But owthir in frith or felde: the rural in the York cycle

Comparative Drama, Summer, 2003 by Chester Scoville

City dwellers frequently treat their city as foreground and that which surrounds it as background, or, indeed, as invisible. Such an attitude is, perhaps, part of the urban experience itself, not only in modern cities but also in medieval ones. A city such as York seems small and even somewhat rustic to a dweller in a modern metropolis like New York, Toronto, or London; but to the medieval people who called York home, the city was anything but bucolic. In the opening chapter of his Tudor York, David Palliser argues that "town and hinterland" were linked and complementary rather than opposed "in the case of a provincial capital" such as York. (1) Surely this is so, yet it does not necessarily follow that the citizens of medieval York were always entirely at ease with this complementary relationship. Indeed, one can detect in the greatest literary production of that city--the York cyde--an attitude toward the rural that is both suspicious and colonizing. The plays of York show a dramatic flexibility that allows the city streets on which they are performed to become a variety of places: everywhere from heaven to hell and all degrees between. Yet they are peculiarly cautious when portraying the countryside around the city, as if reluctant to touch the place without strict controls over what aspects of the rural may, and may not, be let inside.

This attitude is of course not surprising given the theology of the plays, nor is it unique to them. The ancient and baleful statement "Maledicta terra in opere tuo" ("Cursed is the earth in thy work") (Gen. 3:17), (2) and the striking portrayal of heaven as a city, the New Jerusalem where death, sorrow, and toil will have been eliminated (Apoc. [Rev.] 21), create an enduring and apparently scripturally mandated contrast between the dangers of the rural and the goodness of the city. Naturally enough, in the analogous episodes in the York cycle, the characters echo this contrast: Adam's lament about the earth's hostility to him (VI.93-116) (3) opposes the invitation to heaven at the Last Judgement (XLVII.365-68).

Not only Scripture but also geography and history could lead the citizens of York to view the world outside the walls askance. The landscape immediately around the city was not as inviting as it became in later centuries, for during the late medieval and Tudor periods it consisted largely of scrub, deforested woodland, and marsh. (4) The marshland, furthermore, frequently invaded the city; poor drainage would often cause heavy rains or melting snow to rush into the city, drowning the streets (5); an ice flood in late 1564 followed by a sudden thaw in early 1565 caused the destruction of Ouse Bridge and twelve houses thereon. (6) Historically, also, the countryside around York was not unusually marked by instability. The proximity to Scotland and the frequent and hostile Scottish incursions into Yorkshire during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries led the York Council in 1419 to ban the northern outsiders from holding any official position in the city or participating in any civic business. (7) Additionally, a series of rebellions in the North, from Archbishop Scrope's rebellion against Henry IV in 1405 to the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536, repeatedly brought trouble to the city from the outside. (8)

Awareness of and reaction to these realities can be seen in the very terminology with which the York plays describe the contrast between urban and nonurban. In the play of "The Temptation" Diabolus describes the world as consisting of"Toure and toune, forest and felde" (XXII. 146). In the cycle as a whole, the first two--examples of what usually is called civilization--appear a total of thirty-six times, while the last two--examples of the rural and the wild--appear a total of fifteen. Furthermore, toune appears far more frequently than toure--twenty-nine times to seven, focusing attention on the specifically urban--and felde, the cultivated aspect of nature, far outshows forest--twelve times to three. Even the biblically significant word wildirness--the place to which prophets, saints, and Christ himself retreat to receive spiritual revelation--appears a scant five times, and the similarly significant word desert, once. (9)

Pursuing this word study further, one finds that the two dominant places--town and field--are insistently contrasted with each other. Of the twelve occurrences of the word felde, seven of them appear in the same line as the word towne, and of the remaining five at least three contain implicit contrasts with the idea of the town. All of this suggests two major points. First, a recurring contrast in the York cycle is that between urban and everything that is not urban; the most commonly made such contrast is between town and field. Second, when the field is thought of in the York cycle--or when the natural or rural, more generally, is thought of--it is almost always as a contrast with the town rather than as a place in its own right, with its own life, culture, or agency.