ABSTRACT
The sources contain references to land clearance throughout the Frankish period. Gregory of Tours says of Duke Chrodin, a leading magnate, 'he set out villae (country estates), planted vines, built houses and brought land under cultivation'. Charlemagne directed his bailiffs to make clearings at suitable places in his forests, and to see that once a field had been laid out the woods were kept at bay. Among those very valuable sources for this period, the wills of wealthy landowners, there is scarcely one which does not contain some reference to farm buildings recently erected and land converted to productive use. It must be realised, however, that in most cases these were not fresh acquisitions but reclamations following one of those periods of local depopulation which may easily occur in an unstable society. Thus Charlemagne and Louis the Pious encouraged Spanish refugees to settle in Septimania (BasLanguedoc), where they established new areas of tillage among the scrub and forest. There was Johannis, who came to Les Corbieres 'in the heart of a great wilderness' and established
For when all is said and done, the contest ended in defeat. After the breakdown of the Carolingian Empire the French countryside has an undeniably depopulated aspect, riddled with pockets of emptiness. In many places cultivation had ceased altogether. The sources for the succeeding period beginning c. 1050, when land clearance started again, tell a unanimous tale of recovering lost ground before fresh advances could be made. A passage taken at random from the chronicle of the monks of Morigny can be matched from countless other sources. 'We acquired' (in 1102) 'the village of Maisons' (in the Beauce) 'which was nothing but a wilderness ... we took it over in this neglected state in order to clear it.' At a relatively late date (1195) and in a very different region, the Albigeois, the prior of l'Hopital granting out the village of LacapelleSegalar says 'when this gift was made the village of Lacapelle was deserted; not a soul was living there, it had been deserted for a long time'. 6 The picture which begins to emerge is one of settlements comprising a handful of dwellings and surrounded by a modest tract of cultivated land interspersed among vast areas which never saw the plough. Furthermore, as will shortly be explained, the prevailing methods of cultivation condemned arable lands to lie fallow in at least one year out of two or three,
