Soil

Much like its real-life counterpart, a word like soil need only have the slightest pressure applied to it for it to crumble into a series of constituent assumptions. Some crumbs are stickier than others. These are the ones to investigate, to press further until they, too, break down into smaller parts, revealing beliefs even more discreet, yet just as influential. Like most etymological excavations, I began with a dictionary search in the OED. Soil is the commonly abbreviated form of ‘topsoil’ – that layer of cakey mass beneath your feet, which recalls an old childhood lane with its sometimes faintly sweet, sometimes pungent smell of decay and renewal. At its most evocative, soil can behave like a sensual feedback loop, bringing to the surface ‘roots’ made through feelings and associations. But this is where the political dimensions of soil hide in plain sight.

Whether we are aware of it or not, soil situates us in a conversation with our early modern past, when the term was more openly ideologically freighted than it is today. Soil could signify ‘the place of one’s nativity’ or ‘estate’, and was therefore synonymous with rites of ‘possession’ and ‘property’. Yet the certainties of such meanings were to be problematised by the global expansion of trade and the ensuing commercialisation of agriculture, which meant that the private management of one’s ‘soil’ quickly began to implicate questions of national identity and global distinction. Many literary historians have traced this change by attending to husbandry metaphors in canonical works, as well as to the new emphasis placed upon physical contact with dirt and manual labour in matters of national security. By contrast, more revisionist academic approaches, such as ecocriticism, have tended to read soil imagery as the green shoots of a modern climate consciousness.

The increasing academic attention soil has received demonstrates that it is as much a cultural phenomenon as it is a humdrum fact of life. Not simply because it is ‘cultivated’ by farmers, who ‘soil’ the land with manure, but because it continues to demand an analytical framework through which we might approach the non-human. So far, we have only succeeded in humanising it by giving it a ‘culture’ of familiarising associations. Filial metaphors, such as ‘Mother Earth’, are surprisingly persistent, and not just in ecocritical studies. Soil taxonomy adopts the notion of a ‘parent’ material for the purposes of classifying certain soils by their mineral lineage. In psychology, meanwhile, ‘digging’ metaphors have become a cliched means for demystifying the subconscious drives of psychotherapy.

Gervase Markham, The English Husbandman (London, 1613)

But if soil can be abstracted, it can also be politicised by nationalistic rhetoric. In early modern agrarian discourses, national identity was tied to the land, and the physical depths of soil could conveniently analogise apparently ancestral claims of collective ‘roots.’ In the fug of dirt and manual labour, lofty ideas of national belonging could feel concrete, earthy and urgent. This faux vitality was (and is) a consequence of the poetic flexibility of soil in nationalistic imagery, and the tendency to draw upon its hazily sentimental, subjective associations as argumentative proof in a variety of contexts. As Wendy Wall has observed, Gervase Markham’s 1613 husbandry manual — pictured above — is just one text of the many whose attempts to quantify the nebulous ethnic qualities of English soil became a means of securing national distinction in a burgeoning print market. And yet, in an age haunted by recurrent dearth and famine, necessitating transnational engagement with foreign agricultural methods, we need only to look at the contemporary, proto-scientific discourses of Hugh Platt — and later Samuel Hartlib — to see how national narratives of this kind were at odds with the practical realities of soil-improvement.

However, old rhetorical pathways are strong. There is no clearer sense of a national character up for sale than in the present day climate of Brexit — the United Kingdom proclaiming its unparalleled global appeal, while seemingly striving for economic and political isolation. Yet national character has never been found in the molecular content of the landscape. Soil has distinctive qualities, but it is not inherently divisive. Indeed, taken literally, we might learn from biological fact: while soils exist in layers called ‘horizons’, such layers often confound attempts to separate them for the purposes of scientific categorisation. Some soils, for instance, are the result of aeolian weathering, where wind transports and deposits sandy particles from far away countries onto a ‘home’ soil. Neither axis – neither home, nor away – remains an unwavering line once we explore soil’s generative possibilities.

Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life (Vintage, 2020)

Text Illustrations: Colin Elder (2020)

Here we might look at another early modern usage: to ‘soyle’ a problem is to find its solution. One might also ‘soyle’ a riddle and discover the ‘soyle’ of a mystery. It doesn’t take a great linguistic leap of the imagination to see the verbal kinship with the word ‘solve’. In this sense, while soil presents us with difficult questions about selfhood and connection, it might also direct us, if not towards a solution, then perhaps to a more inspired approach towards ‘otherness’. Realising that nostalgic discourse about national character is, and has been since the 1500s, used as a political and economic stratagem, means we can embrace our historical dependence on global, cross-cultural inter-connections. There has been a surge in encouraging literature about the boundary-blurring capacity of soil in the academic world, as well as in popular nonfiction. As I write this, Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life (2020) — a work which situates us firmly within the hidden world of fungal networks and challenges our preconceptions about the boundaries which separate self from environment — stands on the Waterstones’ bestsellers list. This level of popular appeal suggests that such concerns have found an audience beyond the esoteric confines of academia. While the riddle of national identity still endures, soil invites us to question our assumptions, and in doing so, replace compliant sentimentality with a generous, liberating curiosity.

Katherine Mudge is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at the University of Exeter.

Selected Bibliography.

Markam, Gervase. The English Husbandman (London, 1613).

Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life (Vintage, 2020).

Wall, Wendy. ‘Renaissance National Husbandry: Gervase Markham and the Publication of England’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 27.3 (1996), pp. 767-85.

5 March 2021.