Dark Ages at Courtomer in the Dark Ages...end of confinement...ruin and new birth...
“Changement d’herbe réjouit le jeune veau!”
“A change of grass delights the young calf!”
April in the park at Chateau de Courtomer. The stone obelisk in the background, at the edge of the woods.
Dear friend,
This French proverb describes the state of mind induced by a joyful change in circumstances.
It also describes the attitude of our cattle today, as they eagerly head for the pastures after six months under cover in the stabulations.
“And ye shall go forth, and skip as calves released from the stall,” I observed to Madame Brigitte.
“Like the Bible verse,” I added, helpfully.
She sat in le pick-up and I leaned against the window, having a chat in the sun. We were watching her son and husband move the cattle from the stabulations to spring pastures.
Our calves were eager to leave their stabulations for Spring pastures today.
Across several thousand years, two groups of pastoral peoples – the Israelites of the prophet Malachi’s time and the Normandy farmer – describe joy as a young calf skipping out of its stall onto fresh grass. I mentioned this curious parallel to Madame Brigitte.
“Perhaps that’s because most country people rarely knew any book besides the Bible,” she commented. “The words and pictures we heard were what we used to describe our life in proverbs.”
A provocative thought! Do the poetic images in written words influence the way we perceive the world around us, I wondered aloud. I was thinking of Le Roman de la Rose, much mentioned in this Letter last week. While listening to its verses and walking around the park and in our woods then, it seemed possible to sense a connection between the world of that 13th-century medieval poem and the Chateau of 800 years ago.
Madame Brigitte looked at me with a slightly raised eyebrow. Perhaps, she was thinking, le confinement encourages too much thinking.
And indeed, my mind left the Israelites leaping as frisky calves, and drifted a few thousand years ahead to the Middle Ages.
The Middle Ages get a bad rap. The rest of Malachi’s prophecy,
“The day is coming, burning like a furnace…when every evildoer will be stubble; the day is coming when I will set them ablaze…Not a root or branch will be left to them…”
seems to describe what the Almighty had in store for medieval humanity.
War, violence, and “a radical reduction in material conditions” of life, to use the circumlocution of one Marxist historian, were the norm. In Rome, once the caput mundi, the head of the world, population fell from 1 million to 30,000. Soot levels in arctic ice from the early Middle Ages – a period that generally starts after the Fall of Rome in A.D. 476 and ends around the year 1000 – are low. This suggests that brick and pottery kilns as well as forges for smelting and working metals fell out of use.
Terrifying invaders from the North, as depicted in a French medieval manuscript.
In our pocket of Normandy, the early Middle Ages saw walls going up around formerly open cities like Sées, Caen, Rouen, Liseux, and Caracotinum, later called Harfleur. Forests reclaimed cultivated land, covering grainfields and pastures.
If the calves weren’t skipping out to the meadow, it was because their buviers had fled, been taken captive, or simply vanished.
After a lull in which our region was part of the Frankish kingdom of Clovis and then of Charlemagne’s French territory of Nuestria, Viking invasions began.
This was hardly the time to build a big Chateau and create a large agricultural estate!
But times were changing. The roving Norsemen were permanently bought off in 991; the Duchy of Normandy was born.
The year 1000 – which many contemporaries thought might be the End of Days as described by Malachi – actually ushered in a relatively pleasant period of history in France and Europe. Trade, towns, and population rebounded. Chateau de Courtomer appears in the historical record for the first time, in 1047.
But what was Chateau de Courtomer like, in those early days when the strife-ridden Middle Ages was on the wane? Beneath the embellishments made by hundreds of generations of chatelains, lies the original medieval estate.
Dame! as they said back then, evoking Our Lady’s name in vain. In the 11th century, there was a sudden halt in the production of written works. The world had gone “dark.”
Fortunately, the 12th and 13th centuries were another matter. Literary production more than quadrupled. Le Roman de la Rose, written in the 1200s, tells us much about the estate around a late medieval Chateau.
An ideal Chateau, we see, is endowed with a park planted with specimen trees as well as walled orchards and gardens. This was a deliberate imitation of Classical Antiquity, harked to in the Middle Ages as the model for refined living. At the Roman country villa, a specially planted park was kept for hunting, while the garden, hortus, was a place for conversation, entertaining, and reflection. A fruit orchard, as in medieval times, was an object of luxury. And the rustic villa was not only the center of a latifundium, an agricultural estate, but a place to cultivate the arts and learning.
Sure enough, in the Le Roman de la Rose we meet charmingly dressed and behaved persons having a dance. And that is not unknown in the walled garden of the Orangerie in our days, either!
This 1450 "illumination" in Le Roman de la Rose shows the fruit trees, flowers, and amusements of a walled medieval garden.
We only have one walled flower garden today, but old sketches of the Chateau show a series of such gardens on the estate. Then as now, they were filled with “flors indes et perses" -- flowers of India and Persia, as mentioned in Le Roman de la Rose. These were the roses and lilies that the medieval world knew from glimpses into the magnificent gardens of Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium, or from diplomatic exchanges with the splendid Persian Caliphate in Baghdad. Later, Crusaders – among them the seigneur de Courtomer -- brought back inspiration for gardens as well as plants from le Palestine.
We take our landscape for granted. And yet it has been transformed by centuries of history, bearing the imprint of new inspirations and old conventions, of disasters and new beginnings.
We look ahead to another new beginning at Courtomer soon. Le confinement, said President Macron yesterday, will end May 19. Restaurants, cafés, bars, cinemas and museums will open. Public parks and gardens, monuments and amusements will welcome us again!
Nous y attendons avec impatience – et joie!
Henry and his companion have gone back to Paris. The little cousins, who had joyfully skipped around the Chateau during a month’s freedom in the country, have gone back to school, also in Paris. And far away, on another continent, our grandchild is being born…and we look forward to touching his rosy cheek in person.
Changement d’herbe réjouit le jeune veau!
A bientôt, mes amis !
