The Meadows of Medieval Summer

For the past few years the first Saturday in July has been marked by conservation groups across the country as ‘National Meadows Day’. It is intended as an occasion to celebrate wildflower meadows and grasslands, raising awareness of their benefits for wildlife and encouraging the protection of these important but often endangered landscapes. Although this is a relatively new initiative, a special link between meadows and the month of July goes back a long way. In medieval calendars a meadow is often the setting for the emblematic scene of this month: a common ‘labour of the month’ for July shows people hard at work haymaking, cutting grass while wearing hats to protect them from the hot sun. A 15th-century calendar poem, turning these labours into rhyming verse, has its speaker say in July, ‘With my scythe my mede I mowe’, and in August, ‘And here I shere my corne full lowe’. This work may even have given July one of its names in English: in some sources it is called ‘Mead-month’, which may go back to a lost Old English name, Mædmonað. A mead and a meadow are the same thing, though the words now have different connotations. Both go back to Old English forms of the same word, mæd and mædwe. They are related to the Germanic base of the verb mow, just as hay is related to the verb hew, i.e. ‘cut down’. A meadow is land that’s ‘mown’, just as hay is grass that’s ‘hewn’. These days meadow is the usual term in modern English, while mead has become archaic – not quite obsolete, but certainly carrying an old-fashioned and poetic air. It calls to mind literary landscapes more than real ones, such as the place where Keats’ woebegone knight in La Belle Dame Sans Merci ‘met a lady in the meads, full beautiful, a faery’s child’. Such romantic, medievalising associations of mead, compared to the more ordinary meadow, probably owe something to the way the word is used by Middle English poets, especially Chaucer. Chaucer writes often of meads and their beauties, praising their colourful flowers and fragrant scents and the enchantments that might be met there.

At the beginning of ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’, for instance, the wife nostalgically describes the good old days of King Arthur when Britain was full of fairy magic and ‘The elf-queene, with hir joly compaignye, daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede’. Elsewhere among the Canterbury pilgrims, the energetic young squire is adorned ‘as it were a mede, al ful of fresshe floures, whyte and rede’. Chaucer often links meads in this way with youth, fresh beauty, and new love – romantic associations which may help to explain how mead became a more poetic word than meadow. Chaucer’s meadows are landscapes of leisure, not the hard work of haymaking; for wandering on a May morning, not mowing in July. But whatever poets might have felt, for people involved in agricultural work the mead was a place for important labour. Haymaking was a significant stage in the agricultural calendar because a good stock of hay enabled animals to be fed through the winter months. As a result there was a complex economic and social structure attached to mowing rights and obligations and the regulation of hay production. Those haymakers in the medieval calendars might be peasants and smallholders, drafted in by their landowners to meet the demand for extra labour during this season. They were entitled to remuneration and feasts in return for this work, or required to make a payment in lieu of their labour if they did not provide it: late medieval records refer to such payments as ‘math-meed’ or ‘math-silver’. The word math is another term etymologically related to mowing and meadows, which could refer either to the act of mowing itself, or a unit measuring how much was mown. A ‘day’s math’ was the area of land that could be mowed by one person in a day (supposedly about an acre). It has given us one word which many people still use today, without giving any thought to haymaking: aftermath, which originally meant the second crop of grass which grows after the first has been mown. ‘Mead-month’ might originally have been a time for working in the meadows, not just enjoying their beauty, but nonetheless meadows have contributed plenty to our language and literature, as well as to our landscape – more than deserving of their own day of celebration.

Eleanor Parker is Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Brasenose College, Oxford.