March from the Da Costa Hours

The typical labors of March include digging and plowing in preparation for spring planting. In this March calendar image from the Morgan Library’s Da Costa Hours (Morgan Library MS M.399, f.4v) a false frame surrounds a full page illumination by Simon Bening.

Outside a castle with a moat and bridge, two workers are digging garden beds with “D” handled spades.To their right, two gentlemen (based on their expensive clothing) on a walkway, one in blue with a hat, and one resplendent in a red furled cape, appear to be conversing with one of the workers, perhaps, giving instructions about the garden beds.

In the background a grape arbor covers the walkway, with a worker on a ladder tending the young vines.

The garden area is enclosed by a low wall, and a hedge. Beyond the garden area, a bridge crosses a moat to the castle. Two people, one of them a woman, are in conversation on the bridge just outside the a door leading inside the castle. Beyond the garden workers, on the path under an arbor, a worker on a ladder is tying vines to the arbor—another of the labors of March. In the distance, just vaguely discernible before the rise of a hill, you can see a plough and team.

If you look very closely at the castle chimney, there’s a stork’s nest on the on the top of chimney. This is a White Stork, Ciconia ciconia. They’ve been nesting on the roofs and chimneys of Europe for centuries, to the point where the White stork is associated with fertility and luck (hence the folklore about storks delivering babies). White storks return to the same nests, year after year, and the presence of White storks is one of the heralds of spring, even in medieval bestiaries. In recent decades the white stork populations have declined. There has been some success in attracting storks to return in Alsace.