A Peopled Landscape: Bartholomew the Englishman on the Properties of Daily Life

The Franciscan Bartholomew the Englishman's compilation of knowledge De proprietatibus rerum ('On the properties of things'), made before 1240, contains evocative descriptions of domestic and manorial life, indoors and out. These can appeal to the historian as ethnographic data on manorial life in Bartholomew's time and place, but marginal glosses transmitted in the earliest manuscripts show that such secular-seeming descriptions could be understood to hold lessons on the religious life – especially that of the mendicant preacher. They show that the underlying idea of fertility links Bartholomew's descriptions of the properties of a peopled and recognizable world. At the centre of this world is the lord and household, a refuge where men, women, children, servants, and animals go about their daily lives, working in the fields and vineyards by day and returning to the house at night. The glosses help the reader to connect this reality with the Gospel parable of the workers in the vineyard, and to perceive a web of connected spiritual meanings through the properties of people, animals, plants, and products found in the material world.