Landscapes of Fantasy: Lay Out Three Fields

There’s a lot of movement recently towards finding fresh settings for fantasy, rather than the all-too-common Mediaeval Europe look. I still have a certain attachment to Mediaeval Europe, not least because plenty of the books which have brought us all to the point of boredom with it don’t describe it well. I live among the remnants and ghosts of this landscape. They aren’t a background, or a pretty picture. Rather, the way they look derives from a way of doing, and they are a physical record of work and habitation.

It’s hugely helpful for world-building to understand the detail of how people use and move through a landscape, but unless you are setting your tale deep in the everyday life of the countryside, in which case you will need to do more research than reading this, it is perfectly possible to improve your world-building just by understanding better how a pre-modern British agricultural landscape might look.

Now, we are lucky, because the artists of Northern Europe have taken huge interest in this theme. We have a near limitless resource of paintings and woodcuts which are only a Google search away.

This is Not It

The first thing: this isn’t a polite, ‘park’ type landscape such as we understand from the term ‘landscape painting’. It’s not a decorous, empty landscape to pop behind an elegant portrait as in the famous painting ‘Mr and Mrs Andrews’ by Gainsborough.

Ditch (pun intended) the concept of the artistically spaced trees, the occasional flock of tastefully scattered sheep and the complete absence of people working the land. These are all part of the Romantic image of landscape, in which ‘nature’ is wonderous and yet artistic. This is a view which crystallised at the moment in time when the Lake District ceased to be viewed as a nasty, cold, wet, impractical wilderness and became the home of poesy, and the Lady of Shalott cast off on her fatal trip downriver.

Via such Gothic pieces as the Castle of Otranto and Dracula, this has fed the trope of an exciting, desolate, blasted landscape topped with fancy pinnacles and castles straight into the modern Fantasy tradition. Here, it causes things like Peter Jackson’s famous shot of Minas Tirith rising from an empty plain.

This is in complete contradiction to Tolkien’s description of the fields and orchards of the Pelennor. Tolkien quite sensibly concerns himself with what people are going to eat, be it seed-cake and cold chicken or fii-sssh. His wildernesses are away from habitation. But many other authors equate mediaeval landscapes with endless forests and moors in the name of ‘romance’. This drives me to extreme exasperation.

Three Fields

So having established what we are not dealing with, let’s get back to all the things that are going on in a more realistic sort of country life.

There’s a whole set of differences between upland and lowland landscapes. As I’m more familiar with lowland, that’s what I’m writing about. Here, I’m going to look a bit at what kind of settlement and field patterns we can expect and how, in an English context at least, that relates to who owns what.

First, let’s look at the shorthand which is usually used to explain the functioning of an English mediaeval village, the ‘three-field system’. This goes with the manorial system. The Lord has a manor: what he says goes, except that he holds the manor from the King, and owes service to the King in return. That’s of no relevance to the locals who live in the village attached to the manor. They care more about the mill and the church and the wood and the park reserved for the Lord’s deer.

There is meadowland where the grass grows tall, shut up for hay through the early summer, and pasture for grazing. Note these are two different terms for two different uses, and not interchangeable words for grass. You can see these important items laid out in Domesday Book. Look, while you’re there, at the map showing how none of this land is empty. The only gaps you will see are on moors and mountains. Otherwise, villages are at most a couple of miles apart across the whole of lowland Britain. 

The manor has its own court, which deals with infringements on common land, disputes between neighbours, and all the juicy intrigues of village life, usually ending up with someone paying a fine to the Lord. When the villagers aren’t being requisitioned for the dubious privilege of working the lord’s land, otherwise known as his demesne (this is the service they owe him for existing, pretty much) they get to work their own land. This is arranged in (bet you saw this coming) three fields. They are big.

In the first field, wheat is growing, but that might not be obvious at a glance, for it looks nothing like modern wheats. Six foot tall in the straw by harvest time, it is highly efficient at getting nutrients out of poor soil, and maybe even ‘bearded’, with a spiked awn protruding from the end of every grain, like modern barley. It is planted on long ridges that run the length of the field. The reasons for this are largely down to ploughing arrangements, but in damp districts it must also have helped prevent the roots of the cereal from waterlogging in a wet winter.

Drainage, apart from very basic bush drains (a channel dug, stuffed with branches and refilled over them), is a thing of the distant future. Our fantasylands are spongy with water in a damp February, and splash mud up to the knees.

The second field is growing a legume. In England this would be beans or peas. It is worth noting that the smell of a beanfield in flower, gusting and catching in the warm wind of early summer, is one of the most delightful scents I know. The field drones with bees.

The third field is fallow, which means it is having a rest and nothing is planted. While it is resting, it will grow weeds, and livestock may be turned onto it, fertilising it with their dung.

I should add at this point that variants of this system exist around the world, from China to Russia. The English by no means invented it. It probably came in piecemeal from around the time of Charlemagne (around 800 CE), and replaced the two-field system which fallowed half the land each year. Introducing the legume into the rotation enriches the soil. This enables two-thirds of the land to grow a crop each year, rather than half, so it is hardly surprising it caught on.

However, the date and completeness of the transition is much disputed. We have lost a lot of evidence over the years as manorial records got nibbled by mice, lost or chucked away. My grandfather, who worked in a London lawyers’ firm back in the 1950s, once salvaged one item from a great pile of discarded parchment documents–and, I am sorry to say, he made a lampshade with it. So any discussion of the matter will be incomplete, and in a more formal academic context almost everything I am saying would have a footnote at the end qualifying it.

Back to our Village

Common land is scattered around the edges of the place, a source of grazing, firewood and forage. Sometimes straggling extra settlements grow up there. There may be a wood, very intensively managed for coppice, timber, and if it contains beech or oak, pannage.

Pannage is the practice of letting pigs into a wood in autumn to gorge themselves on beech mast or acorns. It fattens the pigs and ensures other, less robust livestock don’t poison themselves by eating them. Pannage is a bonus, and only worth getting excited about in a good mast year. If you want to get your farm-boy out of the village into the woods on a crisp autumn morning so something exciting can happen, put him in charge of the pigs.

But, as I have said, there are just three very large fields, and there are a great many villagers. So even the Lord of the Manor does not have his demesne fenced off and marked as private. It is all mixed up in the same three fields, and, like everyone else’s, held in the form of long thin strips, or lands. This is how a thirteenth-century landholding can end up being described in a legal document:

‘Nine and a half acres in the field which is called Micklehill, of which in the northern part of the field one piece lies between the land of Richard Damien and the land of Richard de Ruhae and abuts on the land of William son of Nicholas and at the other head on the land of Richard de Ruhae, and another piece lies between the land of John Ole and the free land of the church of Ingfield and abuts at one head on the Akerheggesbrook.’ (Translated from Latin by me, probably with the odd error.)

There is nothing like direct quotation to take you into another way of thinking, in which personal names and physical location define ownership.

The land being transferred above, in an extract from a Cartulary, or book of charters, is passing to the local abbey. The Church is a huge landholder in mediaeval England–indeed, across mediaeval Europe. It is, or various of its institutions are, Lord of many manors, and it acquires yet more land in return for prayer or a votive candle on a saint’s day. Abbey farms or ‘granges’ manage many of these holdings, and their names still pepper the map of England.

It is rare in the lands of Fantasy for religion to tie so closely into the economic and physical landscape, though the equivalents of the Church are frequently both wealthy and corrupt. Though fantasy certainly doesn’t have to copy real life (or always have page space to do so), if you are getting too deep into religious intrigue you could quite plausibly slip out of the echoing corridors for a scene or two and pursue your mystery out onto a farm.

‘Et poma pira et nuces ibidem valent per annum vjs. viijd.’ All the granges appear to have had their gardens and orchards, and apples and pears and nuts repeat across them. Everything has its value, at least in the surviving records, which are very much concerned with that side of things.

Now, having told you all about the three-field system, I am going to do something annoying. I will admit it is not the full story, even on the evidence available. There are large parts of England where the one village to one manor equation breaks down. The village next to us had three, and they did not even correspond with parish boundaries. We are also in a part of England that early writers on agriculture characterised as the ‘Woodland’, as opposed to the ‘Champion’. This latter word is kin to the French campagne, and to the old sense of the word ‘camp’ from Latin ‘campus’ or plain.

The Champion is the landscape where the rule of three-fields, one village, one manor holds fairly good. It tends to be open and rolling, with fewer trees, large well-spaced villages and little woodland.

The Woodland has not just more woodland, but a landscape knit out of tall bristling-hedged fields, scattered substantial farmsteads, and an air not quite vanished of slightly surly independence. I am fond of it, as you can doubtless tell. Domesday in these areas appears to list a higher number of people with slightly freer status. Although the exact meaning of any term in Domesday crumbles when examined like perished parchment, it is still possible to gain an impression. There is a tantalising hint of links to Viking influence in terms like ‘sokeman’.

It seems likely that in these areas the Lords of the Manor found themselves in a less straightforward position, with their landholdings scrambled. There is clear documentary evidence that in the Woodland a great many smaller, privately managed fields or closes existed alongside the communal three-field system.

So for your fantasy worlds, consider the possibility that as soon as things are less straightforward for the powers that be, whatever the reason–mountains, maybe, or monsters, or areas of high magical potential–there will be more space, both physical and social, for people to get on and do their own thing. It may not make the area richer, but it will affect ways of thinking and patterns of existence, and it will affect the look of the place.

And the more thought you can give to the look and life of a place, the more real it will become.