ABSTRACT
In all country districts of England, as elsewhere in Northern and Western Europe, such discipline as the King and his Privy Council at Westminster and the two Archbishops resident at Canterbury and York could assert over the ordering of their subjects’ lives and souls was exercised at a distance by their representatives whose own interests were more often local than centralist in both their political and theological orientation, and whose approaches to their appointed tasks were inescapably pragmatic. From the castle or manor house—the prime source of the livelihoods of most villagers and their families—life extended beyond its fields and farms to the woodlands, rivers, moors and swamps that characterised the local area. Everyone thus remained in daily contact with all the phenomena of nature pertaining to climate, the seasons, weather, farm and wild animals, birds, crops, herbs and other wild flowers.
