A new map of medieval London

Yes, not surprising that Henry VIII found the idea of dissolving them and taking all their stuff so attractive :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_monasteries

Those abbeys and monasteries would've (as part of their endowments) owned large chunks of the agricultural land outside the city as well. I wonder what a modern map, showing all land parcels owned or controlled by an entity with a City address, might look like?

Well at the time you were looked at differently if you didn't show up at the mass. For a comparable neighborhood size they were much more easily filled at the time they are currently.

There's another interesting example of this effect in Nicola Griffith's 'Hild' books [0], which fictionalise the early life of Hilda of Whitby [1] in 7thC Britain. Some of the towns that we now recognise (York, Ipswich) already existed, but a lot of the action concerns conflict between small (but real) kingdoms that no longer exist, and that exploits the 'redcrest war streets', i.e. Roman roads, for fast tactical movement. This is one book where I really had to study the map at the beginning to figure out what was going on, even though it is my own country.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hild_(novel)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilda_of_Whitby

I remember reading a line from William Blake's diary which talked about him walking "over the fields to Lambeth" from his house in Soho.

> Rural areas are not more "natural" (as in free from human influence) than cities.

Yes, we have very little left of the primary forest that predated human colonisation over much of the British Isles. Areas that we now perceive as wild countryside are usually anything but. One example is those moorland uplands which (in Scotland) were the result of enforced clearances [0] between 1750 and 1850 and which are now often optimised for grouse shooting. The New Forest, my closest national park, is essentially William the Conqueror's hunting estate and where land use and ownership been very tightly controlled since then.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances

For example, it's worth bearing in mind that the population of Roman Londinium was larger than that of London until about the 16th century, and the population of Roman Britain was also considerably larger than during most of the medieval period. Given the timber-dependent, agrarian pre-industrial economy of the Roman era, this meant an enormous amount of forest removal (military forts and structures like Hadrian's Wall alone would have accounted for a lot of this.)

Thus, any notion of a truly natural landscape of forest in the British Isles disappeared since long, long before the immediately pre-industrial era. Likewise applies for much of Europe even. Again, an example: the landscapes of modern Spain, France and Italy, were repeatedly cleared of forests during their history, particularly by the Roman Empire's needs.

Of course, on the other hand, you could also define natural to mean anything allowed to grow without human intervention for X number of centuries, in which case, yes, there have been many truly natural old growth forests in Europe well after Roman times, simply because they regrew during the hundreds of years between the fifth century and later, heavy population growth prior to the disastrous 14th century depopulation stemming from the Black Death and Great European Famine of the early 1300s (thought to have possibly been caused by a massive volcanic eruption somewhere else in the world)

I certainly wasn't contending that current rural areas are more natural (Isabella Tree's book Wilding is really interesting on what "natural" would have meant in the very long term), but if you're talking about the 13th century - which is one of the maps mentioned above and the kind of timescale I was thinking of - then I'd contend those were much more natural compared to now.

True, but these are also medieval farmer’s fields, about as all-natural and organic as possible. They are certainly more natural than a parking lot, and barring very much stone construction would probably rewild within a generation or two.

Edit: The more I think of it the stone construction really is the most unnatural part. Especially the ancient tradition of building those little walls using the stones you cleared in order to plow.

England was mostly clear cut long before the Industrial Revolution. That was possibly one of the main reasons it happened, there was huge demand for coal because there was little available firewood.

e.g. https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1536/cpsprodpb/144BD/productio...

But today, there's whole lot more greenery in UK than at the bottom of deforestration that happened around ~1955.