Dear Valued Customer,

Outside, the chain saw rumbled. There was a creaking sound, following by a sound like hundreds of swallows soaring through foliage, a brushing of wings against dry leaves and twigs. A crash. The first tree was down.

A prolonged cold snap has hardened the ground. It is time to hook the log-splitter up to the tractor and take down trees.

Last Thanksgiving, back across the Atlantic on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, Monsieur had cut down two beech trees. Planted just before we moved to France many years ago, they had begun to cast gloomy shadows into the front rooms of our family house in Maryland. Their shade killed the lawn. They were not handsome. And they would make good firewood.

As each tree toppled earthward, one of the youngest members of the family leapt up and down in primeval glee. The mastery of machine over nature, especially as wielded by le grand-père, thrilled the little fellow to his core.

Back at Courtomer this week, the chainsaw roared again.

We began by cutting down and hauling away dead trees from the pastures. This was an act of good husbandry rather than a concern for the lawn or the view. Our farmer was alarmed at the thought of trees crashing down amid the herd. The cattle themselves had contributed to the demise of the trees by chewing on the bark and rubbing their heavy, bony heads against the slender trunks. They were likely to knock them over when they leaned on them again in the spring.

The log-splitter, enthroned in the basse-cour, made short work of these spindly chicots. The wood was stocked in the grange to dry out for a couple of seasons.

The woodcutters took down a couple of dying trees in the parc, one leaning precariously over the outer moat.

*Winter work. Moving broken branches and logs into piles before stacking in the grange.*

Some argue – including our gardener Monsieur Martyn -- that dead trees should be left alone as a home for birds, insects, hedgehogs, and mushrooms. For several years, we duly preserved a dead larch. It was a magnificent specimen, at least a few hundred years old, with a diameter of about 4 feet. Probably it had been planted in the 1780s, when the château and its parc were being rebuilt and restored. It towered above the front gates to the Chateau and the new plantation of young trees and shrubs in the center of the manège. But in the end, the dead larch was just too monumentally grim for a garden setting. It was a memento mori, while we wanted the spectacle of new life through the seasons. Monsieur Richard and his workman came and cut it down. We left a tall stump for children to climb on.

But a tree is never wasted. The wood stacked in the grange helps to keep down electricity bills in the Chateau and the Farmhouse. And a bright fire lifts our spirits on an overcast day in mid-winter.

“I can cut enough wood in an afternoon to last a week,” remarked Monsieur with satisfaction.

Monsieur is adept with the chainsaw, swinging it gracefully away from his body as he lifts the blade out of the trunk of a falling tree. A few years ago, we pruned our orchard. He stood on the stocky upper branches of the trees, leaning down into the crown to cut away hefty suckers. No wonder little Charlot is thrilled.

“I don’t know how they did it before power tools were invented,” Monsieur remarked, sinking into the chair beside the fire at the end of the day.

Early man felled trees with fire and sharp stone axes. And until the advent in France of gas-powered machinery, the axe was still part of the bûcheron’s kit. Until the 1950s, a French woodsman would have used the same tools as ancestors dating back to the Roman conquest of Gaul. The cognée, from the verb meaning “to forcefully whack,” was a large axe. The serpe, a sharp tool also used for pruning fruit trees and grape vines, was useful for removing small branches. The scie à bois was a saw, and the passe-partout was the two-handled saw used by a pair of loggers to cut through trunks. The bûcheron was traditionally a farm laborer or small farmer, who left the fields for the forests as soon as the last crops were sown in October. The travail du bois was winter work.

In those olden days, wood was an essential resource. Ships, cathedrals, houses, and barns were constructed of wood. Wood powered the forges where iron was refined from ore and made into tools and weapons. Wood made possible the conversion from the raw to the cooked in the kitchen. And wood kept everyone warm.

Woodlands were as essential to a seigneurie like Courtomer as arable land and water.

Wood not only made the hefty beams used to build a château and its dépendences, it fired kilns for making mortar and bricks. Just as important, woodlands provided a living for the seigneur’s dependents – the peasants, artisans, knights, and clercs who lived in the protective shadow of the château. The droit d’ affouage was the right to gather firewood. The droit de pacage, the right to pasture animals among the trees. The glandée, when acorns fall from oaks in autumn, was when paysans drove pigs into the forest to nourish them. There was cooking oil to be made from beechnuts and, in hard times, flour to be made from chestnuts. The lord and his noble companions hunted le grand gibier, deer and boar, while paysans trapped rabbits and birds and foraged for wild plants.

Wood was so precious that by the 13th century, as French kings began to affirm and centralize their power, King Philippe Auguste established a separate administration to oversee the forests belonging to the Crown. “Maîtres itinérents” – traveling masters of the king’s forests – were charged with protecting the royal domain from the encroachments of local seigneurs and paysans.

Four centuries later, as state power, naval war, and trade with the New World and the Orient expanded, Louis XIV enlarged the jurisdiction of “les Eaux et Forêts,” the waterways and forests. The production of tall, straight oak and pine timbers for building ships was the king’s priority. Private woodlands were now subject to the same rules applied to the royal domain. All forests must be surveyed. Rectangular stones carved with a seigneurial blazon must clearly mark boundaries. La coupe à blanc, clear-cutting, required permission, as did all cutting of wood. And the royal garde-marteau, with the special hammer that only he could use, marked the trees reserved for the king and the navy.

History does not reveal how the seigneur of Courtomer at the time, Léonard Antoine de Saint-Simon, reacted to the king’s bold expansion of royal control. But most likely his own interests aligned with those of the king.

Léonard Antoine was a marquis, owning more than 1,000 acres of fields and woodlands, including the nearby Bois d’Ecuennes. With noble title came royal service. Among other responsibilities of his rank, he must raise and maintain a regiment in the king’s army. He had to maintain his position in the Norman Parlement and at the court at Versailles.

“Voilà des gens qui portent leurs moulins et leurs fermes sur le dos,” scolded the royal minister Sully in the early 1600s.

“See those men who wear their mills and their farms on their backs!”

He wanted Henri IV to promulgate sumptuary laws that would discourage nobles from using their property to pay for fancy clothes and high living at court. But Henri never did. His grandson’s court at Versailles was the most splendid in Europe.

For the marquis de Courtomer as for all other nobles, maximizing revenue from land was vital.

For hundreds of years, the archives of local courts and parlements tell us, not only kings but owners of seigneurial forests had pushed back against les usages, particularly wood-gathering, pasturing of animals, and the essartage à feu or clearing using fire, by surrounding communities. These activities not only destroyed living trees, they impeded regrowth.

As the old documents show, a seigneur rarely “gave” les usages forestiers, he only “recognized” them. As a matter of “reconnaissance” and not “accord,” the law allowed these privileges to be at least partially rescinded. As early as the 13th century, the practices of triage and cantonnage allowed a seigneur to regain control of forest. Triage allowed him to claim a third of the forested land his predecessors had freely conceded to the surrounding community. Cantonnage allowed him to regain complete control of his forest, with the exception of a “canton” where the local community was free to pasture, forage, gather firewood, and even cut timber.

*A November scene from the 14th-century Queen Mary's Psalter, showing peasants feeding acorns to swine in the forest.* The British Museum

Despite the protections of law and royal decree, forested land in France steadily gave way to rising population. A brief respite, sadly for humans, corresponded with the Black Plague and the Hundred Years War. But the French rebounded. Forested land fell to its lowest surface in the years following the French Revolution. Woodlands, like their seigneurs and royal administrators and without their protection, fell to the sharp blade. Then, against all popular expectations, the trend reversed in about 1840.

New techniques for excavating coal revolutionized 19th-century industry, household heat, and cooking. A hundred years later, the introduction of gas motors, mechanized agriculture, and petroleum-based fertilizers to France drastically reduced the amount of land in cultivation. In 1950, almost three-quarters of France was in farmland. Only half is cultivated today. Meanwhile, since 1840, the portion of France covered by forest has more than doubled.

These days, our neighbors are more interested in the boar that take refuge in our woods than in carving out an extra wheat field or gathering firewood. Unless wild boar are culled from the copses around the château, as we are reminded by our enthusiastic local chasseurs, we must pay damages to local farmers.

We no longer rely on our own woodlands to make the handle for a broom or sculpt the beam of a new grange. There is no longer a forge in the communs to be kept hot with home-made charcoal. Fioule and electricity can perfectly well heat the château and les dépendences. And we don’t, unfortunately, keep pigs.

Our seasonal bûcheron is a man who makes his living with the pen – or rather, laptop -- not the plow. But the sound of his chainsaw humming on a winter’s day and the sight of firewood ricked up neatly in the grange still gladden the heart. As does a crackling fire on a winter afternoon.

Winter work and the woods. It's time to cut firewood...and to remember the woodlands