ABSTRACT
DOWN to the eve of the nineteenth century the rural life of France is dominated by a single, ancient and probably indigenous word, bie,2 which owes nothing to Latin, and may well be of Gallic origin, like numerous other words in our agricultural vocabulary which are such eloquent testimony to the antiquity of our agrarian life-charrue, chemin, somart or sombre (in the sense of fallow land), Lande and arpent. During the Middle Ages, and for a long time after, bU was not restricted to wheat, as seems to have become the modern literary usage; in the language of the countryside bU covered all cereals from which bread could be made, whether it was the fine wheat bread which delighted the rich or the heavy black bread of the peasants, which might contain wheat, rye-which when diseased caused the spread of erysipelas-maslin (a mixture of wheat and rye), spelt, oats or even barley.3 By far the greater part of cultivated land was devoted to bU, corn in its closest English equivalent. * Corn held pride of place in every village
and on every estate. It was cultivated even on ground apparently unpromising, rugged alpine slopes and those waterlogged lands of western and central France, soaked with incessant rain, which to us might seem more appropriate as pasture. In 1787 the commissaries of the Provincial Assembly of the Orleanais could still remark: 'agriculture, in the great majority of the provinces of France, may be considered a huge factory for the production of corn'. For a very long time conditions of life militated against any more specialised use of the soil. Bread was an essential food for everyone, for the poor their staple diet. Flour was vital but could not readily be obtained by purchase; although probably never completely non-existent, trading was for centuries a rare and difficult operation. The safest course was to look to one's own fields; and so the lord had his demesne lands sown for him, the peasants worked their own. There was of course nothing to prevent a lord or well-provided peasant from diverting his surplus grain to regions where the harvest had failed.
