 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
Chapter 2
Hedgerows
The first time I ever heard of the hedgerows of Normandy was when I was a sophomore
in high school, studying Caesar's Commentaries in Latin class. Here, in translation, is what Julius
had to say.
The Nervii had practically no cavalry; to this day, in fact, they have very little use
for that arm, relying entirely on infantry. They had, nevertheless, long since
evolved tactics to check marauding parties of foreign horsemen. Their method
was to plash young trees and bend them over so as to form a thick horizontal
mass of branches. This was intertwined with brambles and thorns, and
presented an obstacle as good as a wall, being impossible to see through, let
alone to pass.
I recall my Latin teacher commenting that she had heard there were still vestiges of those
barriers in what is now Normandy. She was right! And in the intervening 2,000 years, earthen
embankments had built up around them.
Another famous writer, Honore de Balzac, wrote in the early 19th century:
The [Norman] peasants, from time immemorial, have raised a bank of earth about
each field, forming a flat-topped ridge, six feet in height, with beeches, oaks, and
chestnut trees growing upon the summit. The ridge or mound, planted in this wise,
is called a hedge; and as the long branches of the trees which grow upon it almost
always project across the road, they make a great arbor overhead. The roads
themselves, shut in by clay banks in this melancholy way, are not unlike the
moats of fortresses ..
Balzac's description is still very good: the hedgerows have changed very little since his
time. Rural Normandy is made up of millions of irregular little fields about a hundred yards
square on the average, all fenced in by hedgerows. These fields are irregular in size and shape;
most are vaguely quadrilateral, except for a few L-shaped ones, but the sides are rarely equal and
the corners may or may not be 90% angles. Many of them have small pools or tanks in a corner
for the cattle to drink from, and most of them have gaps in the vegetation two or three feet wide
at one or two corners, where a person, but not a cow, could scramble over the embankment and
into the next field.
The odd shapes made it easy to locate oneself on the map, because our military maps [the
best I have seen anywhere in the world] showed every field exactly as it was on the ground.
17
|
 |
|