Trees in the Middle Ages

Europe probably has more trees now than it had in the thirteenth century.  The last of the old-growth forests are long gone, but a lot of less-fertile agricultural land has been allowed to return to woodland.  With modern hybrid seed and fertilizers, far more food can be grown per acre than was the case 800 years ago, meaning that less land needs to be cultivated even with the increased population.

Trees were very important in the Middle Ages, even though the normal reaction to wilderness was concern and even fear (unlike today's frequent embrace of wilderness as soul-cleansing).  Trees were necessary for beams for churches--the fire at Notre Dame that destroyed the roof burned up 1300 beams from twelfth-century oaks taller than almost any tree now found in Europe.  Because heating and cooking was done over wood fires, firewood was constantly being gathered (another reason there were fewer trees then than now).  The forest was also a source of food, nuts, berries, mushrooms, and the like, and acorns were prized as food for the pigs that essentially ran wild while getting fattened up.

Timbers were needed for houses of course as well as for churches.  Although most of the buildings that survive today from the Middle Ages are stone, wood was also heavily used at the time, being cheaper and easier to use.  Ordinary people couldn't afford (and didn't need) massive beams, but they needed wood to make a framework, often filled in with clay, rubble, or plaster.

A lot of things that are now made out of plastic or metal were then made out of wood, including furniture, storage containers, fish weirs that would trap fish, poles for vines to climb on, and the like.  Trees were often pollarded, that is had branches cut off so that it would produce a lot of slim young branches, which were useful for things like poles for the vines or fish weirs.  Although pollarding has essentially stopped now, if you look at Impressionist paintings of trees you will notice they still, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, seemed to have had an awful lot of small branches growing out of a thick trunk.

Trees were also used to make charcoal.  Charcoal will burn a lot hotter than wood, and it was thus needed to be able to work iron or to blow glass, before the days of the modern oil-fired blast furnace.  Charcoal burners would level a large patch of forest and then burn the green wood slowly, so that it would burn down into charcoal rather than all being consumed.

Europe's trees in the Middle Ages were mostly the same mix seen today.  Olive trees were valued along the Mediterranean.  Evergreens were found at all high elevations and were tapped for resin.  Chestnuts prospered in the woods, as did beeches, ashes, and oaks.  Orchard were planted with apples and other fruit trees.  Trees often took on holy or at least mythic significance.  The Crucifixion was often described as Jesus hanging from a "tree," and indeed it was sometimes said that his cross was made from the wood of the Tree of Knowledge from which Adam and Eve unwisely ate.  In Norse mythology, there was a great "world tree" (named Yggdrasil, their trees got to have names) whose branches spread out over the gods, humans, and giants.


© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on the medieval environment, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.