Theos-Talk Archives (June 1996 Message tl01024)

At 07:17 PM 6/28/96 -0400, you wrote:
>Alex,
>Maybe they are trying to defend themselves against roving bandit gangs on
>horseback, which is what the mazes were really for in the first place.
>
>Chuck the Heretic
>
>Reeeeealy????? Where did you get that piece of information? I always
thought they were part of the gardening craze that enveloped England from
the earliest renaissance onwards, there are also mazes in France and Italy
(da Vinci left many designs for them and even Michelangelo designed some)
that could never be conceived of as anything but decorative (hedges two to
three feet high), and the Germans didn't seem to get into the fad until the
eighteenth century. There's a nice one in Wurzburg and I saw some real
beauties in Stockholm. I think the English were the first to really go crazy
for them and I had always be told that they were used by people into "The
old Religion" as a safe place to "do their thing". The kind of people who
could afford mazes (the aristocracy) didn't have to worry about bandits
because they had their own private guards. In any case, hedges would offer
no defense against a determined mounted enemy of any kind. Have you ever
ridden a horse? I could easily take one right through a boxwood hedge! (They
were almost always composed a boxwood) In any case a man on horseback would
be in a position to fire arrows or later weapons right over one of those
hedges as few of them are more than six feet high.

alex