Peasants or people of importance alike, do they acknowledge that such places are their community's heritage? If a Roman peasant from late 16th century looked at the ruins of a temple from Roman Empire, would they even care? Would a local lord know the backgrounds of all the historical sights in their domain?
I can give you a specific example of such that we know about! There is an Old English poem in the Exeter Book (a collection of poetry compiled around 1000AD) that critics popularly call "The Ruin" (poems were untitled), and the poem is a reflection upon the presumably-Roman architecture left by the Anglo-Saxon's predecessors on the island of Great Britain.
It starts off as:
Wrætlic is þes wealstan, wyrde gebræcon;
burgstede burston, brosnað enta geweorc.
Hrofas sind gehrorene, hreorge torras,
hrungeat berofen, hrim on lime,
scearde scurbeorge scorene, gedrorene,
ældo undereotone. Eorðgrap hafað
waldend wyrhtan forweorone, geleorene,
heardgripe hrusan, oþ hund cnea
werþeoda gewitan. Oft þæs wag gebad
ræghar ond readfah rice æfter oþrum,
ofstonden under stormum; steap geap gedreas.
The translation freely available on Wikipedia by Jack Watson goes:
This masonry is wondrous; fates broke it
courtyard pavements were smashed; the work of giants is decaying.
Roofs are fallen, ruinous towers,
the frosty gate with frost on cement is ravaged,
chipped roofs are torn, fallen,
undermined by old age. The grasp of the earth possesses
the mighty builders, perished and fallen,
the hard grasp of earth, until a hundred generations
of people have departed. Often this wall,
lichen-grey and stained with red, experienced one reign after another,
remained standing under storms; the high wide gate has collapsed.
What ruins exactly are being described is impossible to know. The most prevalent guess amongst critics and historians is the town of Bath, but it is likely that there was no specific structure that the poet had in mind.
The phrase enta geweorc, meaning 'the work of giants' (or the craft/workings of giants) was actually a fairly common set phrase in Old English, and as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen explains in his article 'Old English Literature and the Work of Giants', the word enta here (also eotan, cognate with Norse jotunn and the inspiration behind Tolkien's ents) can refer to Germanic giants (aforementioned jotunn in the Norse tradition being well-known), giants from Latin learning (like the cyclops of Greek and Roman myth), and/or giants from the Bible (notably the nephilim and the offspring of Cain). Giants had explicit connections to the past, also evidenced by Layamon's Brut, Nennius's Historia, and other tales of the founding of Britain in which giants existed on the island before human inhabitation. Oftentimes it is Brutus, a descendent of Aeneas and refugee of the Trojan War who conquers the giants, showing you immediately how ahistorical this concept of history truly was.
All of this is caught up in a typical perspective in the Middle Ages, one of a previous 'golden age'- the progression of time was often viewed as a progression from a state of perfection into greater and greater corruption or decay. This is enmeshed in medieval practices of identity creation, wherein histories and legends are created, written, modified, and shared in order to manufactured and solidify their current status (for example, many genealogies in the time period will trace their history back to Hengest and Horsa, the legendary heads of the Germanic invasion into Britain, and then to Odin before them, and then from Odin to the biblical Adam, thus reifying their Germanic pagan past and their Christian past in the same genealogy). This is akin to Americans who are so proud of being related to someone on the Mayflower, or people who trace their ancestry to nobility.
Check out this next section of the poem:
...hwætred in hringas, hygerof gebond
weallwalan wirum wundrum togædre.
Beorht wæron burgræced, burnsele monige,
heah horngestreon, heresweg micel,
meodoheall monig mondreama full,
oþþæt þæt onwende wyrd seo swiþe...
...Hryre wong gecrong
gebrocen to beorgum, þær iu beorn monig
glædmod ond goldbeorht gleoma gefrætwed,
wlonc ond wingal wighyrstum scan;
seah on sinc, on sylfor, on searogimmas,
on ead, on æht, on eorcanstan,
on þas beorhtan burg bradan rices.
Translated as:
...a quick design in rings, a most intelligent one bound
the wall with wire brace wondrously together.
Bright were the castle buildings, many the bathing-halls,
high the abundance of gables, great the noise of the multitude,
many a meadhall full of festivity,
until Fate the mighty changed that....
...The ruin has fallen to the ground
broken into mounds, where at one time many a warrior,
joyous and ornamented with gold-bright splendour,
proud and flushed with wine shone in war-trappings;
looked at treasure, at silver, at precious stones,
at wealth, at prosperity, at jewellery,
at this bright castle of a broad kingdom.
Here we see something strange, namely the transposition of Germanic/Anglo-Saxon values and norms onto the Roman ruins. The references to rings, to wire-wrapped goods, to castles and meadhalls are all anachronistic, but they serve a purpose in tying contemporary English identity in with the Roman architecture left behind. Rory G. Critten has a recent article in which he labels this practice "medieval medievalism"- a 'medievalism' is when later cultures look back and project their own values on the middle ages (look no further than the appropriation of medieval symbols by contemporary white supremacists for this today), and so a medieval medievalism is the same practice but by medieval peoples looking back on what they would think of as similarly historically distanced societies and times.
Of course, The Ruin comes to us as a written text, which means that in this time period only churchmen or the very rich and powerful would be able to read or write. So in this sense when we're looking at the attitudes of the early medieval English we're talking about very learned, literate attitudes. Popular perceptions and interpretations of these sites were undoubtedly quite different, but I cannot speak to them.
Hi Forongil,
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