an office worker from Slough had left his home one morning, walked a little way along the road and fallen through an unusual kind of hole into the 14th century. Whether he was lost for ever, or managed to find a way to reascend into our own age, I cannot now recall.
Were I to suffer a similar fate, and had I the choice among the variety of occupations open to men of the Middle Ages, I think I could do worse than be gardinarius in a Benedictine monastery. Brother Thomas I would be, a person of middling status in the monastic hierarchy, unregarded beside the abbot, the prior, the bursar, the precentor and the other major obedientiaries. Doubtless the monks of the scriptorium, with their noses buried in bibles and psalters, would look down on me, with my rough, weathered hands and attendant odour of fish; although they would be grateful enough when executing their illuminations for the dyes derived from the berries and flowers grown under my direction.
Mine would be largely an outdoor life, and a most useful one. I would tend and jealously guard the monastery fishponds, watching over the carp, bream and pike, fattening them up with choice morsels until the feast day came and they were dispatched to the table to provide welcome relief from starch. I would, if there were a river, have an eel fishery; and trap them of a dark night in autumn when the migrating urge is on them, for no flesh of freshwater fish is richer or more tasty. I would have charge of the orchards, prune the apple and pear trees, tend to them at blossom time, gather in the fruit. I would know the way of bees and when to harvest their honey. I would know something of herbs and their ways, although their cultivation and medicinal use would probably be the responsibility of a specialist infirmarius. The sight of my vines would gladden my heart, and the thought of the wine they would provide would warm my spirit through the long hours of devotion and contemplation which the discipline demanded.
The physical well-being of the monastery would depend, in great measure, on me; and productivity and usefulness would surely be my guiding principles. But there would be more to it than that.
The theory of monastic life came from Saint Benedict: ‘None follows the will of his own heart.’ The practice meant a sufficiency of nourishment to sustain life, and little more; ample daily doses of organized communal devotion; a lot of hard work; and, during what was left from a monk’s waking hours, peace, quiet, and a setting conducive to the meditative working of the mind. And they knew, those clever monks, how much more likely the human mind was to turn to the profitable pondering of God’s mysteries if stimulated by God’s work at its most evidently pleasing. Enfolded in the harmony of nature, soothed and delighted by the song of the birds and the rustle of the leaves, caressed by the scents of the flowers and herbs, open to all the associations of the paradise garden, the inner being could soar.
The famous Benedictine monastery blueprint found at St Gall in Switzerland, dating from the 9th century, confirms that the meditative heart of the monastery was the cloister garden, or garth. It was enclosed by one wall of the church, and by the communal buildings, the refectory and the monks’ cells. The church was for observing the liturgy, while the open space of the garden was supposed to encourage the brothers’ souls in private prayer and spiritual wrestling, to raise their vision from this world and its imperfections to the light made available in the Gospels of Christ.
Its ability to promote this influence was, in part, derived from its dominant colour. From the earliest times, green had symbolized rebirth, resurrection, fertility, happiness both temporal and spiritual. Brides in ancient Palestine wore green. The green of the Prophet Mohammed’s cloak and of the banner beneath which he and his followers marched was the green of hope. But it is also the colour of tranquillity and refreshment. Long before modern science was able to establish that it is, indeed, the colour most restful to the eye because of the exactness with which it is focussed on the retina, the phenomenon had been accepted. In the 18th century Addison wrote: ‘The rays that produce in us the idea of green fall upon the eye in such due proportion that they give the animal spirits their proper play.’ A little later, the philosopher David Hartley defined the connection in his Observations on Man: ‘The middle colour of the seven primary ones, and consequently most agreeable to the organ of sight, is also the general colour of the vegetable kingdom.’
The power of the colour was acknowledged by the chroniclers. In the records of the great monastery at Clairvaux, the sick man is seated upon a green lawn (‘sedet aegrotus cespite in viridi’), and ‘for the comfort of his pain all kinds of grass are fragrant in his nostrils … the lovely green of herb and tree nourishes his eyes’. The theme is taken up by Hugh of Fouilloy, who observes how ‘the green turf … refreshes encloistered eyes, and their desire to study returns. It is truly the nature of the colour green that it nourishes the eyes and preserves their vision.’
On this basis – accepting that every visible trace of every medieval monastic garden was long ago expunged, and that no medievalist can know for sure what the physical reality of the monastic garden was – it is a reasonable assumption that it would have contained turf. Grass would have appeared of its own accord; and having done so, would have been approved as a generous, reliable supplier of the beneficence of green. These little patches, around which the cowled brothers shuffled murmuring from the Scriptures, or sat, eyes fixed upon the firmament, were the first lawns.
There is some evidence – a nod here and there among the old books and illustrations – to suggest that cultivated grass was a feature of the handful of pleasure gardens created outside the great ecclesiastical institutions. Henry II’s garden at Clarendon in Wiltshire was said to boast ‘a wealth of lawns’. Under Henry III, turf was laid at the Palace of Westminster, and a herbarium ordered by him at Windsor Castle may well have contained a lawn. A drawing of 1280, now in the British Museum, shows a game of bowls being played on what could be a rudimentarily levelled expanse of grass. A few years earlier, there is a record of a squire of Eleanor of Castile being paid threepence a night to water the turves at Conway Castle.
The date 1260 is honoured among historians who have sought to reassemble the long-buried elements of the medieval garden. In that year a Swabian nobleman turned Dominican friar, Albertus Magnus, Count of Bollstadt, produced the first gardening book, De Vegetabilis. And included in its wisdom – for which the name of Albertus Magnus should be blessed – are instructions for creating a lawn. The noble count counsels that the ground be cleared of weeds, flooded with boiling water and laid with turves which should be beaten down with ‘broad mallets and trodden’; then the grass ‘may spring forth and closely cover the surface like a green cloth’. Those who have explored these recondite places more thoroughly than me – chiefly the late John Harvey, to whose work I am glad to pay tribute – believe that a similar species of pleasure garden, ‘merry with green trees and herbs’, was described a few years earlier by the encyclopaedist Bartholomew De Glanville, much of whose work was subsequently lost.
The digger in the past is mightily cheered by these nuggets. From them, it is clear that a primitive technique for nurturing grass did exist by the early 13th century. Someone had done it, others had copied him, adapting the methods, until a form of knowledge had coalesced to become sufficiently general for an educated man with a self-appointed mission to record the current condition of learning to include it. They are hardly more than names, Albertus and Bartholomew. But the fact that they wrote in Latin made their books as comprehensible in a monastery in East Anglia as in Dalmatia, Swabia or Rome. It is a pleasing fancy that, within the cloisters of Ely or Canterbury, some literate monk, emerging from a session of laborious copying in the scriptorium, might have encountered Brother Thomas the gardinarius (not much of a one for books, as you might gather from his earth-encrusted fingers and communion with carp), and passed on a couple of tips from the Swabian count on how to improve the scruffy condition of the grass in the cloister garth.
Although it is convenient and gratifying to refer to these assorted patches of green as lawns, it is anachronistic and a touch misleading. The Latin word used by Bartholomew is pratum, which is translated in English as ‘mead’, from the Old English medwe. The word ‘lawn’ is
