Stability Through Motion

“Quiet!” warned Adam. “The wood has ears, the field has eyes, and the forester has three young archers who serve the king and guard the deer day and night and have a lodge high upon a hill.”

from King Edward and the Shepherd, medieval manuscript, c.1300

That field hath eyen, and the wood hath ears.

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The Knightes Tale. Line 1524.

Becomes John Heywood’s, Proverbes Part II, c.V of 1565

Fieldes have eies and woods have eares

From Herman Hesse’s Wanderings

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts. Trees have long thoughts, long breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

Wandering : Notes and Sketches / translated by James Wright. – New York : Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972

Mr Salmon went on with measuring the Glebe, but my Lord set out for London. Hooper brought me a Draught from my Lord for £30 but Self paid only £20 & at the same time paid him a Bill deliver’d in by Verney with a vast Abatement. Thomas Silvester sent Richard to my Lord’s House instead of sending him down to the Field. Paid Betty Overton a Quarter’s Wages.

From The Deserted Village, The Diary of an Oxfordshire rector James Newton of Nuneham Courtenay 1736-86, Alan Sutton, 1992, edited by Gavin Hannah.

I’m reading this as research for an installation piece I’ll be producing in July at the Harcourt Arboretum at Nuneham Courtenay. Newton was rector during the period when the village of Nuneham Courtenay was demolished and moved, to provide Lord Harcourt with an unobscured view of the spires of Oxford from his manor.