Trees mattered in the Middle Ages for reasons that extended far beyond the wood, food and shade they provided. From sacred gathering places and religious symbols to moral diagrams and literary catalogues, trees helped medieval people understand both the natural world and the spiritual one.
What is a tree?
British Library Royal 15 E III f. 126
Medieval scholars sought to explain the natural world by examining the origins and meanings of words. In his Etymologiae, the seventh-century scholar Isidore of Seville offers an early medieval definition of trees:
The term ‘tree’ (arbor), as well as ‘small plant’ (herba), is thought to be modified from the word ‘field’ (arvum), because they cling to the earth with fixed roots. The terms resemble one another because the one grows from the other. When you have cast the seeds on the ground first the small plant springs up, and when it is tended it grows into a tree, and within a short time what you had seen as a small plant you gaze up to as a sapling.
Isidore also discusses individual species and the meanings associated with them. The palm tree, for example, “is the symbol of victory, with high and handsome growth, clothed in long-lasting fronds, and retaining its leaves without any succession of foliage.”
His description shows that medieval understandings of trees were not limited to their physical characteristics. Their appearance and manner of growth could also carry symbolic meaning.
Sacred trees in the Norse world
Yggdrasill – From the 17th century Icelandic manuscript AM 738 4to, now in the care of the Árni Magnússon Institute in Iceland
Trees held an especially prominent place in Norse mythology. Yggdrasil, the great ash tree at the centre of the Norse cosmos, connected the nine worlds through its branches and roots. The gods assembled beneath it, while several creatures lived within and around the tree, including a squirrel, an eagle and a dragon.
Trees could also serve as sacred landmarks. The eleventh-century chronicler Adam of Bremen describes a holy tree near the Norse temple at Uppsala:
Near the temple is a great tree which extends its boughs far and wide, always green in winter and summer; of what sort it is no one knows. There too is a spring, where the sacrifices of the pagan are accustomed to take place and a man is immersed alive. For as long as he is not discovered, the will of the people will be granted.
Although Adam wrote from a Christian perspective, his account reflects the religious significance that trees and natural places could hold in the medieval Norse world.
The Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life
Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) depicts Adam and Eve at the Tree of Knowledge
Trees were equally important within medieval Christianity. Two of the most significant appeared in the Garden of Eden: the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, from which Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, and the Tree of Life.
An Old English poem contrasts the appearance and meaning of the two trees. It describes the Tree of Knowledge as “entirely black, veiled and dark; that was the tree of death, that bore many bitterness,” while the Tree of Life was “so very joyous, beautiful and radiant, lithe and praiseworthy.”
The contrast transformed the trees into representations of death and salvation. Their opposing appearances allowed medieval audiences to understand spiritual ideas through familiar features of the natural world.
The Tree of Knowledge also plays a central role in the Ordinalia, a cycle of religious plays written in Cornish during the later Middle Ages. In the story, Adam sends his son Seth back to the Garden of Eden, where he receives three seeds from the tree. The wood that eventually grows from these seeds is connected with several major events in biblical history.
According to the plays, it is used in Noah’s Ark, Solomon’s Temple and Moses’ staff before finally becoming the wood of the Cross upon which Christ is crucified. The story connected humanity’s fall in Eden with its eventual salvation, using a single tree to unite events across biblical history.
Trees as meeting places
The Major Oak, painting by Henry Dawson (1811–1878) from 1844 – Wikimedia Commons
Trees could also mark locations where people assembled to make political, religious or military decisions. In Trees in the Religions of Early Medieval England, Michael D. J. Bintley explains that “trees in the Anglo-Saxon England marked meeting places where significant political decisions were made throughout the period, by both violent and peaceful methods.”
Bede records one such gathering involving Augustine of Canterbury, who “called to a meeting the bishops and teachers of the neighbouring British kingdom at a place which is still known in the English language today as Augustinaes Ac (that is Augustine’s Oak), on the borders of the Hwicce and the West Saxons.”
Trees could therefore become landmarks whose names preserved the memory of important meetings. Their visibility, age and permanence made them natural places around which communities could gather.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle offers another example from the events surrounding the Norman Conquest. Shortly before the Battle of Hastings in 1066, King Harold Godwinson is said to have assembled his army beneath a grey apple tree.
The longevity of some trees allows them to become landmarks associated with stories from the distant past. The Major Oak in Sherwood Forest, England, was thought to be between 800 and 1,200 years old and had long been linked in local folklore with Robin Hood and his Merry Men, who were said to have sheltered beneath its branches. The tree endured until 2026, when the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds announced that the tree was believed to have died after failing to produce leaves that spring. It will remain standing, continuing to serve as a landmark and a habitat for wildlife even after its death.
The trees of virtues and vices
A matching pair of a tree of vices and a tree of virtues, from a manuscript of Speculum Virginum (Walters Art Museum Ms. W.72, foll. 25v & 26r, dated ca. 1200)
By the High Middle Ages, writers and artists were using trees to organise ideas about morality. Medieval manuscripts sometimes included diagrams known as the Tree of Virtues and the Tree of Vices.
These images arranged different virtues, such as humility, and vices, such as pride, along trunks and branches. They could appear on facing pages, encouraging readers to compare the two moral paths.
Even a viewer unable to read the Latin text could distinguish between them. On the Tree of Virtues, the leaves pointed upwards towards Heaven. On the Tree of Vices, they pointed downwards towards Hell. The familiar shape of a tree thus became a tool for teaching complicated religious and moral concepts.
Almonds and medieval food
16th-century miniature depiction of the almond harvest at Qand-i Badam, Fergana Valley
Not all medieval associations with trees were spiritual or symbolic. Trees also produced valuable foods, including fruits and nuts. Almonds became particularly important in wealthy medieval kitchens.
In his book Nuts: A Global History, Ken Albala explains:
the real heyday of nut cookery occurred during the Middle Ages up to the Renaissance. No nut was more beloved than the almond, which featured in a remarkable array of recipes. Almond milk was a substitute for real dairy milk and related products during Lent and other fast days. For much of northern Europe it was an exotic and expensive import worthy of the royal tables and very clearly a mark of status, much like imported spices. Serving a dish laden with almonds or laced with almond milk was de rigeur for the fashionable medieval household.
Almond milk was especially useful because Christian fasting rules restricted the consumption of dairy products on certain days. In northern Europe, however, almonds had to be imported, making them expensive ingredients as well as markers of wealth and status.
Catalogues of trees in medieval literature
Medieval writers sometimes included catalogues of different trees in their works. Danielle Allor has noted that Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer and the author of the Roman de la Rose all wrote poetic lists featuring species such as oak, elm and birch.
The qualities emphasised in these catalogues varied according to the interests of the writer. Chaucer’s trees were often identified by their practical uses. The oak was described as “the builder oak,” reflecting its importance as a construction material, while its acorns provided food for pigs.
In the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose, beauty was more important. Trees considered too unattractive were excluded from its idealised landscape. These literary catalogues therefore reveal not only which trees medieval writers recognised, but also the different practical and aesthetic qualities they associated with them.
Trees were much more than a background feature of the medieval landscape. They provided food and materials, marked places of assembly, appeared in myths and religious traditions, and offered writers and artists a way to represent morality, knowledge, death and salvation.
Those interested in learning more about the subject can read Michael D. J. Bintley’s Trees in the Religions of Early Medieval England, published by Boydell & Brewer in 2015. You can buy it on Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk
Top Image: Bibliothèque nationale de France MS Français 342 fol.102v
Trees mattered in the Middle Ages for reasons that extended far beyond the wood, food and shade they provided. From sacred gathering places and religious symbols to moral diagrams and literary catalogues, trees helped medieval people understand both the natural world and the spiritual one.
What is a tree?
Medieval scholars sought to explain the natural world by examining the origins and meanings of words. In his Etymologiae, the seventh-century scholar Isidore of Seville offers an early medieval definition of trees:
The term ‘tree’ (arbor), as well as ‘small plant’ (herba), is thought to be modified from the word ‘field’ (arvum), because they cling to the earth with fixed roots. The terms resemble one another because the one grows from the other. When you have cast the seeds on the ground first the small plant springs up, and when it is tended it grows into a tree, and within a short time what you had seen as a small plant you gaze up to as a sapling.
Isidore also discusses individual species and the meanings associated with them. The palm tree, for example, “is the symbol of victory, with high and handsome growth, clothed in long-lasting fronds, and retaining its leaves without any succession of foliage.”
His description shows that medieval understandings of trees were not limited to their physical characteristics. Their appearance and manner of growth could also carry symbolic meaning.
Sacred trees in the Norse world
Trees held an especially prominent place in Norse mythology. Yggdrasil, the great ash tree at the centre of the Norse cosmos, connected the nine worlds through its branches and roots. The gods assembled beneath it, while several creatures lived within and around the tree, including a squirrel, an eagle and a dragon.
Trees could also serve as sacred landmarks. The eleventh-century chronicler Adam of Bremen describes a holy tree near the Norse temple at Uppsala:
Near the temple is a great tree which extends its boughs far and wide, always green in winter and summer; of what sort it is no one knows. There too is a spring, where the sacrifices of the pagan are accustomed to take place and a man is immersed alive. For as long as he is not discovered, the will of the people will be granted.
Although Adam wrote from a Christian perspective, his account reflects the religious significance that trees and natural places could hold in the medieval Norse world.
The Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life
Trees were equally important within medieval Christianity. Two of the most significant appeared in the Garden of Eden: the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, from which Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, and the Tree of Life.
An Old English poem contrasts the appearance and meaning of the two trees. It describes the Tree of Knowledge as “entirely black, veiled and dark; that was the tree of death, that bore many bitterness,” while the Tree of Life was “so very joyous, beautiful and radiant, lithe and praiseworthy.”
The contrast transformed the trees into representations of death and salvation. Their opposing appearances allowed medieval audiences to understand spiritual ideas through familiar features of the natural world.
The Tree of Knowledge also plays a central role in the Ordinalia, a cycle of religious plays written in Cornish during the later Middle Ages. In the story, Adam sends his son Seth back to the Garden of Eden, where he receives three seeds from the tree. The wood that eventually grows from these seeds is connected with several major events in biblical history.
According to the plays, it is used in Noah’s Ark, Solomon’s Temple and Moses’ staff before finally becoming the wood of the Cross upon which Christ is crucified. The story connected humanity’s fall in Eden with its eventual salvation, using a single tree to unite events across biblical history.
Trees as meeting places
Trees could also mark locations where people assembled to make political, religious or military decisions. In Trees in the Religions of Early Medieval England, Michael D. J. Bintley explains that “trees in the Anglo-Saxon England marked meeting places where significant political decisions were made throughout the period, by both violent and peaceful methods.”
Bede records one such gathering involving Augustine of Canterbury, who “called to a meeting the bishops and teachers of the neighbouring British kingdom at a place which is still known in the English language today as Augustinaes Ac (that is Augustine’s Oak), on the borders of the Hwicce and the West Saxons.”
Trees could therefore become landmarks whose names preserved the memory of important meetings. Their visibility, age and permanence made them natural places around which communities could gather.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle offers another example from the events surrounding the Norman Conquest. Shortly before the Battle of Hastings in 1066, King Harold Godwinson is said to have assembled his army beneath a grey apple tree.
The longevity of some trees allows them to become landmarks associated with stories from the distant past. The Major Oak in Sherwood Forest, England, was thought to be between 800 and 1,200 years old and had long been linked in local folklore with Robin Hood and his Merry Men, who were said to have sheltered beneath its branches. The tree endured until 2026, when the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds announced that the tree was believed to have died after failing to produce leaves that spring. It will remain standing, continuing to serve as a landmark and a habitat for wildlife even after its death.
The trees of virtues and vices
By the High Middle Ages, writers and artists were using trees to organise ideas about morality. Medieval manuscripts sometimes included diagrams known as the Tree of Virtues and the Tree of Vices.
These images arranged different virtues, such as humility, and vices, such as pride, along trunks and branches. They could appear on facing pages, encouraging readers to compare the two moral paths.
Even a viewer unable to read the Latin text could distinguish between them. On the Tree of Virtues, the leaves pointed upwards towards Heaven. On the Tree of Vices, they pointed downwards towards Hell. The familiar shape of a tree thus became a tool for teaching complicated religious and moral concepts.
Almonds and medieval food
Not all medieval associations with trees were spiritual or symbolic. Trees also produced valuable foods, including fruits and nuts. Almonds became particularly important in wealthy medieval kitchens.
In his book Nuts: A Global History, Ken Albala explains:
the real heyday of nut cookery occurred during the Middle Ages up to the Renaissance. No nut was more beloved than the almond, which featured in a remarkable array of recipes. Almond milk was a substitute for real dairy milk and related products during Lent and other fast days. For much of northern Europe it was an exotic and expensive import worthy of the royal tables and very clearly a mark of status, much like imported spices. Serving a dish laden with almonds or laced with almond milk was de rigeur for the fashionable medieval household.
Almond milk was especially useful because Christian fasting rules restricted the consumption of dairy products on certain days. In northern Europe, however, almonds had to be imported, making them expensive ingredients as well as markers of wealth and status.
Catalogues of trees in medieval literature
Medieval writers sometimes included catalogues of different trees in their works. Danielle Allor has noted that Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer and the author of the Roman de la Rose all wrote poetic lists featuring species such as oak, elm and birch.
The qualities emphasised in these catalogues varied according to the interests of the writer. Chaucer’s trees were often identified by their practical uses. The oak was described as “the builder oak,” reflecting its importance as a construction material, while its acorns provided food for pigs.
In the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose, beauty was more important. Trees considered too unattractive were excluded from its idealised landscape. These literary catalogues therefore reveal not only which trees medieval writers recognised, but also the different practical and aesthetic qualities they associated with them.
Trees were much more than a background feature of the medieval landscape. They provided food and materials, marked places of assembly, appeared in myths and religious traditions, and offered writers and artists a way to represent morality, knowledge, death and salvation.
Those interested in learning more about the subject can read Michael D. J. Bintley’s Trees in the Religions of Early Medieval England, published by Boydell & Brewer in 2015. You can buy it on Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk
Top Image: Bibliothèque nationale de France MS Français 342 fol.102v
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