Practical Georgics: Managing the Land in Medieval Britain

Abstract

This dissertation shows how the management of the land is both a material precondition for and an obsession of medieval British reading and writing. In medieval Britain, the people who read and wrote were the people with power over land, and ecological management was a major imaginative project of these text-producing elites. The years between 1000 and 1400 saw major changes and crises—including the climatic transition from the medieval warm period to the little ice age—and each century saw different literary efforts to sustain the fiction that the land’s productivity as well as its social meanings were constant and manageable. Land management is an imaginative, affective, and literary activity as well as a social, ecological, and material one, and the history of who manages the land and how is the history of who reads, who writes, and how. Texts from Domesday Book to husbandry manuals to Piers Plowman not only engage with the social meanings of physical environments; they demonstrate how power over the land intersects with power over language. Written across four centuries and in Latin, Old English, Middle English, Anglo-Norman French, and Middle Welsh, these texts are all invested in managing their environments. Each chapter is a case study of a different genre of land management text: Domesday Book, estate management treatises and guides for managers, language pedagogy texts, romance, and Piers Plowman. In addition to these fundamentally elite, literate forms, the final chapter explores a reading event in the fourteenth century during which over forty groups of servile peasants, whose relationships to land and to texts were always mediated through the aristocracy, took possession of and read extracts of Domesday Book that described the land they lived on and worked but could not own.