Trackless wilderness

There was not much trackless wilderness in western Europe in the high or late Middle Ages.  Pretty much all of the land that is now being cultivated was already cultivated in the twelfth century.  In England, the census of property and revenues called the Domesday Book (1086) listed most of the villages that are there now.  Indeed, there may have been a higher rural population in the fourteenth century in much of western Europe than there is now.

The early Middle Ages, however, had had wilderness.  Western Europe had suffered serious population loss at the end of the Roman Empire, due to the onset of the mini-ice age (making it harder to get in crops), the Black Death, and war.  With no one cultivating the fields, they were taken over by brush and trees.  But by the eleventh century, wilderness was being pushed back.

A common term in charters of the eleventh and twelfth centuries was assart, meaning newly cleared and cultivated land.  In the twelfth century a lot of landlords established what were called "new towns," new villages laid out in areas that had not been producing crops, with appealingly low rents.

From our perspective, even a cleared and cultivated medieval European landscape would have seemed fairly wild.  There were no highways, just some fairly well worn trade routes (many Roman roads in origin) and a complex tangle of tracks, joining farms and villages with each other.  Finding one's way without road signs, maps, or GPS would have been, shall we say, a challenge.  And there were certainly still plenty of uninhabited areas, and the cities were very small by our standards.

Once the wilderness started to disappear, people began to miss it—the same change of heart happened later in North America.  Wilderness especially was considered (potentially) holy in the twelfth century, a place where one went to break away from ordinary life and worldly distractions.  The new monastic order of the Cistercians was especially interested in siting their monasteries in areas that they could describe as the realms of thorns and wild beasts.  They became very good at clearing land and draining marshy areas, so in spite of their attraction to wilderness their immediate reaction was to try to make it less wild.

Hermits continued to seek out wilderness areas, but like the first hermits in Roman Egypt, they couldn't be too far away from civilization, or no one would be able to come out from town and make them little offerings; after all, nuts and berries will get you only so far.

By the early modern period, western Europe was thoroughly tamed, with wild areas quite limited.  Thus it must have been quite a shock when Europeans reached the Americas and realized, for example, that it was solid trees from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.

Their immediate reaction was the same as that of their twelfth-century ancestors:  Wilderness bad!  Cropland good!  Chop those trees down!  In Ohio people recorded that enormous oaks were cut down and burned in pyres that could be seen for miles.  By the twentieth century, however, there was a Whoops! moment that led to the establishment of national parks, to preserve the remaining trackless wilderness.

Now in fact it wasn't solid trees when the white man arrived, even though it has been said accurately that a squirrel could have traveled hundreds and hundreds of miles without coming down from the trees.  The Native Americans had practiced low-level agriculture, and they had cleared promising areas (fairly flat, fertile land, well-watered without being water-logged).  For example, in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains white men who were moving west, looking for a place to settle, found open meadows and decided this would be a good place to stop.

The Cherokees who had been cultivating the area had suffered serious population loss, due in large part to European diseases like smallpox to which they had no immunity.  (Some have managed to remain, however.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on monasticism and medieval agriculture, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.