Negotiating the Landscape. Ellen F. Arnold

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Introduction

      Approaching the Medieval Landscape

      In the middle of a cold, icy medieval winter, the bare trees of the Ardennes would have provided little shelter from biting winds, snow, and freezing rain. But once spring arrived and “it was the time when the hoary ice melts off of the mountains and the west wind loosens up the fetid earth,” the Ardennes were beautiful. On one particular morning in April 716, as a monk named Agilolf walked through the beautiful forest toward his death, “the woods were in leaf, the plants were bright with flowers.”¹

      Changes of the seasons often brought dramatic alterations in the appearance of the mountainous, forested Ardennes. Although at times the woods may have presented a dark visage to strangers, as spring approached they would have been clothed in a range of brilliant new greens, filled with beeches and birches, water-loving alders, and leafy, shady oaks.² As the canopy grew in over the summer, trees would provide shade and shelter for plants, people, and animals. Glades and clearings were sprinkled throughout the shady, cool woods, and they would have been bright and open places, their grasses and flowers welcoming people and animals. Then the fall would usher in a new range of colors, fruits, and nuts. Tangles of brush and trees would have grown up in the places where woods and glades met, creating a varied, interesting, and complex ecosystem.

      Agilolf was СКАЧАТЬ