"Mak's Heirs": Sheep and Humans in the Pastoral Ecology of the Towneley First and Second Shepherds' Plays

The Christian content of the Towneley Prima and Secunda Pastorum has dominated critical treatment of these dramas, for scholars have rightly seen such content as contributing centrally to the overall religious mission of the Biblical dramas with which these plays have traditionally been aligned. The meaning of Christ's nativity for the unredeemed poor, for example—a class of people exemplified quite vividly by the shepherds to whom the nativity is first announced—is unquestionably one of the most important concerns of the Prima and Secunda Pastorum. Yet as all readers of these plays are aware, the Biblical action and the typological allegories based upon it are set in an environment that is specifically defined as English, with the shepherds often commenting at length, and in great detail, on their roles in the pastoral economy of late medieval and early modern England. Much of the dialogue in the plays, for example, relates to the working conditions of the peasants who were experiencing newlyemerging relationships both to the land (as the economic conditions of their employment changed) and to the animals that were so important to the people involved in England's developing wool trade. Using insights from the emerging fields of environmental history and the history of animal/human relationships, this essay will analyze the ways in which the plays address medieval humans and animals in their rural ecological contexts. It will also demonstrate, I hope, the explanatory power that these approaches can bring to the late medieval and early modern literary canon.

Before beginning close analysis of the action and dialogue in the plays, it is worth reminding readers of the environmental underpinnings of the shepherds' situation. As scholars have noted, the shepherds in the Prima and Secunda Pastorum are represented as living on land that has recently been "enclosed" by its owners; that is, the rural economy is clearly represented in these plays as undergoing a change from grain-based to sheep-based, and the land is concomitantly shifting its function from arable to pasture. To summarize the oft-told story about this shift, enclosure involved a process whereby manorial lords appropriated peasant property, amalgamated these small tracts of land into larger units, and then converted them all to pasture. ¹ Enclosures that took place before the mid-sixteenth century had a very destabilizing effect on the peasantry, for they "frequently involved the destruction of villages and the expulsion of their inhabitants." ² Along with the change in land use came a change in the character and extent of the human work force. Many peasants found themselves displaced from the land and therefore unemployed. Among those that remained, livelihoods became contingent upon wage income—and the wages could be very low. ³ In the situation implied in our dramas, the peasants who were previously involved in tenant farming of the manorial lands are now being hired as wage laborers to maintain flocks of sheep instead. Moreover, many of the agricultural tasks that still remain are being reassigned to special hired workers ("liverymen"), who, with their supervisors, have been retained by the landowners to replace the work force previously made up of peasant husbandmen. The result of this economic shift is that the peasants are being cut off from the land in a very real sense, no longer having a meaningful relationship to it. Formerly, their investment in the land would have been deep and abiding, as they communally worked to bring in the harvest and as they all shared in the material benefits of its bounty. But under the system of enclosure, they have become displaced from their former roles in the rural village community (with the "village" itself perhaps becoming an outdated concept) and are now rewarded with money for their newly-adopted pastoral roles, destroying whatever sense of "communal work" and "identity with the land" they may formerly have had. As R. H. Hilton has observed, the depopulation of villages and the turn towards pasture "destroyed the cohesion of the medieval rural communities." ⁴

According to the most recent...