With a spring in our step
April is the month for gathering flowers, advises Amy Jeffs
IN Old English, April was called Eastermonað (Easter month). The venerable Bede tells us pagan tribes worshipped a goddess of that name and modern linguists trace Eostre to ancient words for dawn and new life. Her breath is on the air at this time of year, whether you are a farmer, leaving the lambing sheds on a wild morning, or a writer fantasising about spring from her desk.
Medieval calendars often feature an illustration of each month’s conventional ‘labour’. Already in this series, we’ve had feasting, the warming of feet before a fire and digging. Now, we come to the sensuous task of April: gathering flowers or plucking green branches from trees. The figures shown in these illustrations evoke Chaucer’s claim that April’s ‘tender shoots’ and ‘young sun’ coax people outdoors—most importantly, his pilgrims. As Chaucer would have known, there were allegorical associations, too. The act of picking flowers was a learned medieval metaphor for the creation of literature: the assembling of stories to entertain and edify or the choice arranging of language to augment readers’ delight.
However, for all April’s prettiness, tales of a more complex natural world reside in its complement of feast days (fixed, unlike Easter). That of St Mary of Egypt falls on the first of the month, or Kalends. She is said to have died in about 421, after years in the wilderness beyond the River Jordan. Medieval artists show her clothed only by her long mane of hair, sometimes unruly, sometimes lush and wavy.
The ascetic example of such saints, especially the so-called desert fathers of early Christian monasticism, inspired Irish and Northumbrian monks to find their own, albeit damper, deserts in the landscapes of Ireland and Britain, leading many to settle in the wilds of the Fens. It was there that Guthlac of Crowland, whose feast falls on April 11 (or three days before Ides), is said to have retreated until his death in 714. His 8thcentury biographer, Felix (translated here by Bertram Colgrave), describes the saint’s ‘desert’ as being ‘now of bogs, sometimes of black waters overhung by fog, sometimes studded with wooded islands and traversed by the windings of tortuous streams’. Yet, Felix writes, Guthlac’s sanctity attracted the Fens’ fishes and birds like sheep to a shepherd. When two swallows arrived at the empty burial mound he used as his hermitage, they landed singing on the saints’ shoulders as if back in a familiar home. Making them a nest in a basket, he hung it in the eaves and the mating pair moved in.
Summer is still heralded by April’s inundation of migratory swallows and we can learn from St Guthlac in ensuring they have somewhere to make their nests. Indeed, as we emerge from a long year in the black waters and tortuous streams of a pandemic, the medieval invitation to delight in and care for the natural world is one we should accept. Not only that, we should mark it—leaf green—in our calendars.
April’s “tender shoots” and “young sun” coax people outdoors