Download PDF | Paolo Squatriti - Weeds and the Carolingians_ Empire, Culture, and Nature in Frankish Europe, AD 750–900-Cambridge University Press 2022.
238 Pages
Preface
It took far longer than expected to write this book: weeds turned out to be a tangled subject. Consequently, my attempts to impose some order on it came to rely on the help of many friends and colleagues, on attentive audiences at academic presentations, as well as on the support of several institutions. My research was made possible by an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship: I am deeply appreciative of both. I also owe a great deal to my employer, the University of Michigan, which allowed me time off to research the history of weeds in the first millennium ad, and to the Office of the Vice President for Research for supporting the publication of color images. Cathy Pense Rayos and Birgit Bucher helped me way beyond the call of duty in securing images, too. Thanks are due to groups of listeners at the University of Illinois, at Princeton University, at the University of Colorado, at Cal Tech, and at Yale University, who both egged me on and pointed out weaknesses in earlier versions of my weed studies.
For their willingness to read half-germinated drafts of chapters, for their saintly patience, and for suggesting numerous improvements, I must single out Alison Cornish, Deborah Deliyannis, Rich Hoffmann, Megan Holmes, Peggy McCracken, Laura Motta, Ellen Muehlberger, Tom Noble, and Marijke van der Veen. Vincenzo Binetti read a version of one chapter and encouraged me to iron out some of its wrinkles. My Michigan History colleagues Sue Juster, Val Kivelson, and Helmut Puff deserve a separate thank you for gamely including my writings in our reading circle, and for their helpful critiques. Thanks also to Noah Blan and David Patterson for teaching me much about Carolingian history.
Cambridge University Press’s three anonymous referees plowed through (and harrowed) the book with both acuity and kindness, proposing several ways to make it better. I am also indebted to Liz Friend Smith for overcoming her initial skepticism and loyally supporting the project as it evolved over several years. Finally, Hans Hummer was exceptionally generous with his time and wisdom, and swiftly read the entire manuscript at a critical juncture, producing a rich harvest of observations on how to turn it into a more coherent text. I dedicate this book to someone who had nothing to do directly with its production, beyond listening occasionally to my ruminations on weeds. Yet long ago Jack Ullman showed me the great interest in unexpected histories, and the great beauty of historical landscapes. He also introduced me to early medieval Europe’s past. More than forty years on, a book that examines some of the complexities of first-millennium agroecosystems is also a tribute to his infectious passion for comminglings of environment and history.
Introduction
After contemplating the past few seasons of devastation in his realm, in 864 the west Frankish king Charles the Bald issued a capitulary at Pîtres. This piece of legislation is remarkable for its repentant tone. In it Charles recognized failings of both the king and the community over which he ruled as the root cause of the recent troubles. Curiously, he expressed the failings in botanical terms. While he ordered several military and infrastructural innovations to counter the Vikings, Charles also noted that success depended on the prior eradication of “the thorns of vices, the stinging nettles of sins, and the hemlock of vanities.” Such choice of metaphors was by then customary in secular and ecclesiastical official documents.
It reveals an ongoing engagement with undesirable plants and with their proper management in literate Carolingian culture.1 This study surveys both the cultural theme of weeds in eighth- and ninth-century texts, and the growth of real weeds in the territories ruled by the Franks, in order to illuminate these plants’surprisingly large role in the “Carolingian project.”2 It shows that weeds stimulated thought and action more than most other components of creation. Weeds mattered so much to Carolingian writers for several reasons, beginning with the fact that it was so hard to delimit them. As simultaneously natural and cultural phenomena, they fit awkwardly into accepted understandings of the universe, and of that corner of it called the Carolingian empire. Weeds entwined human cultural norms and expectations so tightly with vegetable biological patterns that they challenged orderly taxonomies of the natural world and the hierarchies that Genesis had laid out for nature.
Carolingian grappling with and adaptation to weeds thus reflected these bad plants’ fundamental ambiguity, or slipperiness. Intellectually uncontrollable, weeds were also physically irrepressible, and so occupied a larger terrain than other organisms in God’s creation. Unlike other negative environmental phenomena, such as ravening wolves, or landslides, or hailstorms, weeds were omnipresent. Wherever people went, they found weeds. Their “in-your-faceness” rendered them different from other God-ordained disasters. This insolence, and humans’ grudging intimacy with them, meant weeds had far greater economic impact than sporadic natural hazards. Particularly in a Christian culture aware that weeds must be an instrument of divine communication, and probably chastisement, they attracted attention.3 Quietly persistent, ubiquitous, and demanding untold back-breaking effort to repress, weeds’ liminal status between spontaneous creature and product of human activities like sin and agriculture lent them importance in the Carolingian imaginary.
As a new imperial order arose in the eighth and ninth centuries, weeds’ real sprouting in Frankish fields and gardens made them a matter of state, and goes some way toward explaining why Charles at Pîtres could think of no better expression of his anxieties about the disarray into which the state had fallen than to evoke weeds and weeding. Realms like his existed to create harmony, to ensure that human communities observed their roles and performed their duties in the world, and to enforce divine mandates so heavenly and earthly spheres were congruent. The endurance of plants no one liked, that hampered the attainment of legitimate human goals, and that even poisoned people, undermined rulers like Charles, who expected to maintain the kind of order that checked chaos and won divine favor, enhancing everyone’s chances of salvation. For about a century and a half (750–900), rulers, ecclesiastics, and exegetes in what this book considers Carolingian Europe doggedly tackled the problems raised by weeds. They did so with a characteristic zeal that justifies treating as a unit the texts and other cultural products generated in disparate parts of the empire Charlemagne assembled.
The Carolingian state did not of course enforce cultural homogeneity from the North Sea to the Ionian one. On the contrary, despite considerable coherence in weed assessment in the period when members of the Carolingian dynasty held sway in much of what would later become France, Germany, Italy, and northern Iberia, multiple vegetable hierarchies prevailed throughout the empire. But whether they sat in Aachen, or Innsbruck, or Rome, literate people participated in a “discourse community” that the Carolingian hegemony supported.4 This community shared optimistic assumptions about the world and human activity in it that deeply tinged Carolingian-era texts and artifacts, including those related to botanical affairs. This specifically Carolingian dedication to figuring out what weeds were doing on earth makes possible a culturally inflected environmental history of marginal plants in a specific place and time. For the exceptional literacy of the Carolingian elite, and the good survival rate of their writings, offers access to the European vegetable imaginary in ways that are unparalleled for the rest of the first millennium ad.
It also affords glimpses into what weeds were up to on the ground, not just on parchment pages, since, however idealized, the literary weeds were linked to the real ones. And, as actual weeds are now knowable through archaeobotany, this study combines archaeological and textual insights to uncover the fulness of weed discourse in Carolingian Europe, while probing the relation of that discourse (what we might call Carolingian weedology) to agricultural practices in a period when these underwent significant change. Whether or not cultivators confronted the same challenges in a territory as vast as Carolingian Europe’s, from the heartlands of Neustria and Austrasia to the fringes of Provence and Tuscany they all managed insidious undesirable plants. In this sense, weeding worries united the Carolingian polity. But since Carolingian written sources are so unusually abundant and various (of course by early medieval standards), it is the written word that receives most attention in what follows. For this reason, the Carolingian vocabulary pertaining to weeds is of special importance. It requires some preliminary consideration.
Early Medieval Words for Weeds To deal effectively with weeds people need tools. Yet more than the weedhooks, sickles, hoes, diggers, forks, clippers, tweezers, and, nowadays, sprayers, the most important tools for coping with weeds have always been lexical. For from the very moment when they begin to define weeds, humans require a vocabulary to confine and control them. Hence it is thought-provoking to realize that, unlike modern English – beneficiary as we shall see of Old English inventiveness – many other modern European languages lack a special term for undesirable plants. This poverty derives from Latin, which also had no word for weed, a condition that proud German agronomists of the nineteenth century ascribed to the ancient Mediterranean tongues being more archaic and rustic than the younger, more modern, and vigorous Germanic ones.5 Most of the vocabulary we know about that early medieval Europeans used to identify and discuss bad plants derives from texts, and hence is Latin, though a few inflections of vernacular Germanic and Romance languages entered into the toolkit of those whose ruminations on weeds survive.
But for modern people the interest of the words Carolingian people used for weeds lies less in the linguistic pedigrees, the etymologies, they carry, than in the surprising differences between (at least Anglophone) modern amd early medieval ways of talking about weeds. The lack of an abstract word encompassing all bad plants signals something of the elasticity with which the Carolingians approached the categorization of vegetation. Perhaps it reveals their sense that all plants were equally weedy and equally domestic; to them, it just depended on the situation. In Latin, “herba” sufficed for all small forms of vegetation, whether economically useful or toxic (it contrasted with shrubs and trees, whose size and tougher external structure set them apart).6 “Herba” could be inflected in various ways to signal human evaluations, becoming “noxious herb” or “useless herb” when people perceived a plant as uncooperative or contrary to their interests; though his beloved Aeneid (2.471) did refer to “bad grasses,” Augustine was the first Latin writer (that I am aware of) to propose the more general grouping “bad herbs,” a formulation with a rosy future in the Romance languages but not overly popular in early medieval texts, particularly those of Carolingian date.7 Likewise, Latin allowed “healthful herbs,” “good herbs,” and even “celestial herbs” when the plants in question seemed to advance human well-being.8 Notker “the Stammerer”, writing toward the end of the Carolingian epoch, described the extraction of “nettles and noxious plants” from a garden setting, and contrasted these “useless” plants to the “necessary” ones that would “grow more freely” once the garden was properly weeded with a special forked tool.9 But, however many qualifiers people added to them, plants’ essential neutrality remained fixed.
There were few and situational differences among them, and in consequence modern speakers of French, Italian, Spanish, and even German, do not use specialized vocabulary to distinguish plants they don’t like, but inflect the neutral word for plant to signal their displeasure. Hence mauvaise herbe, erbaccia, mala hierba, Unkraut, and so on, terms in circulation since the high and late Middle Ages.10 In Carolingian literate culture, “herb” was a flexible term. Isidore of Seville, the erudite bishop who supplied early medieval Europe, and also Carolingian scholars like Hrabanus Maurus, with its most widely consulted encyclopedia, had left economic and moral evaluations open when he offered an etymology of the Latin “herba” that connected it to the word for field (“arvum”) by means of plants’ rootedness in the earth.11 Closely following his lead, Carolingian lexicographers proclaimed “the name of herbs is thought to be inflected from the word for land, because herbs are fixed to the soil by their roots.”12 By implication, good and bad plants were all basically “herbs” waiting patiently for a human opinion. Virgil had muddled things a little for early medieval Latin readers when he used “herba” without qualifiers to mean weeds in his Georgics (1.69). It was an idiosyncrasy few other Roman authorities adopted.
Thus, Pliny the Elder generally explained the nature of those “herbs” he treated in his massive Natural History, though he did very occasionally use an unqualified “herbis” to mean weeds.13 Similarly, the fourth-century agronomical writer Palladius, whose manuals demonstrably circulated in Carolingian libraries, could deploy plain “herbs” as weeds, and call weedy places “herbosis locis,” but tended to prefer “noxious herbs” when speaking of weeds.14 But as the Georgics were much consulted, and Rome’s pre-eminent poet came to be seen as a supreme linguistic and botanical authority in the course of the first millennium, Virgil influenced some with his blithe and unspecified “plants” to signify weeds. Among them was Walafrid Strabo when he composed what is probably the Carolingian period’s most celebrated botanical text, the poem Hortulus. 15 Strabo used the term “herbs” mostly in the technical sense of aromatic and medicinal plants (for instance of the rose, “winner of all herbs in strength and perfume”), yet was not averse to using the word without qualifiers for weeds awakened early by warm breezes after winter left his garden.16 Still, however charming Carolingian readers found Strabo’s horticultural poem and its Virgilian echoes, on the whole postclassical Latin eschewed unqualified herbology, and most Carolingian writers did not follow the Mantuan poet in this regard.
They added qualifiers when they referred to bad plants. Carolingian ambivalence toward “herbs,” and the Frankish recognition that plants could lean in several epistemological directions, did not translate precisely in all early medieval cultures. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that the first occurrence of the Old English “weod,” the ancestor of modern English weed, appears in the Alfredian translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, a work people at the court of Wessex at the turn of the tenth century found relevant because it advocated a certain indifference to the vicissitudes of this world.17 In The Consolation’s third book, Philosophy launches her first song with an account of the plants that get in the way of anyone who wants to grow grains: they are “frutex,” “rubus,” and “filix.”18 As most shrubs, brambles, and ferns do not grow much in heavily manipulated soils (arable or garden), because they are perennials, and also because they tend not to enjoy the full sun conditions of open areas, the Anglo-Saxon translator, who retained these species, also intelligently conveyed Boethius’ sense with the addition of the general and abstract term “weeds” and an allusion to their infestation of grain fields.19
The anonymous English writer was not the only early medieval reader of the Consolation of Philosophy to find Boethius’ botany confusing: a Carolingian-era commentator on Boethius’ work, likely Eriugena, also tried to clarify the text with the helpful addition of “other kinds of harmful herbs” after the botanically and agronomically improbable list of shrubs, brambles, and ferns.20 The Anglo-Saxon translator obviously did not invent the weed word, nor the abstract category it represents, the opposite of “wyrt,” probably the Old English word that comes closest to the Latin word signifying plant, “herba.”21 For “weodhoc,” a weeding tool, appears in a glossary of ad 725, and implies a previous history of familiarity with the idea, and the category of plants, as well as with long-handled hooks designed to ease the removal of unwanted plants from the soil.22
Moreover, around the same time as the glossary was assembled, when the Venerable Bede was composing De Temporibus Ratione to refute Irish methods of calculating the exact Sunday for celebrating Easter, he used “weod” too.23 He further alluded to the word’s antiquity by telling his readers that “the ancient English people” applied the word to the month of August (as discussed in Chapter 3). It appears that early on in their history, speakers of English developed a concept of immutable, almost genetic weediness and a word to express it, and both entered their texts during the Dark Ages.24 Since Britain is observably no weedier than the next place, it is unclear why the Anglo-Saxons embraced the notion of a general category of plants that were inherently bad.
Lawrence King, a leading weed scientist who bravely delved into the matter, suggested that a semantic slippage had given rise to the word and concept: since woad (Isatis tinctoria) grew rampant across English landscapes, early medieval people had come to associate that plant, called “wad” but pronounced rather like “weod,” with obnoxious vegetation, whence the term came to cover all plants the English disliked.25 But aside from the fact that the earliest record of the old word for woad in English is five centuries later than that for weed, King’s ingenious explanation for the odd emergence of “weed” in eighthcentury texts is purely etymological and does not make sense of the Anglo-Saxon word’s intellectual history. For woad grows vigorously in many other parts of northwestern Europe where there is no evidence of a word for or general idea of weed; and in any case, as King himself recognized, woad requires two seasons to reach maturity and reproduce itself, so is highly dependent on human care and very seldom becomes an infesting nuisance.26 Why the English, as opposed to the Burgundians or the Visigoths or the Vandals, should develop and deploy the semantic tools for sorting vegetation encapsulated in the word “weed” does not, in sum, seem to be related to the presence of Isatis tinctoria, a plant premodern Europeans had long relied on and cultivated to dye cloth and skin blue.
Rather, the Old English word “weed” may reflect a pre-Christian botanical sensitivity, a notion of plant life detached from scriptural estimations of right and wrong. Since late antiquity, when the Church Fathers had popularized “bad herbs,” Christians had found it expedient, even necessary, to moralize plants and divide them into good and bad kinds. When a Carolingian author like Walafrid Strabo wrote of “bad herbs,” he followed earlier Christian authorities who had invented the category, even while mostly clinging to the less sweeping, adjectival constructions popularized in classical Latin.27 The Anglo-Saxon lexicon, with its ample but morally non-committal category of plants called weeds, deviated significantly from the Latin one that dominated textual production during the early Middle Ages. Perhaps if more vernaculars had left written traces of themselves before the first millennium ran out, Old English would look less anomalous in its approach to systematizing the vegetable universe, and Carolingian writers, most of them familiar with a Germanic language, might have dipped into a lexicon less laden with Christianized botanical evaluation.28 But as it stands, the linguistic evidence suggests that the vast majority of early medieval Europeans thought plants were inherently equal, that is, all were “herbs”; it was up to people to add adjectives according to their estimation of them. As explained more fully in Chapter 3, this more situational approach to plants’ qualities reflects a Christian understanding of the universe, in which God made “green herb such as may seed” on the third day of His creation effort, as spelled out in Genesis 1.11–12, and when He also determined that this herb was good.29
This induced attentive early medieval readers of Genesis to hesitate before identifying some slice of the herbal world as inherently bad. It always depended. Earthly vegetation was ambiguous, and the vocabulary early medieval Christians applied to it faithfully mirrored this botanical ambiguity. Some herbs might behave like weeds in some contexts, but to adopt a blanket label for the designated bad species went too far. Early medieval Christian observers approached the vegetable world flexibly, and knew that what seemed a noxious herb now might at another time look altogether different. In the Dark Ages, at least away from the British Isles, total weeds did not exist, so no word for them was needed. A solitary exception to this early medieval continental indifference to more abstract concepts of weediness is the monk of St. Gall and biographer of Charlemagne Notker (+912), whom we encountered earlier applying qualifiers to the general word “herbs.” In the just-so story he wrote in the 880s about Charlemagne consulting his exiled eldest son, Pippin (a story suspiciously reminiscent of Livy’s account of Tarquin the Proud’s suggestion for dealing with dissent at Gabii, duly modified by monastic memory), Notker described the weeds being removed from the monastic garden at Prüm as useless refuse (“inutilia recrementa”).30 Notker’s generalization reveals that on occasion Carolingian writers did feel the need for a broad and capacious term covering the idea of unwanted “trash” plants.
But Notker’s usage of the term is unusual in early medieval Latin. On the very rare occasions when the word “refuse” appears in first-millennium literature it is applied to the non-comestible parts of grain, the chaff from grain processing before its consumption.31 For the rest, postclassical writers in Latin, including Notker, preferred to label small plants good or bad according to the particular relationship people developed with each one. They did not lump them together as vile weeds. For the Franks, whose literacy was Latin and orthodox Christianity ancient, small plants were all herbs. In their laws, the very same word, “herba,” covered both the pasture that a mounted warrior was entitled to on his way to war and the toxic plants whose potency the wicked used in order to kill other people or steal their fertility.32 Certainly Carolingian literati knew that some vegetation was undesirable: following Bede, they compared the doubts of the Apostles before the resurrected Jesus to “bad herbs” that grew up from below ground without having been seeded from above.
Carolingian authors also discussed “noxious herbs” that could poison people when mixed up with more beneficent plants. But they remained anchored to the idea that plants were not in and of themselves harmful or helpful to humans, and everything hinged on what purposes people put them to and on the relationships humans and vegetation established. Carolingian Latin vocabulary therefore perpetuated Roman understandings of the vegetable kingdom and accepted the Christian view of a fundamentally beneficent creation within which botanical misfits were such primarily in the eye of the (sinful) beholder. This confirms the Carolingians needed no special word for weeds.33 Instead they deployed a vast number of names for the individual plants they disliked. No doubt because for them no blanket term could satisfactorily capture the infinite variety of plants that were a nuisance, or the particular situations in which this became true, Carolingian writers preferred to call each type of weed by its own name. Individualizing them made clearer just how each plant was bad.
Thus, a literature that is utterly silent about the category weeds, and lacked a word for them, teems with stinging nettles, prickly thistles, brambles, darnel, wild oats, and caltrop.34 Most of the offending plants were known to be bad from their appearance in the scriptures, the botany of which did not match Carolingian Europe’s perfectly but nevertheless was a great inspiration for any who wondered about what attitude to take toward any given plant. A few species whose representation in Carolingian texts is consistently negative instead had a bad reputation in earlier Latin literature. Overall, while they certainly knew which kinds of plants were undesirable, the Carolingians did not add much to the Latin repertory or vocabulary. They were satisfied with the botanical baggage inherited from the ancient and late antique Mediterranean. Carolingian efforts to raise the levels of Christianity within the empire hinged on improving clerical access to the scriptures, the Latin text of which scholars purified and standardized. Good Latin was henceforth a keystone in Charlemagne’s renovatio. But since by the late eighth century Latin was not the mother tongue of anyone in the Carolingian empire, another aspect of the Carolingian investment in Christian learning was the creation of good dictionaries wherein unfamiliar Latin words could be looked up by the increasingly literate clergy.
The compilation of such word lists and encyclopedias was essential to the imperial project of improving comprehension of Christian truths among both the clergy and their lay audiences, to whom priests disseminated their knowledge in the vernacular. The great lexical monument to this late eighth-century attempt to render Latin vocabulary more user-friendly is the massive Liber Glossarum. 35 This encyclopedia synthesized huge amounts of learning, much of it of Iberian origin, for the benefit of Carolingian readers. In it one learned that thistle (“cardus”) was “a type of prickly plant whose nature is biting and almost austere” and that caltrop was “a type of bush, a prickly plant which is the same as zura, a prickly plant they also call tugzira. It is a prickly plant with one thorn upright and one lying flat; a most bitter and spiny plant.”36 Both of these weeds figured prominently in the Bible, and the Liber Glossarum’s integration may have helped some Carolingian students of the scriptures to envision the bad plants of the Holy Land in more down-to-earth and vernacular terms. The Liber could also guide readers baffled by these plants’ appearance in classical literature (in Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, for instance). But if the glossators also supplied some linguistic data drawn from classical sources (Pliny had claimed the Berber translation for caltrop was “zura”), their intention was not to open up ancient botany to early medieval readers. Along with the information about the nature and appearance of the plants, the Liber’s authors made no room for ancient wisdom on these plants’ efficacy against scorpions or coughs, or utility in wool-processing.37 This suggests that more than aiding readers to recognize the botanical criminals, the function of this material was to show them that the botanical world was known, classified, and ultimately under control. Comforted by the correspondence between the difficult, technical Latin term and a plant they could envision, even label in several languages, no doubt any who consulted the Liber Glossarum left this hefty tome reassured that they now understood what the words meant. The specificity and precision in identifying bad plants visible in the Liber Glossarum underlines how Carolingian Europe needed no general weed concept, or word. Each plant had its own properties, and some of these were often negative.
But weediness was evaluated on a case by case basis, each plant’s qualities audited within the relationship it created with humans in a particular time and place. However ecologically astute they appear, in apprehending and respecting the stunning variety of botanical creation Carolingian literati remained anthropocentric, for, according to their understanding, all plants had been created on the third day for human use. Hence it was up to humans, even in their fallen condition, to evaluate which plants were good and which were not, and when and why. The vocabulary they developed to do so was attentive to the botanical identity of each plant and yet flexible enough to permit judgement. Even in the absence of any one word for weeds it was possible to accurately identify the kind of relation a plant established with people. The Carolingian vocabulary for weeds was both precise and supple, nicely adapted to botanical and theological reality.
Modern Words for Weeds It may seem surprising for people living in an agrarian society, with more than nine-tenths of the population engaged in tending to plants, to neglect convenient blanket terms for obnoxious plants. Yet hesitation over what to call and how satisfactorily to define weeds is not restricted to the Carolingians and their Latin texts. For if early medieval commentators avoided abstract definition of all bad plants (though they could definitely tell a weed from a plant when they saw one), modern discussions of weediness are equally uncertain. Contemporary agronomists or weed scientists are hardly unanimous about how to define weeds. In his 1975 classic Crops and Man, the American agronomist and plant geneticist Jack Harlan tabulated nineteen different authoritative opinions on what a weed is, plus a thick undergrowth of sub-definitions and distinctions.
Clearly the famous “plant out of place” does not satisfy everyone.38 Even the palaeobotanists who, as we shall see in Chapter 2, furnish so much valuable information about which weeds actually grew in Frankish fields, are often unsure whether a given ninth-century seed came from a cultivated or uncultivated plant or, in other words, whether past people considered it a weed or a crop.39 Like Harlan’s nineteen, other contemporary determinations of what makes a plant a weed use either biological characteristics or economic criteria to attain some certainty. Among the most popular botanical features used to pinpoint weediness are the ability to thrive in very diverse environmental conditions, exceptionally efficient reproductive strategies that lead to rapid propagation of the species, early germination of seeds and fast growth of seedlings, and the production of growth inhibitors for other species that give the plant that produces them advantages in the field. Though weekend gardeners who do not grow commercial crops, just ornamentals, might object, where economic criteria are applied to identifying weeds, whether the plant in question causes measurable financial losses to people is the decisive consideration.40 Some, including Harlan himself, blend the two approaches in order to obtain a complete identikit of offensive plants, at once adaptable, fastgrowing and -spreading, and costing people lots of money in additional inputs and lost crops.
In the past three decades, as environmentalists have become interested in “invasive species,” perhaps reflecting the worries of supposedly homogeneous western societies confronting the influx of immigration from the poorer parts of the world, they too have taken an interest in weeds and what makes them weedy.41 Therefore, a plant’s ability to reduce “biodiversity,” one of the very few absolute goods left in postmodern culture, has also become part of current weed definitions.42 Ecologists stress that botanical features of weeds interact with the “disturbances” that humans, especially, cause in ecosystems, to increase the plants’ populations, further destabilizing the ecosystems.43 Agriculture was, of course, the main human “disturbance” to premodern ecosystems, and today remains a formidable source of instability and of weed creation, but road-building, logging, commerce, a host of other activities, and especially warfare, will do nicely as well: all furnish opportunities for weeds to spread and to prevail, bringing attendant reductions of other species in the wake of their success.44 And as Chapter 1 spells out, empire-building, too, is one of the very best incubators for weeds.
Thus, twenty-first-century understandings of what a weed is have expanded to include those species whose opportunism enables them to outcompete slower plants and displace them, in the process sometimes reducing the number of “native” plants in a given place and giving rise to fears of a coming “Homogeocene,” a time period even more dismal than the Anthropocene fashioned by modern industry, when the same handful of species of cosmopolitan plants, most of them weeds, will be found everywhere.45 Perhaps ironically, this was something that Aldo Leopold, the German-American ecocritic avant la lettre, feared already in the 1940s.46 Postmodern conditions have rendered clear-cut boundaries between good and bad plants still more difficult to discern than they used to be. As contemporary agronomists begin to doubt it is even possible to completely extirpate undesirable plants, and farmers settle for “invasive plant management” as opposed to the complete extirpation that was earlier weed science’s goal, a standard crop like wheat has come to be understood as a complex of plants, including those that inevitably compete with the wheat in the field, namely weeds.47
Following an insight of the celebrated Soviet botanist Nikolai Vavilov, an early theorist of the fecund relationships among related species of wild and cultivated cereal plants, recently agronomists have proposed that the distinction between crop and weed is best represented by a spectrum, or “continuum of physiological states of plants used by humans,” from wild to genetically modified.48 Actually, this idea is old, and the Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder, in the first century ad, recognized that some organisms were neither wild nor domesticated, but liminal, in-between; his proposition enjoyed a limited early medieval reception, too.49 According to this way of defining weeds, which is more botanical than economic, not much separates the weed from the crop, and genetically the two might be very intimately related. In this vein, some weed scientists think weediness is a function of the relationship a plant creates with people, anywhere from symbiotic to parasitic.50
This attractive definition of weeds, one Carolingian thinkers might have appreciated, departs from the botanical and genetic “continuum” of the spectrum theorists to emphasize the kind of interactions that arise between people and any given plant. Certain plants fit so perfectly into the lives of people that the two species establish a comfortably harmonious relationship, while other plants, just as proficient at benefiting from human activities and the humanized ecosystem, do so without offering discernible benefits to people: the lack of reciprocity in the relation with humans is what condemns some plants to weediness. Of course, any definition of weeds that derives from a relationship is dynamic and hence is fragile, liable to change. A plant’s relation with people can evolve, altering the plant’s status. In Latin literature, Pliny recognized this when he described barley as a pest, a weed of wheat fields, except in Germany where farmers had given up on controlling it in their fields, had accepted it as a crop, and begun to eat a gruel made from a plant their ancestors deemed weedy.51 On an even quicker schedule than evolution and adaptation, plants also switch from tolerable to pest with the season, as human land use changes.
Divided into “archaeophytes” (as plants thought to have been introduced into a landscape before ad 1500 are known), “neophytes” (introduced later than ad 1500), and “apophytes” (introduced in very remote times; grosso modo the meaning is the same as “naturalized”), or categorized as “ruderal” (living in places humans create but do not use, like roadsides), “obligate” (living in crop fields; also sometimes called “agrestal”), or “facultative” (able to survive without agriculture but also agile enough to insert themselves into agroecosystems), weeds remain as difficult to grasp in theory as they are in practice.52 Even equipped with precise scientific vocabulary, modern specialists in agronomy and weed science cannot agree on how to define weeds once and for all. Perhaps then Carolingian unwillingness to make general pronouncements about weeds and how to define them, and the related recognition of the contingencies in botanical classification, derived from a quite astute assessment of the plant kingdom, shaped by Christian theology. Like Charles at Pîtres, Carolingian commentators stressed each species’ particularities (prickliness, toxicity, etc.), or each specific kind of bad plant’s relationship to humans.
In recognizing that a weed is a situational construct, they agreed with such brilliant thinkers on weeds as Aldo Leopold.53 From his Wisconsin vantage point, Leopold observed that actually it is the particular situation of the observer that determines whether a plant ends up labeled weed or crop, for “good and bad are attributes of numbers, not of species”: when the situation is agricultural, as it often was in the early 1900s Midwest, many plants that had hitherto been decorative or ecologically useful, end up on the wrong end of human constructions and become enemies to extirpate, or weeds. We shall see in Chapter 3 that Leopold’s musings unwittingly echoed Augustinian and Carolingian weed theology, and indeed so do those modern weed scientists who evaluate plants’ fluctuating relationships with people to establish which are weeds.
The Matter with Weeds Though eighth- and ninth-century people in Frankish Europe seem to have lacked a word like weed and to have eschewed the idea that specific plant species were inherently noxious and irredeemable, and though the Carolingians who left written traces behind did not tidily classify certain bad plants as early colonizers of clearances, infesters of the cabbage patch, or specialists in spring-sown grains, they agreed with modern agronomists on one thing: weeds matter deeply. Carolingian-era writers emphasized the cultural relevance of bad “herbs,” but also recognized that such relevance derived from weeds’ economic impact.
This study highlights weeds’ double significance as agricultural pests and cultural artifacts. To do so, it attempts to conjugate environmental with early medieval, specifically Carolingian, history in a way that broadens both disciplines. Admittedly, how weeds mattered to Carolingian cultivators differs from how they matter to modern commercial farmers or weed scientists. For today weeds are accused of depleting soils of nutrients that crops could use, of robbing crops of needed sunlight, of manufacturing and circulating chemicals that stymie crop growth, of altering hydrology in ways detrimental to other (cultivated) plants, of accelerating topsoil erosion, of harboring pests (insects, fungi, viruses) and facilitating their dissemination among crops, and of building inflammable biomass dangerous for desirable species. And nowadays the economic repercussions of these ecological facts matter most.
Overall, weeds are estimated to reduce conventionally grown US harvests of wheat and rice (the world’s two most commonly cultivated cereals) by some 10 percent, and harvests untreated with herbicides by up to 35 percent, far more than what insect or fungal pests achieve; in Italy wheat harvests without weed control (which today mainly means chemical weed control) would be 20–30 percent lower than they are. The attempt to restrict weeds’ vigorous competition in modern agroecosystems costs farmers a sizable portion of their income, and adds a burden in labor. In Britain, the post-1945 leap into subsidized wheat farming vastly reduced populations of field weeds and vastly increased the costs of weed control, in the process creating monocropped “ecological deserts” inhospitable to all wildlife.
A similar reduction of crops’ competitors in French fields since World War II, achieved by liberal use of “chemical controls,” was also associated with more homogeneous cultivations and with higher costs in inputs and labor.54 In the 1800s, when modern farming resembled premodern practice more because chemical fertilizers and herbicides were unknown, when rotations remained important, and when monocropping did not yet prevail (nor its vulnerabilities and added inputs), weeds still reduced wheat yields by 5–15 percent, depending on plowing methods, on how much laborious weeding and harrowing farmers lavished on their fields, and how much crop rotation they practiced.55 In other terms, premodern crop losses to weeds tended to be smaller than they are (potentially) on modern farms today. But as premodern yields and productivity were lower as well, agrarian societies were more vulnerable to shortfalls, and more acutely sensitive to even quite small losses.56
Though many Carolingian farmers were not motivated by calculations of yield, but measured productivity in terms of labor inputs in relation to household needs, at a time of low yields even small crop losses rendered weed infestations relatively more damaging.57 We cannot quantify accurately the losses of Carolingian farmers to undesired plants, but their impact on the Franks’ agrarian economy was not limited to their ability to shrink harvests. It is equally hard to estimate how much additional labor the women and men of the eighth and ninth centuries put into their gardens and fields in order to reduce the impact of the plants they saw as “out of place” there. But labor is a key difference in weed control on Carolingian farms and modern agribusinesses. For early medieval farmers, the labor weeds imposed, not only before and during, but also after the harvest, was significant.
From the beginning of the productive process, weeds imposed burdens. Careful plowing and harrowing served to control weeds, among other things, and forced cultivators to spend more time and energy in their fields.58 A still bigger demand was the weeding which took place in early spring when the crops had germinated.59 In broadcast-sown grain fields, without orderly ranks of crops, hoeing, for example, had to be attentive so as to avoid wrecking the roots of grain plants. It could therefore take twenty people a full winter’s day to hoe-weed a hectare of land sown with grain. Given that an early medieval household of five needed two and a half hectares sown with grain to feed itself, the investment in hoeing labor was large: assuming all hands were on deck, ten full days of work just to weed the family grainfield once. If the weeding was done by plucking, using bare hands, it likely took longer.60 Nor had weeds finished exacting their laborious toll.
During harvests, they slowed down operations, compelling people to choose between speed and the purity of what they gathered. Afterwards, the task of throwing threshed grain across the threshing floor with a shovel to separate the heavier from the lighter seeds (and thus weed seeds from crop seeds) required a strong and skilled worker. Further riddling, by sieve, was a burden big enough that nineteenth-century English farmers skimped on it.61 In the end, it was weeding crops that demanded the most. Whether in grain fields, vegetable gardens, or even where fodder was grown for domestic animals (e.g. oats), to keep the bad plants separate from the good ones took great human ingenuity and effort, and no doubt caused exhaustion, anxiety, and pain. This vast time-sensitive and back-breaking labor, in sum, was the crucial reason why weeds mattered so much in a premodern agrarian economy. While we can only estimate how many days and hours Carolingian peasants spent gouging weeds from the dirt, and really only be certain that weeds mattered because of the vast and urgent toil they imposed on cultivators’ bodies, we can reconstruct something of how and why certain plants came to be abhorred in Carolingian weed discourse.
For weeds mattered in cultural terms, too, not just in economic ones, and therefore crept into Carolingian legislation, becoming endemic in other kinds of text too. Alfred Crosby sagely defined weeds as those plants that attract anthropomorphic metaphors most readily.62 Yet weeds’ textual prominence in Carolingian times is not only a sign of this irresistible feature of theirs. It also depends on their broader cultural importance, and one object of this study is to illustrate that importance by rescuing the noxious plants of early medieval history from neglect. For a balanced reconstruction of the Carolingian past should extend beyond state formation, ecclesiastical organization, renovatio, and North Sea trade, to encompass plants about which Carolingian writers evidently cared a good deal and that shaped the existences of postclassical cultivators. Weedless Carolingian histories overlook some of the protagonists of early medieval European environments.
The Carolingian history of weeds offers insight into the chasm that seems to have separated the vegetation of literate discourse from the weeds that harried landowners and peasants in the fields. As this book demonstrates, the “bad herbs” of the Christian imagination, the species listed as most unwelcome plants in Carolingian books, seldom were exactly the same ones that archaeobotanists discern infesting eighth- to ninth-century barley fields, reducing wheat yields, robbing bean stalks of soil nutrients, and demanding so much work from rural people. Yet Carolingian authors’ preference for biblical bad plants did not derive from cultural myopia, an unwillingness to observe what actually sprouted from the cultivated soils around them.
The weeds that exercised the learned seemed qualitatively different from, and more dangerous than, the homey weeds in gardens or plowed fields because of the relations they established with people. Yet the learned had no aversion to observing the agroecosystems around them: familiarity with humble, common weeds made the Bible’s bad plants more exciting and interesting. In fact, the differences between the weeds of discourse and those rooted in the soil are only apparent, and the human–weed dialectic described in Carolingian books nicely rendered agroecological reality. The abstraction of the Carolingian epoch’s discursive botany served to make it broadly applicable in real economic, social, and political contexts. Early medieval conceptions of creation innovated over the past by including among the gifts of God to humans “savage spaces,” lightly humanized areas that ancient people thought worthless wasteland.63
This rehabilitation lies behind the willingness in Carolingian culture to see complexity in the shifting relationship between people and weeds. Acknowledgment of noxious plants’ ability to climb out of the negative evaluation to which people consigned them most of the time, and their offer of benefits to humans, is one of the hallmarks of Carolingian weed discourse, and helps in comprehending the Carolingian reluctance to adopt generalizing words and concepts like weed.64 Recognition of what we shall call phytosocial mobility was an important characteristic of eighth- and ninth-century writings. Indeed, in Carolingian texts what set weeds apart from domesticated plants, evaluation of which was far more static and consistently positive, was this mobility. This powerful awareness of the value in all plant life, including that which people normally devalued, distinguished early medieval approaches to vegetation. In certain contexts, the foulest weed could reveal itself as a most useful component of an ecosystem, and offer unexpected benefits at least to those who considered it carefully. By moving up, even briefly, in the vegetable hierarchies, lowly, marginal plants proved the fundamental goodness of God’s creation, and by accepting weeds’ potential, Carolingian writers located them within a cosmology that implied all nature was good. Hence Carolingian writers accepted weeds’ agility.
It was difficult but also necessary to understand that all plants were created equal, whatever misguided uses people tried to put them to. Weeds are sensitive proxies of social and cultural priorities, and not just in Carolingian Europe. As Di Palma argued in her acute study of early modern conceptions of badlands, the kinds of ecology that people find abominable are just as revelatory of what they think is important as the landscapes they cherish.65 For environmental historians, therefore, a historically grounded understanding of weeds complements and completes accounts of past woodlands, gardens, or agroecosystems. It enriches environmental historical reconstructions of the diverse and complex relations people have established with vegetation. The exceptional abundance of Carolingian writings allows an early glimpse into medieval Europe’s elaboration of Christian environmental ideas. Just as Di Palma’s wastelands began to evoke new emotive reactions in the 1700s, and became a problem that nations must solve, in the Carolingian epoch for the first time we may observe weeds eliciting disdain and acceptance, exclusion and inclusion, on the basis of Christian cosmological sensibilities. That these sensibilities at times seem to have been out of touch with the harsher realities of Carolingian agroecosystem management only adds to the interest of the story.
For the dialectic between economic and cultural adaptations to ecologies is one of the classic topics of environmental history, modern or premodern.66 As the fairly swift adaptation of early medieval literate culture to the rise of chestnut cultivation suggests, postclassical readers and writers could respond to changes in the land with some alacrity: they understood phytosocial mobility.67 After all, the eighth- and ninth-century intellectuals who read books and wrote treatises inhabited a fully organic economy in which everyone knew about the agricultural process that produced the clothes they wore, the food they ate, and the tools they used, and what could happen when this process faltered: shortages and shortfalls remained a painful possibility that touched everyone, including the fortunate few who almost always knew where their next meal was coming from.68 In such a context, the reduction of productivity and the increase in laboriousness occasioned by weeds mattered a great deal more than it does in the rich countries of Europe today. For this reason, the apparent abstraction of Carolingian weed discourse is poignant: it sheds light on a culture that subordinated the natural world to supernatural imperatives, but always remained alert to ecology and in particular to the biological processes of vegetable life. This study seeks to establish a corridor between the territories of Carolingian and of environmental history. It is predicated on the belief that communication between the two academic fields of research will improve both.
The careful attention to text that is one distinguishing feature of Carolingian studies can enrich understanding of how past people fit into their ecosystems. Discussion of landscape sensibility and landscape management in the relatively deep past of the first millennium ad can also give perspective to environmental histories that privilege the modern and industrial European past and perhaps idealize ecological relations before the Anthropocene. Meanwhile, the archaeological science that has become a preferred source for environmental histories in the past few decades, in this case particularly archaeobotany, vastly improves the database on which to build historical visions of Carolingian Europe. It also allows some independent checks on the Latin words whose authority in traditional Carolingian history has no rivals. In sum, improved traffic between the two academic fields this book addresses most directly generates insights and has the potential to introduce new perspectives for both. The study of bad plants is a chance to see things differently.
Outline This study opens by proposing that Frankish hegemony between the North and Ionian seas during the eighth and ninth centuries was properly imperial. Carolingian power determined new political relations between a metropolis, the Frankish heartland bounded by the Rhine and Loire rivers, and its peripheries in western Europe, mostly subdued by 790. It enabled an elite (the “Reichsaristokratie”) to own land in multiple regions. It also fostered deeper integration among its many regional economies, not least because such novel relations matched the interests of the new transregional landowners. But the small scale of the Carolingian empire, and its brevity (it lasted little longer than contemporary European integration efforts have), may have attenuated the phytosociological impact of imperial unification. By redirecting the traffic of humans and commodities to suit their purposes, and channeling energy flows in new ways, empires shape the populations and distribution of plants in space, both intentionally and by mistake. Yet, however transformative for early medieval European agriculture the Carolingian period may have been, it did not generate a Braudelian “civilizational plant” (such as wheat or grapes might have been for Rome) nor, in consequence, a discernible civilizational weed, an infesting competitor of the preferred cultivations of eighth- and ninth-century Europeans. Chapter 2 uses archaeology to measure the distance between the learned discourse of weeds in Carolingian codices and the weeds that seem to have actually grown on the ground in the eighth and ninth centuries. Archaeobotany brings into focus some astonishingly fine-grained pictures of what grew in early medieval fields and gardens, and though, like all archaeology, it does not always emerge from exactly the places a historian might like to know about, it still represents a great opportunity to evaluate the verisimilitude of Carolingian texts and images. Though some obligate weeds of rye, oats, and wheat appear to have done well in Carolingian Europe, by and large the undesirable plants in agricultural contexts were not the same ones as in contemporary poems, laws, exegesis, chronicles, and letters. The wicked species identified in Carolingian Latin texts were different from what most people encountered on a daily basis in their fields and in their gardens as revealed by carbonized and waterlogged plant remains. In other words, the weeds of the peasant and of the monastic gardener were not the weeds of the literate. Carolingian Europe’s literate weedology had passed through the filter of late antique Christianity, and particularly the meditations of the Church Fathers and of Augustine. The lack of a word for weeds did not hamper a luxuriant discourse about “bad herbs” that identified most of these latter on the basis of their scriptural status.
That status, as shown in Chapter 3, was darkly colored by Adam’s exclusion from Eden and God’s condemnation of his progeny to struggle against thorns and thistles in order to gain their sustenance. But, as the account of vegetable creation at the beginning of Genesis suggested that originally plants had been made good, Carolingian Christians followed late antique exegesis to the conclusion that human inadequacy mattered more than the intrinsic nature of any plant for its placement in botanical hierarchies. Human labor on the ground, that unfortunate necessity of postlapsarian living, caused certain plants to seem evil, though they might have another, totally different, moral profile if viewed ecologically. Perhaps the most celebrated contemporary definition of weeds is the Mary Douglas-inflected “plants out of place.”69 Chapter 3 further suggests that, actually, for agrarian societies accustomed to plants burgeoning all over the place, the problem with weeds lay in their choice of time, more than their choice of where to live. The Carolingian empire was more than ordinarily concerned with its routines and their correct timing, as demonstrated by Charlemagne’s effort to reform and harmonize the calendrical observances of his subjects, and subsequent support for that effort.
That certain plants might sprout of their own accord, not in obedience to a farmer’s plan, was natural enough, but that they did this when the farmer expected crops to grow was an intolerable calendrical infringement. For the Carolingians weeds were “plants out of time,” unable to respect the human economic schedule and therefore detrimental to farming, which is based on carefully modulated rhythms. Yet for all their attention to the times when weeds were thickest on the ground, Carolingian authors detached their rankings of the most pernicious plants from agronomical considerations. Indeed, as observed in Chapter 4, to them the worst weeds were the same weeds that had most impressed the ancient Hebrews in Palestine, namely the ones enumerated in the scriptures.
Thus, the vegetable characteristic that most alarmed Carolingian writers was thorniness, an asset to plants living in arid climates populated by herders and their livestock, but a much less necessary defense against evaporation and animal browsers in temperate northwestern Europe. And though they likely had never seen the plant, Carolingian readers of the Gospel of Matthew knew darnel as the absolute nadir of weediness, because the Evangelist recorded Jesus’story that linked darnel to the devil’s intention to harm good folks. Darnel traversed the Carolingian literary landscape as a vegetable pariah, consistently catalogued as the most wicked plant, particularly because it was thought disobedient to God’s command that all vegetation be true to its seed.
A unique ability to mutate during growth and transform its botanical nature, certified by ancient scientific botany, lent to darnel a note of treachery and further contributed to Carolingian people’s low opinion of it. Chapter 5 explores some of the aesthetic choices deriving from the conviction that postlapsarian vegetation differed from Edenic in several radical ways. The survival in Rome of several depictions of paradisiacal landscapes permits an analysis of how Carolingian-era patrons and artists, and presumably spectators, liked to think about perfection in plants. This ideal vegetable world by definition eluded the limitations of weediness, and thus enables a look at plant life through the rosiest-tinted of glasses. As explained in a previous section of this introduction, the edgy, mutable nature of weeds deeply impressed Carolingian writers.
The very same plants whose mistimed growth made them weeds might become acceptable, with just a little more patience or wisdom. Chapter 6 of this study highlights how plants deemed enemies of humanity in most circumstances could, in certain other circumstances, be rehabilitated. Some weeds were fine pasture for domestic animals. But it was their utility to human health, defined both biologically and spiritually, that mostly elevated them. Carolingian pharmacology was sophisticated in its acceptance and redeployment of ancient herbal lore, and in some cases scribes edited their ancient texts to better match northwestern European botanical possibilities, omitting those simples (plants able to cure disease unadulterated) that did not grow north of the Alps or were unknown outside the Mediterranean. But whatever their strategies, the medical writers knew that some spiny or notoriously toxic plants could produce physiological changes that were beneficial to afflicted people.
Furthermore, rather as in the nineteenth-century tales of Br’er Rabbit from the American South, early medieval ascetics saw an opportunity in prickly and thorny plants. Br’er Rabbit was liberated from the gummy trap set for him by his antagonist Br’er Fox when he persuaded his captor to roll him in the briar patch, known to all in the neighborhood as a painful place to pass through, but just rough enough to catch on the mass of sticky material that left the astute rabbit at the mercy of his predator, and allow him to skip off free.70 The insight of the story derives from the recognition that the very same plants that are dangerous and harmful may on certain occasions serve very useful purposes. Carolingian-era ascetics would have recognized this insight. They practiced several forms of bodily mortification thanks precisely to the physical properties of plants generally considered awful.
The plants thereby participated actively in the ascetical program of spiritual improvement. In doing so they confirmed that when people were excellent, the botanical universe worked in their favor, as God’s approval of that universe on the third day suggested had been the original intention. Weeds were liminal, their virtuous or vicious nature deriving from the purposes of the people who manipulated them. With the lone exception of the Romantic poets in the early 1800s, who idolized “wild” nature in all its forms, including the more unkempt ones, for millennia Europeans have consistently disliked weeds.71 This makes the sovereign as gardener motif probed in Chapter 6 all the more interesting. Carolingian rulers, especially Charlemagne, Louis the Pious, and Charles the Bald, presented themselves as ecologically responsible, or as uniquely positioned to assure to their realms and subjects favorable environments.
They did so by behaving in the morally upright ways that obtained divine favor: in a certain sense their solicitude mimicked God’s care for the world He created. They did so also by ensuring the smooth succession of the several phases of the agricultural cycle, and therefore they could be held accountable not just for poor weather that endangered harvests, but also for outbreaks of vegetable disorder that entangled farmers. That made the weed political, a perfect reflection both of the performance of a regime and of the status of the soul of its head, the kings and emperors of the Carolingian dynasty. To conclude, the Epilogue considers the classification of things, including bad ones like weeds, as an ongoing effort in early medieval European culture. It proposes that the Carolingian way of sorting out plants was ecologically as well as theologically informed.
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