The Edges of the Medieval World

Darkness on the Edge of Town: Life at the Flurgrenze in Medieval and Traditional Narrative

DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN: LIFE AT THE FLURGRENZE IN MEDIEVAL AND TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE Tom Pettitt Exploring the edges of the medieval world, and the concepts of edges in the medieval world, is one way of meeting the criticism of Frits van Oostroom, offered in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology’s recent stock-taking of the field, to the effect that: “... modern medieval studies has neglected to historicize ‘space’”.1 The following contribution will be from the perspectives of performance culture (which includes theatre but is much more than theatre), and particularly of discursive culture (which includes literature but is much more than literature). Performance culture includes activities which take place in and on the spatial environment as a terrain, but which also help to define that environment as a cultural artefact, as a landscape. Within discursive culture are to be found discourses which engage directly with the spatial environment, such as legends assigning significance to particular geographical features, and others which construct a fictional landscape displaying a complex relationship with both the real thing and the way it is conceptualized in the mentality of the time. This too, not least in connection with narrative, is a somewhat neglected field, and promises significant insights. As Laura Howes points out in a recent pioneering study, rather than mere background or context for the action, narrative space is both a reflection of contemporary attitudes, and a significant literary quality; it reveals: ... deep patterns of cultural assumptions ranging from accepted political and social structures to aesthetic and literary traditions. In many texts, descriptions of place help tie a work to a convention or a particular genre, and so serve as an important interpretative signal to the reader. In other works, descriptions of 1 Frits van Oostroom, “Spatial Struggles: Medieval Studies between Nationalism and Globalization,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 105 (2006): 5. For a significant recent contribution see nonetheless Medieval Practices of Space, ed. Barbara Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN 83 place act on their own, almost as independent characters, influencing plot development directly.2 Not least in a subsistence economy, the boundary between one household’s or one community’s territory and that of neighbouring units determined both its relative wellbeing and status, and the same applies to the edge of the land which is productive as tilled fields or pasture – the Flurgrenze as defined in the Grimms’ Wörterbuch (limes agrorum). This significance is further multiplied by the importance of edges and boundaries in terms of protection: both the walls and moats which protected towns and castles from attack by other people and the barriers which protected farm animals from wild animals or kept those same farm animals out of fields in cultivation. Contributing to the maintenance of the fences or other structures defining and securing a community's boundaries was a duty incumbent on its members, and sanctions could be imposed if it was neglected.3 Indeed there seems to have been a whole art of rural boundary-making, deploying and combining walls (dry-stone and mortared), hedges, fences (or quickset fences which grew into hedges), ditches and banks, with well established combined heights for different purposes: 9 feet to confine or keep out deer; four and a half feet for cattle; three feet for sheep, etc. 4 Not surprisingly the functional significance of boundaries and edges is reflected in cultural activities and artefacts, for example in the segment of performance culture conventionally distinguished as pageantry. The lines drawn on the landscape by the routes of parades and processions are unavoidably superimposed on the lines already inscribed there in the form of edges & boundaries, visible or invisible,5 and in many cases the parades acknowledge the existing boundaries, say by taking routes which follow an existing boundary, or approach and emphatically halt at an existing boundary, or cross an existing boundary in a way which draws attention to it. Thus in the aptly named “beating of the bounds” English parishes annually confirmed and asserted their boundaries with neighbouring parishes, with all that this implied for their rights within the boundaries and their lack of obligations beyond them, by a perambulation which both followed their course and paused for symbolic ceremony at customary landmarks.6 In some countries, at least as recorded in more recent centuries, individual farmsteads undertook a similar boundary perambulation, in German-speaking regions for example 2 Laura L. Howes, “Narrative Time and...