Above, from left to right: Detail from The Annunciation (17.190.7); Detail from The Unicorn in Captivity (37.80.6); Trie Cloister Garden in bloom.

…fruit trees that grow easily, such as cherries and apples, should be planted in place of walls; or, what is better, willows or elms or birch trees should be planted there, and their growth should be controlled for several years, both by grafting and by stakes, poles, and ties, so that walls and a roof might be formed from them.

—Book III: “On the Gardens of Kings and other Illustrious Lords.” Piero de’ Crescenzi, Liber ruralium commodorum (1305-09). (See Catena, the Bard Graduate Center’s Digital Archive of Historic Gardens and Landscapes for more information.)

In my undergraduate studies in landscape and architecture, I examined how the natural landscape is used to determine designs for parks, gardens, and public spaces. I took part in several design processes, which included research on site analysis, interviewing potential patrons of public spaces, building models of future designs, and using plants to blend artistic design with nature. I learned to look at the land as a palimpsest rather than a blank slate, and to examine its many layers of use throughout history, understanding that context is an important influence on new designs. Now, as the new assistant horticulturist here at The Cloisters, I’ve found more levels of meaning to my studies, and am inspired to think about design issues from a landscape historian’s perspective.

Today, parks are most often public spaces dedicated to recreational use such as playgrounds, sports fields, or walking trails. In the Middle Ages, on the other hand, parks were generally private areas signifying high social status. They were often used as hunting grounds, or as areas for deer management, animal grazing, woodland management, and timber production.

While medieval parks contained areas for pasture, the majority of the land was dedicated to the recreational activity of hunting, especially for deer. Although medieval parks were put to practical use, they also played a complex social role, and research about royal palaces in the medieval ages indicates that they were carefully designed for aesthetic purposes as well. English kings arranged their estates in such a way that their living places were almost completely surrounded by parks. Attention was given to the placement of the park lodges within the visual approach to the main royal buildings. There were also smaller parks that contributed aesthetically to the spatial relationship between buildings on the property. In the above detail from The Annunciation, we see a common convention: an enclosed garden with a doorway leading into a rolling landscape, perhaps a park. Plants were used not only ornamentally, but also as design features within the gardens, a trend that we still see in landscape architecture today.

A specific example of a hunting park can be seen in The Cloisters’ treasured series of Unicorn Tapestries. The presence of the palace in the backgrounds of the third, fourth, and sixth tapestries tells us that the enclosure was aristocratic, but the plants also provide a wealth of information. They’re are all shown in their true habitats, with the correct type of trees located in the forest and the moisture-loving plants near the water’s edge. Even though the plants are all displayed in their most attractive stage, regardless of the season, their specific inclusion and placement are part of the symbolism in the tapestries’ story.

The pomegranate tree (Punica granatum), featured in several of the tapestries, symbolized the chastity of the Virgin Mary, the union of faith, and peace. The fruit’s red juice represented Christ’s blood, and redemption in a paradise garden. In the seventh tapestry, The Unicorn in Captivity (shown above), the unicorn is enclosed by a fence and chained to a pomegranate tree, signifying the tree’s direct connection to the story’s meaning. (The lush planting of Trie Cloister Garden, shown above, evokes the landscape of medieval millefleurs tapestries like this one.)

As we see in this example, plants were more than just a pleasant physical backdrop in the Middle Ages; they had important symbolic meanings. Landscape was treated as more than just a place to inhabit physically. It was used to create ambience, emotion, and symbolism within a specific setting, or, in this case, work of art.

—Corey Eilhardt

Sources:

Cavallo, Adolfo. The Unicorn Tapestries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1998.

Freeman, Margaret B. The Unicorn Tapestries. New York: E. P. Dutton, Inc., 1956.

Harvey, John. Mediaeval Gardens. Beaverton, OR: Timber Press, 1981.

Liddiard, Robert, ed. The Medieval Park: New Perspectives. London: Windgather Press, 2007.

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Above, from left to right: common myrtle is grown in pots at The Cloisters and brought indoors before frost; detail of the ivory-white blossoms of Myrtus communis; detail of the blue-black fruits of the common myrtle.

In myrtle shades oft sings the happy swain,
In myrtle shades despairing ghost complain.
The myrtle crowns the happy lovers’ heads,
Th’ unhappy lovers’ graves the myrtle spreads.

—Verses Written at The Request of a Gentleman to whom a Lady had Given a Sprig of Myrtle, by Samuel Johnson

This eighteenth-century verse is a deft summation of many centuries of the myrtle’s association with love, lovers, and the goddess of love. Although many plants and flowers were dedicated to Venus in antiquity, the myrtle was the most sacred. Myrtus communis grew near the sea, from whose foam the goddess was born, and according to Ovid (Fasti, 4. 141–43) Venus used the myrtle to screen her nakedness when she rose from the waves. A temple to Venus Murtea in Rome was still surrounded by a sacred grove of myrtle in the first century B.C.

A plant of immortality, myrtle was an emblem of love and desire; poets, especially love poets, were crowned with it, and doorposts were wreathed with myrtle in nuptial celebrations. All these connotations were preserved and embellished in medieval and Renaissance poems and allegories of love, but the myrtle was also conceived as a plant sacred to the Virgin, and was worn by virgin brides. In biblical tradition, the myrtle was a plant of peace and joy, prized by the Hebrews, and was used to shade the booths at the first Feast of Tabernacles, or Sukkot, in 445 B.C. Because of a similarity between the Hebrew word for myrtle and Hadassah, the original name of the heroine Esther, the plant was equated with the queen who saved her people.

According to the ancient Greek geographer Pausanias, the tiny “perforations” visible on the leaves were made by the unhappy Phaedra, who pricked them with a hairpin in revulsion at her own lawless passion for her stepson Hippolytus; she later hanged herself near a myrtle tree. These perforations are actually the vessels for the aromatic oil in the leaf.

Myrtle was greatly valued for this oil, which was included in many perfumes and unguents and is still important in perfumery today. The distilled water made from myrtle leaves is known as eau d’ anges, or “water of angels”.

In its native habitat, the warmth of the sun is enough to bring out the scent of the leaves, but here at The Cloisters they only yield their delightful fragrance when crushed. (We are in possession of a small, electrified copper alembic, but I haven’t experimented with it yet. Myrtle, which we have in abundance, would be a very good choice for our first distillation.)

The Roman natural historian Pliny says that eleven different sorts of myrtle—a very variable plant—were cultivated in the first century, and variant forms were known and grown in the Renaissance. Dr. Arthur Tucker, an authority on aromatic herbs, and the herb grower Tom DeBaggio, describe twelve forms of this tender shrub in their comprehensive reference on herbs used for flavor and fragrance, The Big Book of Herbs (2000).

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:

Anderson, Frank J., ed. “Herbals through 1500,” The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 90. New York: Abaris, 1984.

Coats, Alice M. Garden. Shrubs and Their Histories. 1964. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992 (reprint with additional notes by Dr. John L. Creech).

Davidson, Alan. The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Levi D’Ancona, Mirella. The Garden of the Renaissance: Botanical Symbolism in Italian Painting. Firenze: L. S. Olschki, 1977.

Moldenke, Harold N. and Alma L. Moldenke. Plants of the Bible. Waltham, MA: 1952. Reprinted. New York: Dover Publications, 1986.

Tucker, Arthur O. and Thomas DeBaggio. The Big Book of Herbs: A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference to Herbs of Flavor and Fragrance. Loveland, CO: Interweave Press, 2000.

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Above, from left: Butcher’s broom growing in a pot indoors in Cuxa Cloister; detail of the stiff, sharp “leaves,” which are actually modified stems; detail from the tapestry The Hunters Enter the Woods showing Butcher’s broom.

An odd-looking little shrub, Butcher’s broom (Ruscus aculeatus), which reaches a height between one and a half and two feet for us here at The Cloisters, was also known as knee-holly, because of its short stature and prickly nature. (Another old name is “pettygree” or “pettygrew.”) Usually included in the very large lily family, butcher’s broom is a botanical curiosity as well as a household and medicinal plant with a long history of use.

According to the Royal Horticultural Society’s Index of Garden Plants, R. aculeatus ranges from the Mediterranean and the Black Sea north to Great Britain. The sixteenth-century herbalist William Turner reported that knee-holly grew wild in the hedgerows of Kent, although it bore no fruit as it did in Italy.  Turner’s younger contemporary and fellow observer John Gerard (1545–1611/12) discovered it growing on Hampstead Heath near London.

In Garden Shrubs and Their Histories (1964), Alice Coats remarks that butcher’s broom is “very tender” and is rarely cultivated north of Louisiana, although the RHS lists it as Zone 7. (Grieve considers it “very hardy” and remarks that it will spread into large clumps if planted under deciduous trees; hence it was often planted as an evergreen groundcover in shrubberies or woodland margins in England.) Here at The Cloisters, butcher’s broom is grown in pots for display, and removed to shelter before frost. It has survived being overwintered in the ground here in the past, but the “foliage” does suffer damage. The new shoots, a much paler green than the older ones, emerge in the spring. These have been eaten like asparagus (see Asparagaceae), to which butcher’s broom is botanically related; Tony Hunt lists “spargus” or “speragus” among the medieval English names for Ruscus. (According to most ancient and modern commentators, these shoots are somewhat tough and bitter. I haven’t yet tried them myself.)

The medicinal virtues of the plant derived from the De Materia Medica of Dioscorides: Ruscus aculeatus was identified with the Mursine agria described in Book IV, 146, and recommended as a diuretic and a breaker of stones in the bladder, as well as a treatment for headache. Either the leaves and berries drunk in wine or a decoction of the root provided the same benefits. According to the fifteenth-century Hortus Sanitatis, the juice was held in the mouth to cure sores, and was  given for stomach pain and excess bile. It also stopped the spitting of blood and cleared sore eyes. The powdered root was used to cleanse wounds. The medieval reputation of the root as a diuretic was upheld by John Parkinson in the seventeenth century, who counted it—along with parsley, fennel, celery, and true asparagus—among the five “opening” or diuretic roots known to apothecaries.

(Several other species of Ruscus are included in the De Materia Medica, including R. hypophyllum or Chamaidaphne, Book IV, 132. Dioscorides recommends the leaves of this species, “beaten small and smeared on” for headache. It eased a griping stomach if drunk with wine, and, like R. aculeatus, was diuretic in action. The Ruscus shown in a manuscript of the herbal of Apuleius c. 1400 (see image) may represent either species.

A page from the mid-fourteenth-century manuscript herbal Secreta Salernitana (see image), now in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence, shows the medicinal Ruscus aculeatus in the upper left-hand corner of the folio; a woman to the left of the plant holds a broom made from the branches of the shrub. The name is said to derive from its use by butchers to scour their blocks and stalls. (The Scottish botanist John Claudius Loudon reported that little brushes of butcher’s broom were used to scrub kitchen utensils in nineteenth-century Brittany.) The plant was also used to deter mice from gnawing raw meat awaiting sale or consumption, since the prickly stems formed an impenetrable hedge around the flesh. The berried stems have been used as a garnish and as a Christmas green. (Although the berries ripen in September, they are carried on the stems all winter.) In the eighteenth century, young plants were dug up and sold to be potted up in sand as a winter decoration indoors.

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:

Alexander, E. J., and Carol H. Woodward. The Flora of The Unicorn Tapestries. Second edition. New York: The New York Botanical Garden, 1947.

Anderson, Frank J., ed. “Herbals through 1500,” The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 90. New York: Abaris, 1984.

Coats, Alice M. Garden Shrubs and Their Histories. 1964. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992 (reprint with additional notes by Dr. John L. Creech).

Grieve, Maude. A Modern Herbal. 1931. Reprint: New York: Dover Publications, 1971.

Grigson, Geoffrey. The Englishman’s Flora. 1955. Reprint: London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1987.

Gunther, Robert T., ed. The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides Translated by John Goodyer 1655. 1934. Reprint. New York: Hafner Publishing, 1968.

Hunt, Tony. Plant Names of Medieval England.  Cambridge: Wolfeboro, NH:  D.S. Brewer, 1989.

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Above, from left to right: Detail of the January calendar page from The Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux, ca. 1324–28; detail of the activity for the month of January from The Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry, 1405–1408/1409; Ewer with Wild Man Finial (detail), late 15th century, German, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Cloisters Collection, 1953 (53.20.2).

In the Middle Ages, the  Christian liturgical year, and not the old Roman calendar, determined the date on which the new year began. The date used differed depending on the period and locale, and coincided with either the Nativity on December 25 or the Annunciation on March 25. However, throughout the Middle Ages, the ancient Roman tradition of January festivities in celebration of the New Year continued unabated. Banquets and gifts were given, and folk rites intended to ensure good fortune and plenty and to stave off disaster and want were performed. The Church discouraged such practices, but found the celebration of the New Year more difficult to suppress than any other calendar tradition inherited from pagan antiquity.

Feasting is the typical activity for the first month in medieval calendar scenes. The two examples above, from books of hours in the Museum’s collection, allude to classical tradition. (See also the New Year’s feast depicted on the January page of the Très Riches Heures, which shows the Duke on the right, richly robed in blue, celebrating the day on which gifts were exchanged with his household. This is the most elaborate New Year’s feast in the medieval calendar tradition. The large golden vessel in the form of a ship on the far right of the food-laden table is a saltcellar.)

The Limbourg brothers, who painted both the Très Riches Heures (now in the collection of the Musée Condé, Chantilly, France), and the Belles Heures, in The Cloisters Collection, for the Duke, participated in these festivities and presented their patron with a work of art on the occasion of the New Year.

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:

Boehm, Barbara Drake, Abigail Quandt and William Wixom. The Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000.

Chambers, E. K. The Medieval Stage. Oxford: 1925.

Henisch, Ann Bridget. The Medieval Calendar Year. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.

Husband, Timothy B. The Art of Illumination. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008.

Longnon, Jean, and Raymond Cazelles. The Très Riches Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry. Preface by Millard Meiss. New York: George Braziller, 1969.

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Above, from left to right: Detail from a fifteenth-century panel of The Nativity that shows the Emperor Augustus censing an apparition of the Virgin and Child; cover of a gilded copper censer in The Cloisters Collection (1979.285); Detail from Panel with Censing Angels, on display in the Treasury at The Cloisters.

The ceremonial use of incense in devotions and rites of purification  is common to many religious traditions  and dates back to antiquity. (The incense trade was of great economic importance.)  While some animal substances such as ambergris and musk are used, most incenses are of botanical origin. A number of species and plant parts have been exploited for their aromatic properties, including roots like vetiver and galangal; woods and barks like cedar, cassia, and juniper; leaves like sage and patchouli; seeds and fruits like coriander and nutmeg, and buds and flowers like clove and saffron.  In the Judeo-Christian tradition, aromatic resins like frankincense, myrrh, and bdellium, or false myrrh, are the most important constituents. All three of these fragrant resins are derived from plants in the botanical family Burseraceae. The incenses used in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches today include myrrh, frankincense, and other aromatics. The perfumed smoke that rises from the censer is interpreted as a symbol of the prayers of the faithful rising to heaven.

The term “bdellium” has been applied to the aromatic substance of as many as four species of Commiphora. True myrrh, C. myrrha or abyssinica, was a component of the Holy Oil of Jewish ritual. According to the Gospel of Matthew, the three Magi presented the infant Jesus with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. In the Gospel of John, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus brought many pounds of myrrh and aloes to the tomb of Jesus to prepare his body for burial.

The ancient Egyptians used myrrh to embalm the dead and as a burnt offering in temples. The Greeks and Romans also used it as an incense. According to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Myrrha, the daughter of the king of Cyprus and the mother of Adonis, was banished from Cyprus and fled to Arabia Felix, where the gods transformed her into a myrrh tree. The god Adonis was born from “her” trunk.

The only incense plant now grown here at The Cloisters is Commiphora africana, native to northwestern Africa and Arabia. Known as false myrrh, or bdellium, it belongs to the same genus as the true myrrh, Commiphora myrrha. We once had two specimens of C. africana, but have been reduced to one, which is now a shrubby plant about a foot and a half tall and two and a half feet wide. The native habitat of bdellium is dry savanna or rocky soil with a minimum of rainfall. It is grown in a pot and placed out on a sunny parapet in Bonnefont Cloister in the shelter of the arcade to help protect it from summer rain. In fall, the plant defoliates and the thorny branches remain bare until early spring. It is removed to a greenhouse and kept dry until it breaks dormancy in March. As with other incense plants in this family, the resinous gum is exuded when the bark is incised, and the “tears” are then collected. As our specimen is so precious, we’ve never experimented with this technique, lest we weaken or injure the plant.  The resin produced in our climate would probably not be of good quality.

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:

Anderson, Frank J, ed. “Herbals through 1500,” The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 90. New York: Abaris, 1984.

Moldenke, Harold N. and Alma L. Moldenke. Plants of the Bible. Waltham, MA: 1952. Reprinted. New York: Dover Publications, 1986.

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Above, from left to right: Boxwood shrub growing in Bonnefont Garden; fresh boxwood installed on the Main Hall arches for the holidays; detail view of a minutely carved boxwood rosary bead in The Cloisters collection. See the Collection Database to learn more about this work of art.

Boxwood (Buxus sempervirens) is most familiar to us as a foundation planting, or as a low edging for garden beds, a practice that became common in the sixteenth century and continues today. Boxwood has also been a popular subject for topiary work since Roman times. There are many varieties of box, including dwarf forms and forms with variegated foliage. (For more about B. sempervirens and other ornamental species, visit the website of The American Boxwood Society.)

The arborescent form of boxwood is a slender, arching, slow-growing tree. Mature specimens range in height from twelve to twenty-five feet, although rarely exceeding twenty. The trunk reaches a diameter of about six inches. The evergreen boughs were used both as a Christmas green in the Middle Ages and, in northern Europe, as a substitute for palm on Palm Sunday. According to Mirella D’Ancona Levi, boxwood, like yew, was a funereal plant in antiquity; it was also sacred to Venus. In the Middle Ages, it came to be associated with the Virgin. The foliage is notoriously pungent, and many people find it malodorous, although some enjoy the smell. The leaves are bitter and astringent. Boxwood was not used in ancient or medieval medicine, although it did come to be used as a purgative and a vermifuge (a plant that expels and kills internal parasites) in subsequent centuries.

The light-colored wood is very hard, close-grained, and fine-textured, allowing the carver to do very delicate work. Boxwood was valued for practical as well as artistic purposes, and was employed for rolling pins, mallet heads, pestles, weaver’s shuttles, combs, chess pieces, and musical instruments. It was and is especially valued for wood engraving and printer’s blocks. According to the sixteenth-century herbalist John Gerard, the root is yellower, harder, and more beautiful than the timber, and was preferred for making boxes, dagger hafts, and the like. The wood of the root was known as “dudgeon.”

More on medieval plants and gardens to come in the New Year . . .

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:

Grieve, Maude. A Modern Herbal. 1931. Reprint: New York: Dover Publications, 1971.

Grigson, Geoffrey. The Englishman’s Flora. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1955.

Levi D’Ancona, Mirella. The Garden of the Renaissance: Botanical Symbolism in Italian Painting. Firenze: L. S. Olschki, 1977.

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Above, from left to right: A large yew tree (Taxus baccata) growing near the portcullis on the lower drive of The Cloisters; a detail of the yew in fruit in mid-November. The gelatinous red flesh surrounding the seeds is as sweet as it looks, and is innocuous, but the seed itself is very toxic, as are the leaves.

There is here above the brotherhood
A bright tall glossy yew;
The melodious bell sends out a keen clear note
In St. Columba’s church.

—Fragment of an Irish poem, ca. 800–1000

A famously long-lived tree of ancient significance, the yew (Taxus baccata) has borne both positive and negative connotations. As Geoffrey Grigson notes, yew was beneficent in its character as a protective tree, to be grown in dooryards and churchyards (perhaps because of the red fruit, often a sign of apotropaic power); it was a tree of life, both as an evergreen and because of the great age and stature it could attain. However, yew also had more somber and funereal associations because of its poisonous nature.

In Greco-Roman antiquity, the yew was sacred to the Furies and was a plant of ritual purification; according to both the Roman natural historian Pliny and the poet Ovid, yew was a tree of hell and grew near the entrance to the underworld. Yew was planted on tombs and was associated, like the cypress, with death. It was also a sacred tree of the Celts, planted anciently in the British Isles, where many famous specimens, like the Fortingall Yew, remain.

Christian commentators associated the poisonous fruit with sin and death, but despite this link, yew was used as a Christmas green in Europe. (Like the boxwood that will be the subject of next week’s post, the yew was used not only at Christmas but also on Palm Sunday as a substitute for the exotic palm, which would only have been available in southern Europe.) The Renaissance painter Girolamo dai Libri juxtaposes a yew tree, as a symbol of the Tree of Death, with a pomegranate in flower, signifying the Tree of Life in his Presepe dei Conigli, or Nativity with Rabbits. (An image of this work is available on the website for the Dioceses of Verona, Italy.) Dai Libri also contrasts the Tree of Life and the Tree of Death in the Met’s Madonna and Child with Saints. In this work the Tree of Life is a magnificent bay laurel; the Tree of Death is unidentifiable.

Yew was a useful as well as a symbolic tree. Both its hardness (a post made of yew was said to outlast one made of iron) and its flexibility were exploited in weaponry: Beowulf’s shield was made of yew, and yew was also the wood of choice for the medieval longbow.

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:

Grigson, Geoffrey. The Englishman’s Flora. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1955.

Levi D’Ancona, Mirella. The Garden of the Renaissance: Botanical Symbolism in Italian Painting.  Firenze: L. S. Olschki, 1977.

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Above, from left to right: Calendar page for December from the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry, 1405–1408/1409. Pol, Jean, and Herman de Limbourg (Franco-Netherlandish, active in France, by 1399–1416). French; Made in Paris. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Cloisters Collection, 1954 (54.1.1); detail of the activity for the month; detail of the zodiacal symbol Capricorn. See the Collection Database to learn more about this work of art.

A boar, wild or domesticated, is an uncastrated adult male pig. Swine were domesticated earlier than any animal other than the dog, and all domesticated hogs descend from a single wild species, Sus scrofa, although numerous subspecies are recognized and many breeds have been developed.

As befits an animal that has lived in such close conjunction with humans for so many centuries, pigs have acquired much religious and symbolic significance, both positive and negative, while cleaning up around the dooryard and greasing chins. (See “Pigs in Religion and Folklore” on Professor Joshua Bamfield’s website.) Many medieval calendar images for this month depict either the slaughter of the domestic boar or the hunting and killing of a wild one. (See the December page of the Très Riches Heures.) Bridget Henisch observes that the death of the boar in December is the only death portrayed in the medieval calendar tradition.

Unlike sheep and cattle, domesticated swine were not kept over the winter, but were slaughtered to provide food for the cold season. Peasants are often shown either dispatching a hog with an ax or slitting its throat, preparatory to making the bacon, hams, and blood puddings that were an important part of their winter diet. The wild boar hunt of the Middle Ages, however, was an aristocratic activity that was an exercise in martial skill and a proof of valor. The famous hunting manual of Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix, provides several illuminated chapters on the pursuit of this dangerous animal, including “How to put the wild board to the sword.” (See the online exhibition on the Morgan Library & Museum website.) Although boars were brought down by hounds, Gaston remarks that the dogs’ fangs could not tear their tough hides, which could only be pierced by pikes or arrows. Once the boar turns to face his tormentors, the huntsman should rise in his saddle and throw his pike like a javelin; he must then dismount and dispatch the dying boar with a sword thrust, carefully and from behind.

While the peasant’s Christmas dinner might consist of pork, the head of the wild boar, bedecked with bays and rosemary, was at the front and center of the nobleman’s feast, as in the famous fifteenth-century Boar’s Head carol still sung today. Le Viandier, a recipe collection compiled about the year 1300, describes a rich dish called bourbelier, for which a wild boar is boiled and then roasted and basted with a sauce of ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and grains of paradise.

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:

Gaston III Phoebus. The Hunting Book of Gaston Phébus. Preface by Christian de Longevialle; introduction and captions by Clause d’Anthenaise; translated Ian Monk. Dallas,TX: Hackberry Press, 2002.

Henisch, Ann Bridget. The Medieval Calendar Year. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.

Husband, Timothy B. The Art of Illumination. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008.

Redon, Odile, Francoise Sabban & Silvano Serventi. The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy. Translated by Edward Schneider. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.

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Above, from left: The ripe fruits of the white rose tree in Bonnefont garden are held on their stems late into the fall, and provide food for birds and wildlife; the fleshy red fruits of the rose are known as “hips” and contain seeds that were used medicinally in the Middle Ages.

Apples, roses, and hawthorns are all members of a single botanical family, the Rosaceae. The fruits of the hawthorn are known as haws. The fruits of the rose are known as hips, a word of Germanic origin that appears in the glossary compiled by the Anglo-Saxon grammarian Aelfric in the ninth century.  (The Romans had designated the rose hip as malum roseum, or “rose apple”.)

While all roses bear hips, it was the fruit of wild roses such as the briar rose or eglantine (R. rubiginosa) and the dog rose (R. canina) that seem to have been used for food and medicine. The cookbook of Apicius, compiled in the fourth or early fifth century A.D., includes rose hips in several recipes, but in both ancient and medieval cuisine rose petals are used more often than the fruits. Wild roses seem to have been a famine food gathered in case of need rather than a delicacy. In the fourteenth-century Middle English translation of the Romance of William of Palerne, two lovers, William and Melior, flee to the woods disguised in bearskins, where William is given advice by his cousin—who has been transformed into a werewolf—as to what foods they may sustain themselves on, in addition to their love. It is suggested that they forage for wild plums, blackberries, hips, haws, acorns, and hazelnuts (”haws, hepus, & hakernes & hasel-notes”):

(For acorns as famine food, see last week’s post, “Pigs and Pannage“.)

William Turner, in his New Herbal of 1565, warns that those who make tarts out of hips should take heed to remove all the “down” from the fruit. These little hairs inside the hips are quite irritating to the skin. (I once made hedgerow jelly from hips, haws, and sloes, while in England, and found the process of removing the fibers from all those little hips pretty unpleasant, as well as tedious.) Dioscorides also recommended that this wooly matter be removed before the fruits were dried as a medicament to “stop the belly.”  Albertus Magnus specified the seeds contained in the hips as a remedy for diarrhea in infants.

Rose petals and oil of roses are more frequently recommended in medieval herbals than the fruits. Although garden roses were characterized as cold in the humoral theory of the Middle Ages, wild roses were classified as hot. Hildegard of Bingen says that the hips are very hot. As such, they would be considered efficacious in a complaint of  “a cold cause,” such as catarrh.) Hildegard recommends rose hips as a cure in Book LII of the Physica:

One who has pain in his lungs should crush rose hips with their leaves. Then he should add raw honey and cook these together. He should frequently remove the froth, then strain it through a cloth and make spiced wine. He should drink this often, and it will carry off the rotten matter from his lungs, purging and healing him.

Despite the flower’s ubiquity in medieval art, rose hips are rarely depicted in paintings or illuminations. However, a leafy stem of rose hips does appear in an early sixteenth-century book of hours commissioned by Anne of Brittany and painted by Jean Bourdichon. The painter shows a single “robin’s pincushion” or rose gall, formed by a parasitic wasp. (For the illumination, see the British Library Images Online.)

The gall, which is especially common on the wild field rose (R. arvensis) and the dog rose, is created when the wasp deposits its eggs in autumn. The larvae overwinter in the plant tissue, which provides both food and shelter until they hatch out in spring. This rose gall, known as a “bedeguar,” was powdered and used to treat internal ailments.

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:

Fisher, Celia. The Medieval Flower Book. London: The British Library, 2007.

Hildegard of Bingen. Physica. Transl. Patricia Throop. Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press, 1998.

Touw, Mia. “Roses in the Middle Ages,” Economic Botany, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Jan.–Mar., 1982).

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Above, from left to right: Calendar page for November from the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry, 1405–1408/1409. Pol, Jean, and Herman de Limbourg (Franco-Netherlandish, active in France, by 1399–1416). French; Made in Paris. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Cloisters Collection, 1954 (54.1.1); detail of the activity for the month; detail of the zodiacal symbol Sagittarius. See the Collection Database to learn more about this work of art.

“September’s Husbandrie” from Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandrie, 1580.

The term “mast” was applied to any autumnal fodder on which pigs might forage, including beechnuts, haws (the fruit of the hawthorn), and acorns, as well as fungi and roots. Acorns were the principal fodder in fattening up swine to be slaughtered and salted for winter food. While green acorns contain toxins that are poisonous to cattle and to people, they are not harmful to pigs. (Pigs were not reared in winter. Once the boar had sired a litter, he was sacrificed. Bacon and hams were cured after the November slaughter. Bacon grease replaced butter as the principal fat in the winter diet.)

“November’s Husbandrie” from Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandrie, 1580.

A swineherd carrying a pole or stick to knock down acorns for his pigs frequently appears in the calendar tradition as the activity proper to November, as in the detail from the Belles Heures shown above. A very similar scene is depicted on the November page of the Très Riches Heures.

The same subject is drawn in ink on the lower left margin of the November calendar page of the Hours of Jeanne d’Évreux, currently on display in the Treasury at The Cloisters. Jeanne, queen of France, retained the right to the income from the harvest of acorns in the forest of Nogent for her lifetime.

Jean Pucelle (French, active in Paris, ca. 1320–1334). Detail from the November calendar page from The Hours of Jeanne d’Évreux, ca. 1324–1328. Grisaille and tempera on vellum; 3 1/2 x 2 5/8 in. (8.9 x 6.2 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Cloisters Collection, 1954 (54.1.2). See the Collection Database to learn more about this work of art.

In medieval forest law, certain rights and privileges were afforded the tenants on the lord’s woodlands; the term “pannage” was used to designate both the practice of bringing pigs to the wood to forage for mast, and the right or privilege to do so. The term could also be applied to payment made to the owner of the woodland in exchange for this privilege, or to the owner’s right to collect payment, or to the income accruing from the privilege.

In England, where the tradition of foraging swine in oak forests was an important part of the agricultural cycle, the Saxon rights of pannage were much reduced by the Norman enclosure of game preserves, and the Saxon diet was greatly reduced when their pigs were deprived of acorns.

Acorns contain fat, carbohydrates and protein. The acorns of the common oak of Britain and northwestern Europe (Quercus robur) have a high tannin content and are too bitter to be palatable, but have been eaten in times of famine. They were ground into a meal that afforded a coarse bread. Alan Davidson notes that both acorns and bread or cakes made from them have remarkable keeping powers.

The Mediterranean holm oak (Quercus ilex var. rotundifolia) bear acorns that are much sweeter, and these are still enjoyed in Spain and Portugal, much as chestnuts are. It is probably the acorns of this species that are recommended in the fifteenth-century Tacuinum Sanitatis as a health-giving food, to be roasted and eaten with sugar.

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:
Arano, Luisa Cogliati. The Medieval Health Handbook: Tacuinum Sanitatis. New York: George Braziller, 1976.

Davidson, Alan. The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Hartley, Dorothy. Lost Country Life. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.

Husband, Timothy B. The Art of Illumination. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008.

Pérez-Higuera, Teresa. Medieval Calendars. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1997.

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