God's Town of the Saucepans

Villedieu-les-Pôeles has a long history, and is famous for three reasons. Firstly, in the 12C it was where the Knights Hospitaller – the Order of St John Of Malta – was set up in Europe, and secondly since the middle ages it has been a centre for copper working.

The third reason for fame, or rather notoriety, is that for the second half of the twentieth century it was one of the grands bouchons – the great traffic bottlenecks – of the French holiday season. The only major road from Paris and the north to Brittany went through Villedieu; unfortunately, at the edge of the town there is a major junction controlled by traffic lights. On the major holiday weekends of the summer, in July and August, huge volumes of traffic pass across France. The result was that every year there were long tailbacks from Villedieu, in one or both directions, sometimes up to 30 kilometres. The opening of the A84 autoroute from Caen-Rennes has bypassed Villedieu and ended the problem. In fact the old road now is effectively deserted even in high summer

It is an unexplained aspect of the French personality that in circumstances where the entire population takes to the roads on the same weekends, and when they know there will always be major traffic problems, both from known bottle necks, and from roadworks, accidents and other temporary events, they still all insist on driving on the same major roads and motorways, and spending lots of time stationary. They just will not use the lesser roads. If you want to progress through France in July and August, stick to the slightly smaller roads – the Routes Nationales, the N roads, or the Routes Departmentals, the D roads: little traffic, much more interesting, and stress free. The Michelin maps are good, and the Michelin Green guides will enable you to discover all sorts of fascinating places.

But back to Villedieu-les-Pôeles. Originally, it was a small village called Saultchevreuil (Deer Leap) on the side of a hill overlooking the valley of the small River Sienne. There is an old church there still, with the occasional little concert, but the village has effectively gone. For the usual reasons of family connections, politics and obligations that governed England and France at the time, Henry I Beauclerc, who apart from being the son of William the Conqueror (Guillaume le Conquerant) was also Duke of Normandy, Anjou, Acquitaine and much else, gave the Knights Hospitaller of St John of Jerusalem, one of the two military religious orders of the Crusades (the other the Knights Templar) some land around the River Sienne, which became their Headquarters. That explains the very large church (for a town with a population even now of just over 4000), and the renaming of the place as Villedieu, Town of God. There is still a pardon, a religious parade and ceremony, every ten years (I think) where the remnants of the order reassert their rights etc.

It may be that the middle east connection with the Knights brought back metal working skills, but for whatever cause copper and pewter products became the main trade of the town from the early middle ages. The quality was famous, and the trade had three effects. One was the addition of les Pôeles – the Saucepans -to the name to distinguish it from the dozens of other Villedieus in France; such a godly lot before the revolution. The other was that the nickname for the population, who if not hammering away at metal themselves were surrounded by the noise, of les Sourdins – the Deaf ones.

The main street used to be nothing but copper shops, but many have now gone. There are still workshops, making things by hand, some of which are open to visits, and there is a market leading factory, Mauviel, operating since 1830, still producing excellent stuff. I have half a dozen Villedieu copper cooking pots, and they are extremely good. About a third of the price of the same items in UK cook shops.

Happily, Villedieu survived the second world war: the mayor was able to persuade the allies not to bombard it by driving safely through the centre. As a result, unlike Vire, Villers-Bocage, St Lo, Mortain and many others that were destroyed, the central late medieval part is still there. There are many ancient courts off the main street, a pedestrian street (Rue Dr Havard) runs parallel,and many very old homes with huge granite lintels over the doors, which are usually quite low.

I like Villedieu, it is still quiet, feels like a community, and even has its own group folklorique, Les Triolettes, who travel around fetes and celebrations with music and dance. Well worth stopping off on your way to Brittany or the South.

Coincidence, interesting, or boring?

The piece below was posted yesterday afternoon. Last night, on BBC television, I saw a programme called QI, which included reference to the same stuff. Does that mean that I am connected to the zeitgest, or that my ideas are commonplace?

QI stands for Quite Interesting, and the programme is a panel game hosted by Stephen Fry, a British National Treasure. The idea is that the panel, of four comedians, discuss questions around a particular subject, and get points for answering specific questions correctly, and extra for mentioning something considered quite interesting by Stephen Fry. They also lose points for giving the obvious answers to questions, which are also wrong as common knowledge often is, which means that sometimes the final scores are all negative.

Last night's programme was around the subject of France, and part of it was done in rather poor French, but French nonetheless. Two of the specifics were around the stilt walking shepherds of Les Landes, who covered long distances on stilts to locate their sheep in the flat land of the Languedoc marshes, up to the mid nineteenth century, and the fact that at that time only about one fifth of the French population actually spoke French, the rest speaking Breton, Occitan, Basque, Provencal and other local languages, and extreme dialects.

As part of the discussion on language the panel were asked what they thought brushing and relooking meant. They were also asked what les people meant, which is a word I forgot to include. It is the French term for 'celebrities', the subjects of Heat and OK magazines, and the tabloid newspapers in the UK, so you will often see headlines in French magazines and newspapers talking about les people, with photos of actresses, singers, and usually Johnny Hallyday or Eddie Mitchell.

I think I have to assume that the timing was just coincidence.

Franglais and Anglish

English words and terms seem to be becoming ever more common in France. Partly this is because of the general internationalism that affects every country. A lot of it is because television, films and DVDs are increasingly influencing everyone. In the UK, American terms, phrases, ideas and practices are being seen everywhere, particularly among children and young adults. Teenagers especially are it seems learning about the shallow culture of rich US kids, and the restricted views of small town American middle classes, at the expense of their own history and culture.

In France, the state requires a significant proportion of films, television and radio programmes to be made in French by the French, which is admirable and important. Nonetheless, English, and particularly American English, seems to be appearing everywhere. Incidentally, language school in Paris, and I imagine elsewhere, offer the choice of learning British English or American English. No doubt in another 50 years the two versions of English will be as separated as French and Spanish.

As with French words in English, English words contrive to acquire a slightly different meaning or use when transported. Some mean much the same, such as 'le Normandie Horse Show', with its auction of 'les yearlings' and its competitions in 'le jumping', some are the same, but with strange spelling, such as the advertisements in the dogs for sale classification for 'les bouldougs' – bulldogs.

Others are downright weird, and I thought it might be amusing to list some of those I have seen. This is the first of what will be an occasional series.

Relooking: A word that has recently crept in to common usage, for a new service offered by beauty salons and hairdressers, joining shampooing and brushing (blow drying). One of the local museums said in its annual report that visitor numbers were slightly down in 2008, in spite of the museum having been 'relooké'. It means makeover, or redesign.

Tweety Girls: this is the name of a magazine aimed at girls between ten and twelve. I have been afraid to look at a copy in the maison de presse to see if the term has any meaning, and I am certainly not prepared to ask a passing pre-teen girl.

Until a few years ago, French children could only have their births registered with an approved first name, mostly those of saints. Because of immigration and different names from different societies and languages, the rule was abandoned. One unexpected side affect has been the use of names from English, but with Frenchified pronunciation. Two examples I heard recently, both for girls: Shah-duh, which was written Jade, and Dacc-uh-tah written as Dakota. Ah well, there seems to be a trend in England for girls to be given invented, often hyphenated, names. And the American comedian Chris Rock asks why black American women name their children after the sounds they make while giving birth. Languages and cultures will always continue to develop and change.

The bocage: in trouble?

In most countries, fields are separated by hedges of trees and shrubs, or by fences. In Normandy (and also parts of Brittany, Picardie, and Devon) the separation is usually by earth and stone barriers with trees, called bocage. The word comes from bosc, meaning woodland, as in the English word bosky, meaning wooded. They are part of what makes the countryside so attractive.

The geology of much of Normandy includes rich earth, but with lots of stones of varying sizes randomly distributed,. This is good for building, but gets in the way of farming. Since the fifteenth century, fields have been marked by dragging the stones to form barriers, covering them with soil to a height of 1.5 to two metres, and planting trees, such as oak, beech and hazel on the tops. The advantages are that these barriers are solid all year round, unlike ordinary hedges which can be relatively easy for animals to get through, are not affected by individual trees dying or falling leaving gaps, and require little or no maintenance, or raw material costs as fences do.

The trees also provide firewood and timber, and have a value. The plan cadastrale, the equivalent of the UK Land Registry, marks every field with an indicator of which side owns the bocage. Two of our neighbours fell out very seriously when one sold a field to the other, and cut down the trees the day before the sale was completed. The buyer considered this robbery, because he would have paid less for the fields without the trees, the seller considered the sale was of the field, not the trees, and the buyer had no right to the wood.

The bocage is made up of quite small fields, which is now becoming a problem. In about half of France, the law dictates that people can only leave real property – buildings and land – to their spouses, and then equally to all the children. You cannot will it to who you like. The result has been that over the generations, farms have become smaller and smaller, as they have been divided up with each successive generation. Sometimes, one child will buy out or rent from the others to keep a large enough farm, but today there are two very serious issues. Whilst it used to be that 20 hectares of land was enough to support a family, these days it is nowhere near enough, what with milk quotas, fuel and maintenance of tractors, and taxes. Families even up to quite recently could be largely self sufficient, growing all their own vegetables, keeping a pig and a sheep or two, and a dozen cows. One of our neighbours made her own butter and cheese, an annual pig provided ham and pate for the year, and apart from delicacies and essentials such as clothes, water and electricity, hardly needed any cash. That standard of living is no longer acceptable.

Part of the effects of this historic process is that any one farm will have its fields all over the place, rather than as one big parcel of land. Farmers can spend a large part of their time driving their tractors from one field to another, moving cows and sheep quite long distances, and generally being limited in how they use their land. One farmer we know well has about thirty small fields spread all over three communes, a distance of five or six kilometres.

The other problem is that with ever more joint owners of land and houses, it can be impossible to sell. It is not just, as with one friend, getting all six siblings to agree to sell a house, but that often there can be forty or more distant cousins all owning one field or building, many of who are completely unknown and untraceable. This is one of the causes of some houses being abandoned. And of course, family feuds are not unknown, and one intransigent person can prevent all the others making a deal.

The French government are trying to help by brokering matching sales of fields: Farmer A sell a field to Farmer B who has the two next to it, and Farmer B sells a field to Farmer C, who in turn sells one to Farmer A. The complication is that of course each farmer thinks the field he is giving up is worth far more than the field he is receiving, irrespective of any government sponsored financial adjustments. The one irrevocable fact of farming throughout the world is that every farmer devoutly believes that 'my land' is always worth far more than 'your land', because it is better earth, better maintained, gets better sun and rain and so on.

The roadways between fields – well tracks, mostly – have been worn down over the centuries, by horses, cattle, sheep, wagons and people, and are often two or three metres lower than the fields on either side. In England these sunken paths are often called 'hollow ways'. In summer they can be effectively green tunnels.

The bocage presented a serious problem during the Normandy landings from D-Day. Looking at maps, the military, especially the Americans, assumed that their tanks would just drive right through the countryside. The senior British, French and other officers who had visited Normandy before the war, or done their research, knew how wrong that was.

Firstly, the tanks, particularly the US Shermans, would just rise up at the front, exposing the unarmoured underside, rather than passing through, stopping that sort of progress. The second point is that the hollow ways were narrow, so tanks could not turn round once they started along one, and they could only fire their guns straight ahead; the barrels could not be swivelled. Proved to be a bit of an issue.

Today, there are two factors causing the increasing loss of the bocage. Farmers are increasingly wanting larger fields for efficiency, and easier use of mechanisation. This is being driven by a sad trend to keep many cattle indoors, and feed them silage, mostly maize, and chemical feeds. This means growing large amounts of maize, which is harvested by large machines, which need large fields. The cattle produce less milk, of lower quality, but I believe fatten more quickly for beef. Once the bocage has been cleared, it will never return.

At the same time, local councils are finding that they have a little bit of money each year, and are using it to 'improve' visibility in country lanes. This is done by widening some parts, which means ploughing up the bocage, adding a couple of metres to the road width, and putting up wire fences on the new road edges. They are also removing twists and turn where they can, and in many places just replacing the bocage with fences that can be seen through. The idea is to reduce traffic accidents. Doesn't seem to work: people just drive faster on the new straight bits, and don't slow down enough on the bends.

I think that progressively much of the more obvious bocage will disappear: in the last ten years the roads from the nearest town to where we live have mostly been modified, and it is less interesting a journey as a result. Animal husbandry might change, but increasing awareness of and concern for the welfare of the beasts will help to diminish the trend.

It seems, however, that progress almost always involves swapping something rare and special for more of something cheap and worse.

Mont St Michel 1300 years of history - plus.

A World Heritage Site, one of the modern Seven Wonders of World, Mont St Michel in Normandy near Avranches was first used as a Christian site 1300 years ago. In fact, it was also a religious site before the arrival of Christianity. One of the very successful policies of the early church was to take over existing religious places as soon as they gained enough power. By so doing, they created an impression of continuity, and used the familiarity with the site of the local people. Plus of course it made it much harder for the original religions to carry on.

Many of these takeovers are identifiable today, because most of them were dedicated to St Michael (St Michel), the slayer of the dragon, a metaphor for the old faiths. The early Celtic religions often used hill tops and other prominent locations for their shrines and meeting places, and if there is a church on a hill, it is most likely to be the Church of St Michael.

The Abbey and church on Mont St Michel, built in various stages during those 1300 years, is spectacular and overwhelming; the highest part is known as La Merveille (The Marvel). Not just a church, but an entire small town, and enormous, and above all in the most striking location imaginable. It is in fact so complex that when I went on a guided tour I lingered a litle too long in one part, and the tour had vanished; it took an hour to find a way back out. There are several of my photographs of the place in the gallery at the top of this blog, which can also be found here. Every time I visit the Mont, or go near it there is a different view, or different lighting, and I probably have hundreds of pictures.

A few years ago I visited Egypt, and went to Giza to see the Pyramids. Having seen so many pictures of the iconic group of three overlapping triangles, seeing the real things was somehow very weird. That familiarity of the image made it seem as if that is all there is, an image. It was as if having seen all the Left Turn road signs over the years, I was one day to encounter the 200 metre high original Left Turn of which all the signs were copies. It is the same with Mont St Michel: the outline is so familiar, a jagged triangle that is easy to draw freehand from memory, sitting in the sea or miles of wet sand, that the real thing becomes unreal.

The village where I live is about 30 miles from Mont St Michel in a direct line, but 50 miles by road because of the Bay. Of course, whenever we have visitors they want to visit the Mont, and even the most wonderful of places can be seen too often, so these days we tend to provide them with guide books, itineraries, and ideas on all the other nearby interesting places.

We were driving out of our village with one visitor, an old friend from Canada, and she suddenly squeaked 'I can see Mont St Michel!'. We told her she was mistaken, we are far too distant, and there is at least one range of hills in the way. Every time we saw her over the next couple of years, we would suddenly point, whether we were in London or anywhere, and say 'Look – Mont St Michel', and laugh. Very unfair.

Then, one very clear day in winter, we saw Mont St Michel from the same place. With a very detailed map we discovered that our village is on the top of a range of hills that is slightly higher than the range between us and the Mont. At one specific place, it is just possible to make out a little grey triangle, apparently hovering in the air, in the far, far distance, if the light is right, and you find the gap in the trees. Most embarrassing.

One of our neighbours then told us that the musician Jean Michel Jarre had a huge concert and light display on the Mont, and quite a few villagers gathered in a particular field to watch, and listen on their radios to the simultaneous broadcast. Apparently, so many people wanted to go to the concert that the roads were jammed for miles in all directions, and most of those with tickets missed it.

Like St Iago de Compostela, in Spain, Mont St Michel was a major pilgrim site, and indeed one of the stops on the way to Compostela. There is a little village, not far from us, called St Michel de Montjoie (Joie means, unsurprisingly, joy), which grew up at the first point where pilgrims from Paris caught a glimpse of the Mont. It is also the site of a Museum of Granite, and part of the Route du Granit walk. Much of the granite used in Paris came from here.

For some reason, quite a lot of British people either know nothing of Mont St Michel, or think it a minor attraction, like the Cornish St Michael's Mount, which is like comparing the parish church of St Pancras with Westminster Abbey. If you ever go to Normandy, or Brittany because it is effectively on the border, not to stop off at the Mont would be a dreadful loss.

Foxes, urban and rural

Over the Christmas holiday, a French man in his forties, with learning difficulties, was on a visit to London with a group. He became separated from the group, and disappeared. He had no money, no ID, no mobile phone, and did not speak any English. Happily, he was found, three days later, in South London. He did not explain what he had been doing, or how he got where he was found. All he wanted to talk about was the foxes in the streets of London.

Of course, every one knows about the urban foxes, but over the last four or five years there seems to have been almost an explosion. I live near Hampstead Heath in London, and one sees foxes in the streets most evenings after dark. These are city foxes: cocky and hard to intimidate. They walk along the pavements, and if you follow them they take no notice unless you gain on them, when they either break into a casual saunter, or wander into a garden out of sight. If they are coming towards you, they usually cross the road, not out of fear but because they really would prefer not to be seen with you. I have seen a couple sit down in the middle of a suburban road in broad daylight, watching builders put up scaffolding, and another lying along a wall between gardens sleeping in the sun. And of course, it is always easy to smell where they have built their dens. I have even been woken up by the screaming of two or more foxes in the gardens.

In Normandy, by contrast, I have seen foxes on only two occasions, both as they slunk along the far side of fields. They are around, and there are many paths made by them as they follow a regular route around their territory, particularly where they scramble over the bocage hedges. They are secretive. That is because many people keep chickens, which roam around freely so that foxeds are shot on sight, and because many farmers still hunt. Not on horseback with hounds, but on foot with rifles, and motley dogs, and mostly they are hunting for the pot. Winter weekends the hunters are a common sight, trudging through the morning mist and fog in ones, twos and threes, every so often firing at something, and missing. At the nearby forest, during the weekends in the season, there are signs warning that the people are hunting is in progress, and to beware.

La Chasse is very important to those to whom it is very important, but there is less and less to shoot. The hunting societies now artificially raise hares, pheasants, partridges and even deer, to release when the season starts. The increase in prosperity, the rise of supermarkets and the use of cars means that it is not really necessary to hunt for food to survive, although there are of course always interesting game that you cannot easily buy.

Because the Societés de la Chasse have traditionally been quite powerful, they have many rights and privileges, and they are governed by quite extensive regulations. However, nowadays, fewer young people are interested, and older hunters are dying off. There are now many people who do not approve of hunting, and where there were signs at the gates of fields saying that the hunting rights were reserved to the Societés, there are more and more signs saying 'Chasse Interdite' (hunting forbidden).

The downside of regulation for the hunters is that as their power wanes, the regulations start to work against them. The owners of land can register their refusal to allow hunting. The hunting season is being shortened by the Préfectures who set the rules. Limits are being imposed on what creatures can be shot, and how many. For example, a Societé can only shoot so many hares in total, but no one hunter can shoot more than one, only two wild boar may be killed, and so on. Even if the Societé had actually raised the creatures themselves. The details are usually published in the local papers, and displayed on the larger mairies.

Many hunters are unhappy, but there is little they can do. In a couple of generations' time, hunting will be virtually gone. I for one will not miss it.