14 - Framing Medieval Landscapes: Region and Place in County Durham

Summary

All history involves the creation of viable balances between detail, seen for instance in the minutiae of an individual land charter – the legitimate subject of a single learned paper by a historian – and the broader sweeps of regional and national contexts. To create the latter, broad brush representations necessarily replace the finely grained textures. This contrast is to be seen in the antithesis between the Spanish fighting bull, all rush and testosterone, found in a few strokes from Picasso, and the meticulous and bejewelled detail of an artist such as van Eyck. In art, and history, there is a place for both. This essay uses work by the three authors in order to sketch some broad brush lines concerning the medieval landscapes of County Durham.

The land itself and its adjacent sea, a complex of geology, relief, soils, vegetation and water, locked together within frames defined by latitude and longitude, have always been the setting for local human affairs. Clearance and farming, building and destruction, management and usage have all played a part, with each generation maintaining, altering and sometimes destroying the cultural landscapes inherited from previous generations: an endless succession, paradoxically involving both stability and change. One indicator of the problems involved when dealing with historic landscapes is to be seen in field observations of portions of the boundary banks of Steward Shield Meadow (map 14.4). On the eastern side of the site these have actually been cut away by valley-side retreat, itself the result of increased run-off occasioned by woodland clearance and the grazing of many beasts. We know that the site was deserted by the later fourteenth century and the banks can be seen as ‘medieval’. They probably were, and the interpretation of the site as an eighty-acre moorland farm (see below and map 14.4) is reasonable. However, the fact that the pollen diagram shows that the major clearance took place long before this date leaves other options open amid a mere sixty-two centimetres of muddy peat: we cannot, without extensive excavation, prove that the banks are not Romano-British or prehistoric. The problem is one of correlating evidence that can disappear through the fingers like dry sand.