinely inspired vision; the world as it might be if God’s creatures abandoned their vicious ways and lived according to his Word (the Canterbury Tales being, in part, the glorious exception).
It is difficult to believe that anyone who read the most popular European poem of the 14th century, Guillaume de Lorus’s Roman de la Rose, can have related the interminable amorous gyrations of its courtly hero to anything happening in their own lives. This was the century of the Black Death, the Peasants’ Revolt, the Hundred Years’ War. Life was assaulted by the prospect of death by violence or putrefying disease, privation, starvation or social upheaval; and it was understandable that the artistic consciousness should have preferred to dwell in a clean, sweet-smelling, idealized kingdom of the imagination.
This is the setting for the Roman de la Rose, which Chaucer translated from the French. Here, freed from any obligation to engage with life, the courtier could devote himself to the intricacies of love-making, his delicate footsteps directed by the bloodless conventions of courtly love. He progresses, at the speed of a snail, towards his fulfilment, enacted in the centre of a garden in the form of a perfect square, with a fountain at the intersection of its diagonals. The sky is blue, the air warm, the cheeks of the participants untouched by mark of pox, their clothes neat and clean, the birds a-twitter, the trees in blossom, the grass lush and spangled with violets and periwinkles and flowers red and yellow – ‘such plenty there grew never in mead’, Chaucer writes. In the 15th-century illustrations of the poem in the British Museum, we see the courtly company loose in this Eden, prancing around to the strains of harp, oboe and fife-and-drums, beneath their feet a soft carpet of vegetation, their milk-white faces shaded by luxuriant trees.
It is a world of complete make-believe, purged of ugliness. We meet it in Stefan Lockner’s Madonna in the Rose Arbour, in which the grass is studded with daisies, violets, red clover and strawberries; in the Hennesy Book of Hours, where the saints Cosmos and Damian are seated on a turf bench in the middle of a lawn bright with daisies and camomile; in a fresco of Pinturicchio showing Susannah and the Elders against a background of turf and flowers; in the tapestry known as the Lady with the Unicorn, where the lady receives a jewelled necklace from her maid, standing in a flowery mead.
I encountered it on my honeymoon, in the chapel built in Granada to contain the remains of the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. It was a Flemish painting of the early 15th century, displaying a fine palace, a garden in which squares of grass are divided by gravel paths, a low wall with peacocks on it, a couple reading under a tree, a knot with spindly trees, a lake with a swan and sloping lawns leading down to it, the grass shorn rather than shaggy.
So medieval man, or our time parachutist, would have found lawns in the imaginary world of poetry, painting and tapestry; and might have encountered a version of the real thing within the great ecclesiastical institutions, and adorning royal pleasure grounds. But to believe a stroll around the countryside would have brought him, sooner or later, to a well-ordered garden containing cultivated grass is probably fanciful. Miles Hadfield, in his History of British Gardening, asserts that gardening as an aesthetic pursuit did not exist in England before the end of the 15th century. He dismisses attempts to cite the walled and trellised gardens of the Roman de la Rose illustrations, arguing that the presence of such exotics as dates, liquorice and zedoary reflects a purely Continental tradition. Energetic medievalists necessarily disagree, maintaining that, with the development of international commerce, Continental influences must have achieved a degree of penetration; and that, anyway, the division between serviceable and aesthetic is false.
To put this argument simplistically, medieval man would have grown his apples and pears to eat or sell them, his leeks and garlic to make soup, his thyme and hyssop and sage to flavour his food and treat his ailments, his vines to make wine. And in the planting and the growing and the harvesting, he would have taken a spiritual pleasure; smiled at the blossom, breathed in the fragrance, felt the fatness of grapes in his hand; and, consciously or unconsciously, he would have found that there was a correlation between the arrangement of his garden and the degree of his pleasure.
It is a truism to observe that the period between the Norman Conquest and the victory of Henry VII on Bosworth Field gave birth to the nation, and hazardous to offer generalizations about national psychology. On the other hand, an attempt has to be made to explain how the aspiration to create order and beauty achieved physical expression. Norman rule freed England from what had been the constant threat of invasion. But it took time for the effects of this liberation to percolate the collective consciousness. The ruling class continued to organize their demesnes on the first principle that they must be resistant to attack. Any garden ordered by the lord for his gratification had, therefore, to be contained within fortified walls. But as time went on, and notions of permanence and stability of a sorts took hold, so was born a new confidence; and, for the first time, the lord considered the possibility of enclosing his lordly dwelling within its grounds, rather than the other way round. Freed at last from the psychic claustrophobia imposed by fear of chaos, the human spirit might take wing and, recalling Eden, create a garden.
With confidence came a mighty economic growth, which the depredations of the wars with France, the astounding population cull of the Black Death, and assorted social upheavals, merely slowed, never halted. Although the great mass of the population remained mired in the unending struggle for survival, significant numbers, inspired by the possibility of self-advancement, rose like bubbles in a dark pond to take their places among the élite. Trade with Continental Europe, particularly in wool and woven cloth, soared. Huge fortunes were made, and required managing and spending. Great men had leisure, as they always had. But now they had more idea what to do with it, though hunting, hawking and playing war games remained their chief outlets.
With wealth came a loosening of the ropes which bound people to their protectors and the places where they were born. No longer did they feel so inclined to share their living quarters with their livestock and toil on soil which was not theirs, for the benefit of remote, grasping landlords. Nor were they edified by the spectacle of privileged prelates and the vast army of lesser clergy feasting on the proceeds of their tithes. As the abbots and bishops and friars exchanged devotion to their vows for ever softer living, so did the reputation of their Church decline. In the great religious houses, even the humble gardinarius would have his servant, and perhaps a dovecote to cluck over, and a dog to take scraps. They were no longer sanctuaries from barbarism, but places of frequently ostentatious luxury, the maintenance of which required endless cadging and knavish tricks.
The new-found social fluidity engendered a spiritual flowering. No longer apprehensive about what the next day might bring, nor owing obeisance to a feudal lord or vainglorious bishop, educated Tudor man looked around him. Settled in his fine house, his lands secure, with cash to spare, he wanted more from life than merely its continuation. Staring from his gabled windows out over his acres, his curiosity stirred. It was time for the first gardening book in English.
These even and uniform carpets of green velvet, seen through their countryside, which other nations have not been able to obtain for themselves, make an admirable sight. People tried vainly to imitate them in France … the lawns that grow in France are not fine