Nature and Culture in Medieval Towns

Abstract

This special issue comprises papers presented at the conference titled ‘Nature and Culture in Medieval Towns’, arranged by the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU) and held in Oslo on the 6th–7th March 2019. This special issue presents four papers that explore how the dynamics between nature and culture both affected, and was affected by, the development of medieval urban settlements in the North Atlantic region, and more specifically in medieval England and Norway. Insights through interdisciplinary discussions of new and previously known archaeological data, in juxtaposition to written sources, and from novel theoretical perspectives, allow us to gain a deeper knowledge of the aforementioned dynamics. The focus on medieval urban sites becomes significant due to the recent tendencies in environmental history to promote the study of more varied social and demographic contexts as these are inevitably linked to, formed by, and forming back the environment within which they are created. In the Middle Ages, the environment was certainly under pressure and was transformed by, among other factors, intensified centralisation and urbanisation. Medieval towns were some of the first institutions that left a distinct ‘ecological footprints’, as they were dependent on the intensified exchange of energy (food, water, fuel), material (wood, stone, raw material) and waste with the surrounding ecosystems. Towns were also the main foci of political, administrative, economic, and religious activities, and the places where descriptive and prescriptive narratives about the society and people’s place in the environment were often (but not exclusively) written. Medieval urbanisation, inseparable from its environment, encompassed ecological and cultural innovations that changed nature-culture dynamics permanently and formed the historical background for modern urban development. In the first article, ‘Urban Infrastructures & Environmental Risk in Medieval England’, Roberta J. Magnusson accounts for how infrastructure sustainability became an acute problem in England during the Great Transition of the late Middle Ages. The shift from the Medieval Climate Anomaly to the Little Ice Age led to more erratic weather fluctuations and amplified the frequency and violence of severe storms. A growing mismatch in scale between rising infrastructure costs and declining resources was not just another wobble that could be corrected by a renewed mobilisation of traditional recovery mechanisms. If medieval urban infrastructures were to survive into the early modern world, they, and the organisational systems that supported them, would require reconfiguring and restructuring. This article addresses how the environmental hazards threatened three types of urban infrastructures in medieval England: rubble-core city walls, arched masonry bridges, and maritime harbour fixtures, and the ways in which medieval townsmen sought to sustain these public works. In the second article, Axel Christophersen, argues that a study of the longer-term perspectives of social, cultural, mental, and material interactions between people and environment are needed to better comprehend the dynamics and changes in urban ecosystems. The article discusses the medieval version of the concept of ‘nature’ in order to explore (1) how medieval mentalities determined people’s attitudes to nature and (2) how these influenced action and non-action when ‘nature’ rebelled. This approach is applied to a case study of medieval Trondheim, conducted by archaeologists, historians, bio-archaeologists, geneticists, and epidemiologists, where human, plant and animal remains are studied together with physical interventions (drainage, waste disposal etc.) that aimed to prevent infectious deceases in the urban landscape. This investigation provides a new understanding of how the urban community and authorities acted in the case of epidemics and climate-driven famines in medieval Norway. The article by Per Christian Underhaug discusses how water management systems during the period AD 1050–1250 shaped urban and social spaces in early medieval Bergen, Western Norway. An analysis of archaeological material from recent excavations, relevant written sources, and recent geological data demonstrates that the abundance of water from rainfall, rivers and streams was a very important resource for the development of early urban Bergen. Interventions of regulation and drainage were considered necessary and contributed to the organisation of the medieval town. Recent excavations have uncovered water management systems from the eleventh century and onwards, providing new and previously unknown