Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 1 (2022), p. 149

Soon after the fire that tragically consumed much of Notre-Dame of Paris’s roof in 2019 there were widely reported fears that it would be impossible to find trees large enough, at least in France, to rebuild the cathedral the way it was. Such fears reflect the astonishingly persistent myth that primeval forests survived into the Middle Ages. While experts are not always capable of banishing such popular misconceptions, in this case some of the confusion may derive from the fact that, for long, even scholars have lacked an updated survey of French medieval woodlands. By helping to make better known the countless advances in research that have been made over the last generation, this collection of essays succeeds in providing such an update, even if its 27 distinct contributions do so in a fragmented way. The publication of this important book is therefore cause for celebration.

The volume’s intended geographical focus, as noted on p. 7, is the territory of modern France and Belgium. Chronologically, the Middle Ages are understood here in a traditional sense as the millennium between 500 and 1500 CE. Along with endnotes, the table of contents, and indices of proper names, the book contains three brief prefaces (pp. 7–21), two concluding remarks (pp. 349–56), and three main parts.

Standing apart from the rest of the volume’s historical approach, Part I, entitled ‘La forêt rêvée’ (‘The imagined forest’, pp. 25–103), addresses how woodlands are portrayed in medieval literature and hagiography. Its two chapters provide an engaging survey of the ways in which medieval writers represented arboreal spaces, and they are superbly illustrated with 47 colour images from medieval manuscripts. Part I is less impressive, however, as a scholarly update. The notes reflect recent work, at least in French, but there is no sustained discussion of methodology; there is mention neither of recent ecocritical interpretations nor of the use of hagiography as a source for environmental history by, for example, Albrecht Classen and Ellen Arnold amongst others.

From a historical perspective, then, the value of this book lies in its Parts II and III, which are organized around a series of regional studies, spread across seven chapters and many unnumbered subchapters. Part II focuses on northeastern France and Belgium, while Part III turns to the North West, the South (the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean littoral), and three zones of low or moderately high mountains (the Vosges, the Jura, and the Morvan in Burgundy). While covering many regions, the volume omits a wide swath of south-central France, stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Alps.

Although the book lacks a substantial, synthetic introduction, Part II’s first chapter, ‘La forêt resources’ (‘The forest resources’, pp. 107–21), by Corrine Beck and Fabrice Guizard, along with a subchapter by Sylvie Bépoix on ‘L’évolution des espaces cultivées’ (‘The evolution of cultivated spaces’, pp. 180–90), together provide a survey of medieval French forest history. The outline of this history consists of alternating phases of woodland expansion and retreat, according to a rhythm that is familiar from older accounts. For example, the most substantial medieval attack on woodlands took place from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, after which woodlands regained ground during the crises of the later Middle Ages. That current research confirms this familiar sequence is in itself a valuable finding. But Beck and Guizard also emphasize a point echoed elsewhere in the volume: even in periods of less anthropogenic pressure, few woodlands resembled the dense, wild forests of medieval and modern legend. They instead comprised multifunctional, mosaic landscapes, thoroughly shaped by already age-old practices of agro-pastoralism.

In terms of the sources used, about half the essays of parts II and III rely mostly or entirely on texts, almost always to good effect, especially for the later Middle Ages. For periods before the fourteenth century, however, the penury of written sources makes it difficult to advance significantly our understanding of French (and European) woodlands.

It is here that this volume makes its greatest contribution: it includes ten essays that present recent archaeological and paleo-scientific findings, all accompanied by helpful figures and clear, colored illustrations. These essays will familiarize readers with burgeoning research in the study of such things as pollen deposits (palynology), tree rings (dendrochronology), charcoal deposits (anthracology), and mills, furnaces, kilns, and other industrial sites. Some essays also address settlement patterns and other anthropogenic modifications of the landscape by drawing on either archaeological surveys of pottery fragments and other artifacts or the new method of LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), which uses airborne lasers to detect hidden features of the earth’s surface. The value of combining such methods is perhaps best illustrated in an essay by Vanessa Py-Saragaglia and her co-authors, who reconstruct in impressive detail the forest history of several sites in the Pyrenees (pp. 276–99).

The most noteworthy contributions, however, are five of the scientifically oriented essays that study the forests of northern France and Belgium through dendrochronological analysis of oak timbers from churches, castles, manor houses, and other archaeological sites. Thus, Vincent Bernard and his co-authors, making use of more than 7000 core samples of timbers from almost 400 sites across the northwestern quadrant of France (pp. 243–58), present a graph showing the average age at which oak trees were cut down across the entire millennium from 500 to 1500 CE (Figure 4, pp. 252–53). Although samples from the early Middle Ages are still too few, this single chart provides a more scientifically-grounded snapshot of medieval French forest history within a broad region than anything previously available of which I am aware. It suggests, for example, that the use of very old oaks of 200 years or more was mostly limited to the period before 750 CE, and that the most intensive phase of felling occurred between about 1180 and 1230, when the average age of oak timbers fell to only 30–35 years.

Moreover, as these five essays show, the insights to be gained from the study of surviving construction timbers go far beyond just the age of the trees used. The variations in the widths of a tree’s annual growth rings, along with the length of the trunk used and the frequency of forks, branches, knots, etc., all provide evidence concerning the environment and system of management within which the tree grew.

For example, both the above essay by Bernard et al. and another by Frédéric Épaud on the Paris region (pp. 142–53) show that the churches built in the new, Gothic style of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries typically include large numbers of similar, very long and thin roofing beams, averaging 8–14 m long and 20–30 cm in diameter. Yet the trees from which these beams were made were only 50–60 years old, much younger than the 80 years or so required to reach an equivalent height in this region’s forests today. These authors argue persuasively that these medieval trees must have grown not from seed, but rather from pre-existing root systems (coppice stools), which allow for rapid growth during a tree’s first decades, and then continued to grow tall and straight within dense, homogenous stands of timber. This timber was produced, therefore, in well organized and protected timber ‘reserves’, to use a term that was only then beginning to appear in texts referring to forest management.

Épaud goes on to note that this research casts doubt on contemporary complaints about a timber shortage: it would take a reserve of only about three hectares to supply all the beams needed for the cathedral of Bourges’s gigantic roof (p. 150). This work also shows that these well-managed timber reserves—some of which Bernard et al. have traced to as early as the tenth century (pp. 256–7)—were established centuries before any surviving texts record how they were regulated.

These examples provide only a sample of the insights to be gained from this collection. Its editors and contributors are to be congratulated for publishing this stimulating book.