Wood for burning: The continuity of woodland management in medieval and early modern France

Abstract

This essay argues that over the last five or six centuries of the preindustrial era northern French patterns of woodland management, which prioritized the production of fuelwood, were more stable than is usually thought. Regulations were gradually tightened, most famously in the Forest Ordinance of 1669, but such administrative reforms aimed primarily to reassert the state's authority and improve its finances. Silvicultural techniques themselves changed only incrementally, and more often as the result of market forces than of central planning. Early modern norms of woodland management had much deeper and broader sources than the tendency to trace them to royal initiative suggests. The French state appropriated and standardized practices that were in many cases already common by the thirteenth century. This essay focuses on the pervasiveness of coppicing, the enduring norms governing tree density and species, and the persistence of use rights.