[Herbalist] What's the logic of gardens?

[Jenne Heise]

>    Medieval England before about 1300 was a poor agrarian society.  Food
> was raised for subsistance, wool was the cash crop.  Manufactured goods
> were brought in from the Continent. Growing crops was very hard work.  If
> you spent all your time cultivating fields--yours and the lord's--tending a
> few more plants isn't very attractive.  Your cultivated hops may outproduce
> my gathered hops, but I simply walk until I have all I want, and put no
> other effort into it.  Seems good to me.

Before 1300, hops were not cultivated in England. Hops are a late period
introduction to the British isles. So you wouldn't be using hops anyway,
let alone gathering them in the wild, because they hadn't been introduced.

However, many sources have shown that peasants generally had small gardens
with some food plants (peas and beans seem to predominate). There's an
example of a case at law by 1380 where marauding pigs ruined a peasant's
garden.

What modern herbalists nowadays rather pretentiously call 'wildcrafting',
i.e., harvesting things, such as acorns and nettles, from the wild, was
practiced, but since the lord of the manor wasn't responsible for feeding
ALL the people who lived on his land EVERY day, you had to grow your
vegetables somewhere.

These small gardens were near the houses and enclosed, often with wattle
fences.

--
Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, mka Jennifer Heise	      jenne at mail.browser.net
disclaimer: i speak for no-one and no-one speaks for me.
"he said, cut off your hands./They are always poking at things./
They might touch me. . . " -- Marge Piercy, _The Friend_