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ENGLISH PASTORAL

SESSION 4 - THE DAWN OF THE PASTORAL

THE GEOGRAPHICAL ENDOWMENT

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said,
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

(Philip Larkin The Trees 1974)

One of the aims of these sessions is to explore how geographical factors shaped our

early history. In this context, the word pastoral has several connotations: shepherds;
countryside; the slow pace of rural life; peace and tranquillity. In one respect, English
Pastoral, as we’ve seen, is a misleading label for early English history and its bouts of
turmoil and violence. Yet it has value in conjuring up a pre-industrial, pre-urban,
lower-tech age.

A promised land: the first historians
How did the earliest historians portray the geography of the offshore islands? They
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all, from Gildas (6 century) to Geoffrey of Monmouth (12 century), start their
histories off with a brisk geographical survey. This is slightly less useful than it sounds,
because they all seem to copy the same information from one another.

Gildas (On the Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae, mid-6th century) is the first
historian of the Britons. He begins, as all the early histories do, with a brief
geographical survey :

“The islands of Britain, situated on almost the utmost border of the earth, towards
the south and west, and poised in the divine balance, as it is said, which supports the
whole world, stretches out from the south-west towards the north pole, and is eight