Historians have been examining more and more the logistics of medieval warfare. Danny Lake-Giguere writes about how armies needed timber to build everything from ships to crossbow bolts, demand so great that governments had to figure out ways to manage their supply.
By Danny Lake-Giguere
Even after centuries of clearing, in the late 14th century Normandy was still France’s most heavily forested province. Most of these woodlands belonged to the king and were overseen by the Waters and Forests Administration, an increasingly complex institution created towards the end of the 13th century for the purpose of ensuring their rational and sustainable exploitation.
During the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453), Normandy saw important fighting and subsequently suffered from widespread devastation. Not only did it bear a symbolic significance for the English monarchy, but it was also one of France’s most important and richest provinces during the late Middle Ages, one whose proximity to England made it an easy target for the English chevauchées, brutal expeditions aimed at devastating the countryside. In that context, its royal forests, amongst the richest parts of the French kings’ demesne, became important military assets in the war against England, providing lumber to build warships and to maintain and repair the duchy’s castles and fortresses.
Forest Usages and Regulations in the Late 14th Century
Cutting down a tree in Gregory the Great’ Moralia in Job, early 12th century. Dijon. Municipal Library, Ms. 173, fol. 41
Late medieval Normandy still relied heavily on royal forests, which not only provided timber and pastures to rural communities and feudal elites alike, but also supplied the duchy’s early industries such as the glass workshops in the forests of Lyons and the forges of the Pays de Bray. Ancient customs, sometimes dating back several centuries, guaranteed these usages, which increasingly complex and far-reaching regulations sought to oversee and control. In 1346, King Philip VI decided that no new usages would be granted in his forests because it spoiled them. By then, users were usually forbidden from exercising their rights in certain parts of the forests, such as the deffens, reserved for the king’s own use, or the taillis, which were generally prohibited for 12 or 15 years to allow coppiced trees to regrow. While peasants could usually take as much firewood and timber as needed, nobles and clergymen were usually limited to a certain amount so that they would not abuse their privileges. Most users could only take either dead wood, wood that had fallen on the ground, and also mort bois, or standing trees considered of poor quality. Most of the time, timber had to be delivered by the local forester, which allowed for a greater control over forest usages by the royal administration.
These regulations, strictly enforced by an increasingly powerful administration, aimed at ensuring that the royal forests would be able to “perpetually sustain themselves”, thus marking one of the earliest occurrences of the concept of sustainability. Beside the annual rents they had to pay, in coins or, most of the time, in oats, eggs or capons, forest users were heavily fined if they were caught with timber by the forests’ sergeants, even if they had the right to it. These fines varied greatly and were determined either by local customs or by the quality of the wood, with oak usually being fined at 10 sous for each cartload, and lesser species, branches or dead wood much less. It is, however, difficult to evaluate how much these fines contributed to the king’s revenues, as medieval records were either destroyed in 1737 during the burning of the Chambre des Comptes, France’s financial court, or lost during the Revolution. One surviving account from 1372-73, compiled by the Receiver-General of the Waters and Forests Administration, shows for that year revenues of 469 pounds tournois for the forest of Roumare, one of Normandy’s most important forests, including 52 pounds tournois’ worth of fines for misuses.
From the Forests to the Sea: Rouen’s Clos des Galées and the King’s “Sea Armies”
View of Rouen, in 1525, by Jacques Le Lieur in the Book of Fountains .
Throughout the Hundred Years’ War, control of the English Channel was paramount to both France and England. Regarding his concerns about a French naval attack in late 1338, King Edward III (1312-1377) wrote that “the French fleet intends to proceed from port to port and place to place along the coast, wherever ships may be found, to sink, burn, destroy the shipping of the kingdom; and then to attack, occupy, plunder and burn the ports and other towns on the sea or its inlets, perpetrating every evil that men can work”. If the early phases of the conflict saw sporadic clashes between the two navies, the French defeat at Sluys in 1340 abruptly put an end to the French control of the sea. Although the defeat was so devastating that it incapacitated French naval ambitions for almost three decades, it also prompted the government of king Philip VI (1293-1350) to promulgate France’s first major set of forest regulations, the 1346 ordinance of Brunoy, which sought to regulate the royal forests’ exploitation and usages.
The reign of Charles V (1338-1380), crowned in 1364, marked a major turning point in the war, as the new king began to plan the kingdom’s reconquest, which included taking back the English Channel from Edward III. By that time, the royal forests were in a state of great disorder, having been, according to the 1376 ordinance of Melun, “not sufficiently visited, overexploited and greatly damaged because of the wars”. A tighter control and policing over these woodlands was therefore needed in order to ensure a sufficient lumber supply to build the warships needed for the king’s endeavours, most of which were to be built in Normandy’s main shipyard, the Clos des Galées in Rouen.
In late 1369, having consolidated his power, crushed the ambitions of his cousin Charles II of Navarre (1332-1387) and broken his peace treaty with England, Charles V commissioned the construction of three barges in Rouen as, after the battle of Sluys, France relied mostly on foreign warships. While the surviving records show that during the following decade, shipbuilding at the Clos des Galées was rather intermittent, the shipyard was much more active towards the end of Charles V’s reign. In 1379, one year before his death, the king had commissioned four large bargots, a type of flat-bottomed ship, and four smaller ones, as well as seven great barges and ten pinnaces.
These important projects necessitated massive quantities of timber. The nearby forests of Roumare and Rouvray, only a few kilometers from Rouen, as well as those of La Londe, Touques, Brotonne and Le Trait, were put to good use, and the local workforce was mobilized to supply the shipyard. After trees were felled and prepared by lumberjacks under the watchful eye of the king’s foresters and in accordance with the strict regulations of the royal ordinances, the timber was carried by carters to the port of Dieppedale, or to other smaller ports downstream of the Seine such as Croisset, Bliquetuit and Caudebecquet, from which it was finally transported by bargemen to the Clos des Galées in Rouen.
As receipts given to the viscount of Montivilliers or to the shipyard’s master show, the amount of wood carried was considerable. In early January of 1370, the carter Robert Lenoir had brought nine cartloads of timber from the forest of Roumare to the port of Dieppedale for the construction of the king’s barges. A few months later, in April, a receipt shows that Philippe Chouquet, another carter, had transported twelve cartloads to Dieppedale for the same purpose. In 1379, around the period during which the shipyard was most active, the records identify several deliveries, including one totalling 53 cartloads of timber, to the Clos des Galées, used either to build or to repair damaged warships.
While the Clos des Galées was not Normandy’s sole military shipyard, as the ports of Harfleur, Honfleur, Dieppe and Montivilliers also contributed to the war effort, the surviving records show that it was the most important because of its strategic situation on the Seine River, near the forest of Roumare, which provided it with a steady wood supply. The archives also confirm the important role played by the royal forests in France’s naval strategy during the Hundred Years’ War.
In the end, their exploitation for military purposes, strictly regulated by royal decree, was quite successful. Between 1369 and 1382, about twenty naval operations were mounted against the English, most of which departed from Normandy or included ships built in Normandy. One of the most successful of these naval endeavours was a series of raids led by admiral Jean de Vienne who, at the head of a small but efficient Norman fleet, departed from Harfleur, burned down Winchelsea and other cities on the Rye, and then later raided villages on the Thames, putting Normandy’s resources to good use in France’s war against England.
Royal Forests and the Defence of Normandy
Map by Andrein / Wikimedia Commons
The defence of Normandy was one of Charles V’s chief concerns, as, throughout his reign, the duchy was often under threat from English raids or from attacks by routiers and allies of the King of Navarre. On various occasions, upon hearing the rumours of an attack, the king sent commissioners to inspect his castles in Normandy in order to ensure that they were well repaired and sufficiently provisioned.
In 1371, as rumours of an English attack became increasingly alarming, the king sent Regnier Le Coustellier, his bailiff of Caen, along with two knights, Jehan Dubois and Roger Lemasnier, to report on the state of the bailiwick’s fortifications. During that time, they inspected important fortified sites such as Argentan and Falaise, but also major abbeys like Saint-Étienne and Sainte-Trinité in Caen as well as smaller fortified sites such as the churches of Cintheaux and Trun in order to make sure they were defensible. Two years earlier, in 1369, Charles V, convinced that the English were about to attack, had tasked Jean Le Baudrain de la Heuse with visiting the fortresses throughout the bailiwicks of Amiens, Rouen, Gisors and Caux for the same purpose, as these fortified sites were major assets in the war against England.
Much like with Normandy’s shipyards, the duchy’s forests contributed to the war effort by providing the lumber needed to repair and maintain these fortresses. While a late 14th century castle was built mostly out of stone, wood was still important in its construction, as it was used not only in its foundations but also in several of its parts, such as the drawbridge, gatehouse and portcullis, something which medieval administrative records demonstrate more clearly than archaeology.
Most of the wood used to build, repair or maintain Normandy’s vast network of castles and fortifications was taken directly from the king’s forests, in accordance with the decrees of the 1346 ordinance of Brunoy. The royal castle of Caen, one of western Normandy’s most important fortified sites, could take the lumber it needed in the adjacent forest of Troarn. Receipts given to the viscount of Caen in 1368 describe with great precision the process by which the castle was supplied. Lumberjacks were first sent to the forest to prepare the trees that were then brought to the castle by carpenters. Jehan Ferrant, the bailiwick’s master-carpenter, then inspected the trees in order to determine which ones were best suited for the repairs. When needed, carters and carpenters were again sent into the forest to gather more lumber.
These works often necessitated significant quantities of resources, as shown by the receipts concerning the repair works done on the castle of Arques between 1367 and 1371. In late 1371, Guillot Majoie and his colleagues cut down a staggering 90 oaks, which were delivered to Arques by Pierre de Biaurain, a carter, for the works on the castle’s terrace and gatehouse. Timber could be bought from wood merchants who were licensed to exploit certain sections of the forests. In 1369, Mathieu Hais, one of these merchants, delivered 12 pounds tournois’ worth of timber to Silvestre de la Cervelle, the king’s chaplain, to be used in the repair works of Pont-de-l’Arche, a royal stronghold strategically located at the confluence of the Eure and the Seine rivers.
The king’s master-carpenters, royal officials attached to a particular bailiwick, played an important role in these undertakings, as they often coordinated the repairs and supplying of the royal castles. Pierre Le Fèvre, one such administrator, worked tirelessly throughout the reign of Charles V to ensure that the castles around Gisors were suitably maintained. Between Easter of 1377 and Easter of 1378, he visited the forests of Andely, Vernon, Gisors and Lyons in order to evaluate the trees he needed to repair the bailiwick of Gisors’ castles. A few years earlier, in 1372, his accounts show that, along with carpenters and roofers, he visited the castles of Vernonnel, Gisors, Château-Gaillard and Longchamps, before travelling to the forest of Lyons in order to inquire about the reasons preventing the supplying of Château-Gaillard.
Most of the time, royal forests provided enough timber for the duchy’s castles, although in rare cases, royal administrators had to resort to private forests. In 1374, as master-carpenter of the bailiwick of Gisors, Pierre Le Fèvre had a meeting with officials representing Blanche of Navarre, queen dowager of Philip VI, who held lands and forests in the region, as he had not found trees large enough to build the beams of the tower of Vernonnel. In 1370, Charles V also ordered royal officials to pay 80 pounds tournois to the abbey of Valdieu-Réno after the captain of his castle of Ventrouze, in southern Normandy, had taken timber from their forest to fortify the castle.
In other instances, when needed, the king also provided resources to faithful noblemen whose castles had been attacked by the English or Navarrese, as even these private castles were counted upon to defend the duchy. As the king was the guarantor of the common good, he had to provide the means necessary to ensure his kingdom’s and his subjects’ defence. In 1364, at the height of the war against the partisans of the King of Navarre, Charles V donated 300 trees from the royal forest of Eawy to Colart d’Estouteville, lord of Torcy, so he could repair his castle, which had been attacked by the Navarrese. On other occasions, Charles V donated wood to important cities such as Dieppe, a strategic Norman port, which was authorized to use a hundred oaks from his forest of Eawy to fortify itself against the English.
Finally, apart from supplying the wood needed to fortify the king’s castles, Norman timber was used to make weapons and ammunition. Administrative records from the late 14th century show that viretons, or crossbow bolts, were mass-produced in order to ensure a steady stock throughout the reign. In 1365, the king ordered the masters of Waters and Forests as well as the foresters of Roumare and Rouvray to provide fourteen beeches and twenty aspens to the workers of the Clos des Galées, which was used to make 100,000 crossbow bolts and 200 pavises. On several other occasions during the following decades, the Clos des Galées was tasked to make ammunition. In 1379, the viscount of Pont-Anthou paid lumberjacks for the trees they had felled in the forest of Rouvray and needed to make another 22,000 bolts.
Evaluating the Impacts of Warfare on the Forest Environment of Medieval Normandy
Normandy was profoundly affected by the Hundred Years’ War. Despite the devastation of agricultural lands, woodlands were mostly left untouched, although forest revenues, the chief part of the royal budget, had degraded so much because of the neglect of royal foresters that the king complained about it in 1378. “The revenues of the Waters and Forests,” wrote Charles V, “that should be one of our kingdom’s most important source of incomes, are now insignificant.” Other than that, it does not seem that the Hundred Years’ War had an especially negative impact on the duchy’s woodlands. Rather, by emphasizing their importance as military assets, it prompted a more sustainable exploitation, one that tried to balance military needs and common good with the customs and usages enjoyed for centuries by the Normans.
Finally, by the end of the conflict, for the first time since the beginning of the great clearances during the 10th century, Norman woodlands had begun to regrow, something that coincided with the sharp demographic declines of the time and might explain the lack of new forest regulations until the reign of King Francis I (1494-1547). Administrative records, such as the aveu from 1399 for the Norman lands held by Pierre des Essarts, confirm the situation. “The tenements and vavassories,” it says, “became the property of the lord of the said fiefs [Pierre des Essarts] because of mortality and war, and the said lands turned back to forest and were ruined and transformed into a wild desert of ferns, shrubs and other woodlands”. This exceptional regrowth must have been noteworthy to contemporaries, as Thomas Basin (1412-1491), bishop of Lisieux and councillor to Charles VII, wrote:
I have seen that the vast plains of Champagne, Beauce, Brie and Gâtinais, those of the countries of Chartres and of Dreux, of Maine, Perche and of the French and English Vexin, of Beauvaisis, of the country of Caux from the Seine to Amiens and Abbeville of the country of Senlis, of the Soisonnais and Valois up to Laon, were absolutely deserted, uncultivated and depopulated, covered in scrubs and brushes, or even, in those regions where only a few trees grew, covered in forests.
Danny Lake-Giguère is a medieval historian and lecturer at the University of Montreal. In 2020, he defended his Ph.D. thesis on forest management in medieval Normandy. His main areas of interest are environmental and forest history and the history of royal institutions in France. He is passionate about hunting and fishing, both academically and recreationally. You can follow him on Academia.edu and LinkedIn.
Historians have been examining more and more the logistics of medieval warfare. Danny Lake-Giguere writes about how armies needed timber to build everything from ships to crossbow bolts, demand so great that governments had to figure out ways to manage their supply.
By Danny Lake-Giguere
Even after centuries of clearing, in the late 14th century Normandy was still France’s most heavily forested province. Most of these woodlands belonged to the king and were overseen by the Waters and Forests Administration, an increasingly complex institution created towards the end of the 13th century for the purpose of ensuring their rational and sustainable exploitation.
During the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453), Normandy saw important fighting and subsequently suffered from widespread devastation. Not only did it bear a symbolic significance for the English monarchy, but it was also one of France’s most important and richest provinces during the late Middle Ages, one whose proximity to England made it an easy target for the English chevauchées, brutal expeditions aimed at devastating the countryside. In that context, its royal forests, amongst the richest parts of the French kings’ demesne, became important military assets in the war against England, providing lumber to build warships and to maintain and repair the duchy’s castles and fortresses.
Forest Usages and Regulations in the Late 14th Century
Late medieval Normandy still relied heavily on royal forests, which not only provided timber and pastures to rural communities and feudal elites alike, but also supplied the duchy’s early industries such as the glass workshops in the forests of Lyons and the forges of the Pays de Bray. Ancient customs, sometimes dating back several centuries, guaranteed these usages, which increasingly complex and far-reaching regulations sought to oversee and control. In 1346, King Philip VI decided that no new usages would be granted in his forests because it spoiled them. By then, users were usually forbidden from exercising their rights in certain parts of the forests, such as the deffens, reserved for the king’s own use, or the taillis, which were generally prohibited for 12 or 15 years to allow coppiced trees to regrow. While peasants could usually take as much firewood and timber as needed, nobles and clergymen were usually limited to a certain amount so that they would not abuse their privileges. Most users could only take either dead wood, wood that had fallen on the ground, and also mort bois, or standing trees considered of poor quality. Most of the time, timber had to be delivered by the local forester, which allowed for a greater control over forest usages by the royal administration.
These regulations, strictly enforced by an increasingly powerful administration, aimed at ensuring that the royal forests would be able to “perpetually sustain themselves”, thus marking one of the earliest occurrences of the concept of sustainability. Beside the annual rents they had to pay, in coins or, most of the time, in oats, eggs or capons, forest users were heavily fined if they were caught with timber by the forests’ sergeants, even if they had the right to it. These fines varied greatly and were determined either by local customs or by the quality of the wood, with oak usually being fined at 10 sous for each cartload, and lesser species, branches or dead wood much less. It is, however, difficult to evaluate how much these fines contributed to the king’s revenues, as medieval records were either destroyed in 1737 during the burning of the Chambre des Comptes, France’s financial court, or lost during the Revolution. One surviving account from 1372-73, compiled by the Receiver-General of the Waters and Forests Administration, shows for that year revenues of 469 pounds tournois for the forest of Roumare, one of Normandy’s most important forests, including 52 pounds tournois’ worth of fines for misuses.
From the Forests to the Sea: Rouen’s Clos des Galées and the King’s “Sea Armies”
Throughout the Hundred Years’ War, control of the English Channel was paramount to both France and England. Regarding his concerns about a French naval attack in late 1338, King Edward III (1312-1377) wrote that “the French fleet intends to proceed from port to port and place to place along the coast, wherever ships may be found, to sink, burn, destroy the shipping of the kingdom; and then to attack, occupy, plunder and burn the ports and other towns on the sea or its inlets, perpetrating every evil that men can work”. If the early phases of the conflict saw sporadic clashes between the two navies, the French defeat at Sluys in 1340 abruptly put an end to the French control of the sea. Although the defeat was so devastating that it incapacitated French naval ambitions for almost three decades, it also prompted the government of king Philip VI (1293-1350) to promulgate France’s first major set of forest regulations, the 1346 ordinance of Brunoy, which sought to regulate the royal forests’ exploitation and usages.
The reign of Charles V (1338-1380), crowned in 1364, marked a major turning point in the war, as the new king began to plan the kingdom’s reconquest, which included taking back the English Channel from Edward III. By that time, the royal forests were in a state of great disorder, having been, according to the 1376 ordinance of Melun, “not sufficiently visited, overexploited and greatly damaged because of the wars”. A tighter control and policing over these woodlands was therefore needed in order to ensure a sufficient lumber supply to build the warships needed for the king’s endeavours, most of which were to be built in Normandy’s main shipyard, the Clos des Galées in Rouen.
In late 1369, having consolidated his power, crushed the ambitions of his cousin Charles II of Navarre (1332-1387) and broken his peace treaty with England, Charles V commissioned the construction of three barges in Rouen as, after the battle of Sluys, France relied mostly on foreign warships. While the surviving records show that during the following decade, shipbuilding at the Clos des Galées was rather intermittent, the shipyard was much more active towards the end of Charles V’s reign. In 1379, one year before his death, the king had commissioned four large bargots, a type of flat-bottomed ship, and four smaller ones, as well as seven great barges and ten pinnaces.
These important projects necessitated massive quantities of timber. The nearby forests of Roumare and Rouvray, only a few kilometers from Rouen, as well as those of La Londe, Touques, Brotonne and Le Trait, were put to good use, and the local workforce was mobilized to supply the shipyard. After trees were felled and prepared by lumberjacks under the watchful eye of the king’s foresters and in accordance with the strict regulations of the royal ordinances, the timber was carried by carters to the port of Dieppedale, or to other smaller ports downstream of the Seine such as Croisset, Bliquetuit and Caudebecquet, from which it was finally transported by bargemen to the Clos des Galées in Rouen.
As receipts given to the viscount of Montivilliers or to the shipyard’s master show, the amount of wood carried was considerable. In early January of 1370, the carter Robert Lenoir had brought nine cartloads of timber from the forest of Roumare to the port of Dieppedale for the construction of the king’s barges. A few months later, in April, a receipt shows that Philippe Chouquet, another carter, had transported twelve cartloads to Dieppedale for the same purpose. In 1379, around the period during which the shipyard was most active, the records identify several deliveries, including one totalling 53 cartloads of timber, to the Clos des Galées, used either to build or to repair damaged warships.
While the Clos des Galées was not Normandy’s sole military shipyard, as the ports of Harfleur, Honfleur, Dieppe and Montivilliers also contributed to the war effort, the surviving records show that it was the most important because of its strategic situation on the Seine River, near the forest of Roumare, which provided it with a steady wood supply. The archives also confirm the important role played by the royal forests in France’s naval strategy during the Hundred Years’ War.
In the end, their exploitation for military purposes, strictly regulated by royal decree, was quite successful. Between 1369 and 1382, about twenty naval operations were mounted against the English, most of which departed from Normandy or included ships built in Normandy. One of the most successful of these naval endeavours was a series of raids led by admiral Jean de Vienne who, at the head of a small but efficient Norman fleet, departed from Harfleur, burned down Winchelsea and other cities on the Rye, and then later raided villages on the Thames, putting Normandy’s resources to good use in France’s war against England.
Royal Forests and the Defence of Normandy
The defence of Normandy was one of Charles V’s chief concerns, as, throughout his reign, the duchy was often under threat from English raids or from attacks by routiers and allies of the King of Navarre. On various occasions, upon hearing the rumours of an attack, the king sent commissioners to inspect his castles in Normandy in order to ensure that they were well repaired and sufficiently provisioned.
In 1371, as rumours of an English attack became increasingly alarming, the king sent Regnier Le Coustellier, his bailiff of Caen, along with two knights, Jehan Dubois and Roger Lemasnier, to report on the state of the bailiwick’s fortifications. During that time, they inspected important fortified sites such as Argentan and Falaise, but also major abbeys like Saint-Étienne and Sainte-Trinité in Caen as well as smaller fortified sites such as the churches of Cintheaux and Trun in order to make sure they were defensible. Two years earlier, in 1369, Charles V, convinced that the English were about to attack, had tasked Jean Le Baudrain de la Heuse with visiting the fortresses throughout the bailiwicks of Amiens, Rouen, Gisors and Caux for the same purpose, as these fortified sites were major assets in the war against England.
Much like with Normandy’s shipyards, the duchy’s forests contributed to the war effort by providing the lumber needed to repair and maintain these fortresses. While a late 14th century castle was built mostly out of stone, wood was still important in its construction, as it was used not only in its foundations but also in several of its parts, such as the drawbridge, gatehouse and portcullis, something which medieval administrative records demonstrate more clearly than archaeology.
Most of the wood used to build, repair or maintain Normandy’s vast network of castles and fortifications was taken directly from the king’s forests, in accordance with the decrees of the 1346 ordinance of Brunoy. The royal castle of Caen, one of western Normandy’s most important fortified sites, could take the lumber it needed in the adjacent forest of Troarn. Receipts given to the viscount of Caen in 1368 describe with great precision the process by which the castle was supplied. Lumberjacks were first sent to the forest to prepare the trees that were then brought to the castle by carpenters. Jehan Ferrant, the bailiwick’s master-carpenter, then inspected the trees in order to determine which ones were best suited for the repairs. When needed, carters and carpenters were again sent into the forest to gather more lumber.
These works often necessitated significant quantities of resources, as shown by the receipts concerning the repair works done on the castle of Arques between 1367 and 1371. In late 1371, Guillot Majoie and his colleagues cut down a staggering 90 oaks, which were delivered to Arques by Pierre de Biaurain, a carter, for the works on the castle’s terrace and gatehouse. Timber could be bought from wood merchants who were licensed to exploit certain sections of the forests. In 1369, Mathieu Hais, one of these merchants, delivered 12 pounds tournois’ worth of timber to Silvestre de la Cervelle, the king’s chaplain, to be used in the repair works of Pont-de-l’Arche, a royal stronghold strategically located at the confluence of the Eure and the Seine rivers.
The king’s master-carpenters, royal officials attached to a particular bailiwick, played an important role in these undertakings, as they often coordinated the repairs and supplying of the royal castles. Pierre Le Fèvre, one such administrator, worked tirelessly throughout the reign of Charles V to ensure that the castles around Gisors were suitably maintained. Between Easter of 1377 and Easter of 1378, he visited the forests of Andely, Vernon, Gisors and Lyons in order to evaluate the trees he needed to repair the bailiwick of Gisors’ castles. A few years earlier, in 1372, his accounts show that, along with carpenters and roofers, he visited the castles of Vernonnel, Gisors, Château-Gaillard and Longchamps, before travelling to the forest of Lyons in order to inquire about the reasons preventing the supplying of Château-Gaillard.
Most of the time, royal forests provided enough timber for the duchy’s castles, although in rare cases, royal administrators had to resort to private forests. In 1374, as master-carpenter of the bailiwick of Gisors, Pierre Le Fèvre had a meeting with officials representing Blanche of Navarre, queen dowager of Philip VI, who held lands and forests in the region, as he had not found trees large enough to build the beams of the tower of Vernonnel. In 1370, Charles V also ordered royal officials to pay 80 pounds tournois to the abbey of Valdieu-Réno after the captain of his castle of Ventrouze, in southern Normandy, had taken timber from their forest to fortify the castle.
In other instances, when needed, the king also provided resources to faithful noblemen whose castles had been attacked by the English or Navarrese, as even these private castles were counted upon to defend the duchy. As the king was the guarantor of the common good, he had to provide the means necessary to ensure his kingdom’s and his subjects’ defence. In 1364, at the height of the war against the partisans of the King of Navarre, Charles V donated 300 trees from the royal forest of Eawy to Colart d’Estouteville, lord of Torcy, so he could repair his castle, which had been attacked by the Navarrese. On other occasions, Charles V donated wood to important cities such as Dieppe, a strategic Norman port, which was authorized to use a hundred oaks from his forest of Eawy to fortify itself against the English.
Finally, apart from supplying the wood needed to fortify the king’s castles, Norman timber was used to make weapons and ammunition. Administrative records from the late 14th century show that viretons, or crossbow bolts, were mass-produced in order to ensure a steady stock throughout the reign. In 1365, the king ordered the masters of Waters and Forests as well as the foresters of Roumare and Rouvray to provide fourteen beeches and twenty aspens to the workers of the Clos des Galées, which was used to make 100,000 crossbow bolts and 200 pavises. On several other occasions during the following decades, the Clos des Galées was tasked to make ammunition. In 1379, the viscount of Pont-Anthou paid lumberjacks for the trees they had felled in the forest of Rouvray and needed to make another 22,000 bolts.
Evaluating the Impacts of Warfare on the Forest Environment of Medieval Normandy
Normandy was profoundly affected by the Hundred Years’ War. Despite the devastation of agricultural lands, woodlands were mostly left untouched, although forest revenues, the chief part of the royal budget, had degraded so much because of the neglect of royal foresters that the king complained about it in 1378. “The revenues of the Waters and Forests,” wrote Charles V, “that should be one of our kingdom’s most important source of incomes, are now insignificant.” Other than that, it does not seem that the Hundred Years’ War had an especially negative impact on the duchy’s woodlands. Rather, by emphasizing their importance as military assets, it prompted a more sustainable exploitation, one that tried to balance military needs and common good with the customs and usages enjoyed for centuries by the Normans.
Finally, by the end of the conflict, for the first time since the beginning of the great clearances during the 10th century, Norman woodlands had begun to regrow, something that coincided with the sharp demographic declines of the time and might explain the lack of new forest regulations until the reign of King Francis I (1494-1547). Administrative records, such as the aveu from 1399 for the Norman lands held by Pierre des Essarts, confirm the situation. “The tenements and vavassories,” it says, “became the property of the lord of the said fiefs [Pierre des Essarts] because of mortality and war, and the said lands turned back to forest and were ruined and transformed into a wild desert of ferns, shrubs and other woodlands”. This exceptional regrowth must have been noteworthy to contemporaries, as Thomas Basin (1412-1491), bishop of Lisieux and councillor to Charles VII, wrote:
I have seen that the vast plains of Champagne, Beauce, Brie and Gâtinais, those of the countries of Chartres and of Dreux, of Maine, Perche and of the French and English Vexin, of Beauvaisis, of the country of Caux from the Seine to Amiens and Abbeville of the country of Senlis, of the Soisonnais and Valois up to Laon, were absolutely deserted, uncultivated and depopulated, covered in scrubs and brushes, or even, in those regions where only a few trees grew, covered in forests.
Danny Lake-Giguère is a medieval historian and lecturer at the University of Montreal. In 2020, he defended his Ph.D. thesis on forest management in medieval Normandy. His main areas of interest are environmental and forest history and the history of royal institutions in France. He is passionate about hunting and fishing, both academically and recreationally. You can follow him on Academia.edu and LinkedIn.
Danny’s new book Administrer les forêts royales en Normandie au Moyen Âge (1204-1328) provides an overview of the development, aims and methods of the Waters and Forests administration in Normandy between the 13th and 14th centuries.
See also: How Medieval Normandy Managed Its Forests
See also: How Medieval Kings Took Control of Forests in Normandy
See also: Crime and Conflict in the Medieval Forests of Normandy
Top Image: British Library Royal MS 15 E IV, fol. 57v
Subscribe to Medievalverse
Related Posts