Thoughts on Herefordshire, part 1

Workin' on my MLA paper.  

Herefordshire is characterized by three simultaneous and contradictory attributes. First, it was held up as a place of extreme agricultural promise and fertility; second it was represented as a place in which the poverty of the land necessitated extraordinary agricultural innovation and industry; and third it was represented as a place where poverty and environmental stress constantly threatened.

Here is a stab at the first part (unedited):

Throughout the seventeenth century, Herefordshire was consistently idealized as an agricultural paradise by nature, a place exceeding all others in England in absolute fertility. Thomas Fuller says “It is not to be accounted the Second shire for matter of fruitfulness." Its most famous agricultural products were sheep (Lemster wool was the benchmark against which others were measured), apples, and wood. John Beale says the county “is reputed the Orchard of England, and (in the generality of good husbandry) excelleth many other places” (2). Its fruit trees “sweeten, but also purifie the ambient aire.”  Evelyn singled Herefordshire out for his companion works on woods and apples: Silva, and Pomona. Herefordshire Salmon also frequently come up in discussions of the county. According to Fuller, “the River of Wy affords brumal [winter] Salmons, fat and sound, when they are sick and spent in other places.”

The so-called Golden Vale along the tiny river Dore occupies an important place in these agricultural claims. In his atlas of Britain, John Speed introduces Herefordshire like this:

The Counties climate is most healthfull and temperate, and soyle so fertile for Corn and Cattle, that no place in England yeeldeth more or better conditioned: sweet Rivers running as veynes in the body, doe make the corne bearing grounds in some of her parts rightly to be termed the Gilden Vale: and for Waters, Wooll, and Wheat, doth contend with Nilus, Colchos, and Egypt. (49)

In his map (and others from the period), the “Gilden Vale” is one of only two features specially labeled in the county. The other is the Marcley hill landslip of 1571 or 1575 (of which more later). The title of the Golden Vale probably comes from a false etymology of the river Doire or Dore (imagined as the French d’Or), but in the minds of early modern writers that false etymology was the ground for superlative speculation.  “If any demand how much gold is to be found therein,” writes Thomas Fuller, “know that even as much as in Chrusaroas or, Golden stream, the river of Damascus so called from the yellowness of their water as this vail is so named either because gilded with flowers in the spring, or because being the best of Molds [soils, OED 1b] as Gold is of Mettalls." In their attempt to reach for superlatives, both Speed and Fuller reach for Classical comparisons (Colchos, Nilus, Chrusaroas) as does Drayton in his discussion of the Golden Vale in Poly-Olbion: 

Th'Hesperides scarce had such pleasures as be there: 

Which sometime to attaine, that mighty sonne of Jove 

One of his Labors made, and with the Dragon strove, 

That never clos'd his ies, the golden fruit to guard; 

As if t'enrich this place, from others, Nature spar'd: 

Banks crown'd with curled Groues, from cold to keepe the Plaine, 

Fields batfull, flowrie Meades, in state them to maintaine; 

Floods, to make fat those Meades, from Marble veines that spout, 

To shew, the wealth within doth answer that without.  (Drayton 106)

The Hesperides are perhaps the perfect allusion because they combine apples with the paradisal place, but Drayton is also asking the reader to imagine the Golden Vale as a place that might be threatened with depredation.