Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 253

Along with défrichement (wasteland clearance), bocage was one of the few French words that H.C.Darby required his novice historical geographers to learn back in the 1960s. But what was bocage? Was it woodland or hedgerow? Was it a natural response to a moist oceanic climate or the cumulative response of landowners seeking to define their property or constrain their animals? Were its origins back in the distant past, lost in the mists of time and perhaps associated with the Celts, or were the hedgerows of the bocage planted after moorland clearance during periods of population growth during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Could bocage be found in areas of crop cultivation or was it only associated with livestock husbandry? These, and other questions, filled my head when I started research on my first bocage territory in the Pays de Bray where some hedgerows were arranged irregularly but others were geometrical features resulting from heathland reclamation after 1789. In later years, I witnessed the uprooting of hedges in Brittany and the Auvergne, in the company of Pierre Flatrès and André Fel, and conversely saw new hedges being planted near Nantes, with the guidance of Jean Renard. Recently, I have explored how thick bocage in Basse-Normandie concealed German ambushes and hindered the advance of the Allies after D-Day.

These questions and experiences were set in context by the three dozen essays, written by 68 authors, that have been brought together by Annie Antoine (Université de Rennes II) and by Dominique Marguerie (also at Rennes) whose expertise spans archaeology and the ‘archéosciences’ as well as history. Indeed, Bocages et sociétés had its origins in a conference with the same title that was held at Rennes in October 2004. In their introduction, the editors explain how studying the rural landscape was once the preserve of geographers who produced regional monographs during the first half of the twentieth century in the tradition established by Paul Vidal de la Blache. However, the arrival of the ‘new geography’ in the 1960s and 1970s pushed study of the structure agraire off the main agenda of academic geography, opening the way for historians, ecologists, landscape archaeologists, and practitioners of new techniques, such as remote sensing, geographical information systems and environmental modelling, to colonize that territory. The ‘productivist’ thrust of West European farmers, to produce more foodstuffs with greater efficiency, during the 1960s and 1970s has been replaced by ‘post-productivist’ concerns for managing the whole rural environment in sustainable ways. Thus, hedgerows are now protected rather than being uprooted in the process of field enlargement. Bocage landscapes are now viewed as repositories of tradition and authenticity that respect biodiversity rather than as tangible expressions of backward farming. Legislation has been passed to protect enclosed landscapes that figure on international lists of ‘fragile environments’ and are widely seen as part of national patrimoine and regional heritage.

These changes in research practice and in popular perception resonate throughout Bocages et sociétés. Initial homage is paid to pioneer geographers, especially André Meynier and Pierre Flatrès, but geographical voices become muted in the greater part of this beautifully illustrated volume. Its spatial context is largely, but not exclusively, north-western France; a few essays refer to other parts of France, to Portugal, Spain and even Quebec. Unfortunately, there are no contributions from, or devoted to, the bocage landscapes of Britain, Ireland or other parts of the Atlantic fringe of Europe. Archaeology and palaeo-ecology figure largely in the first cluster of chapters that report latest research findings, which date the origin of enclosed landscapes in north-west France to the late middle ages. However, bocage was still being planted during the nineteenth century, as an intriguing discussion of the experience of agronomist Jules Rieffel on the former heathlands of Grand-Jouan reveals. The structure and evolution of bocage environments through time is at the heart of the second group of contributions, which introduce the recent practice of rebocagement, as farmers in Brittany plant new hedgerows in conformity with sustainable land-management policies. Echoing the views of archaeologists and ecologists, Annie Antoine declares how in western France

the bocage is essentially a ‘historic’ feature and to search for its origins prior to the last centuries of the middle ages would be in vain. Its history is thus one of implantation and increasing density that runs from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries until the middle of the twentieth century (p.185). Les sociétés bocagères are discussed in the third cluster

of essays, which contain both historic and contemporary studies. For example, attention is drawn to the legal significance of hedgerows as property boundaries, reviewing evidence from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, and the role of bocage environments as sources of firewood is illustrated from the countryside around Rennes in the nineteenth century. Recent enquiries in Brittany reveal a duality of attitudes, with some farmers recognizing the ecological and heritage value of hedgerows but others still favouring ‘productivist’ messages from the 1960s and 1970s that extolled the supposed virtues of hedgerow removal associated with plot consolidation (remembrement). Such contrasting ideas figure prominently in the final group of chapters that include nineteenth-century literary representations of bocage country as wild and rustic territory, and further deliberations on hedgerow-reconstitution policy to produce areas of néobocage.

This highly informative volume contains an excellent array of photographs and maps, some of which are in full colour. Each chapter has a substantial abstract in English, as well as one in French, thereby making the collection more accessible to an international audience. At only €23 for over 500 pages, the Presses Universitaires de Rennes have produced another publishing miracle. Bocages et sociétés is recommended to all with an interest in the evolution of French rural landscapes and in the farmers and landowners who produced, and continue to refashion, them. My one regret is the absence of detailed work on bocage country found in the British Isles, but I have benefited by expanding my vocabulary on landscape features.