Forêt de Rouvray

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The once vast Forêt de Rouvray ("Forest of Rouvray", from Latin roboretum, 'oak forest') was a forest that extended from west of Paris in the Île-de-France region westwards into Normandy, virtually unbroken, threaded by the winding loops of the River Seine, traversed by forest traces and dotted with isolated woodland hamlets, as far as Rouen.[1] A rural relict is the Forêt Domanial de la Londe-Rouvray, at Les Essarts, Haute-Normandie, near Saint-Êtienne-du-Rouvray, south of Rouen, on an upland massif the left bank of the Seine, which makes a wide arc enclosing it.[2] At its eastern end, the tract of heavily used urban woodland, trails, and man-made lakes of the Bois de Boulogne, Paris, once formed part of the forest of Rouvray. The remnants of the forest have been reduced even as recently as the last few decades, prey to urban sprawl, highway construction and pollution.

According to his early biographers, it was while riding in the forest of Rouvray that William the Norman decided to assert his rights to the throne of England.[3]

The forest that extended to the floodplain of the Seine was incrementally cleared by the monks of congregations established in the environs of Rouen, at the abbeys of Grammont, of Saint-Julien and others. At the end near Paris, in 1424 the abbess of Montmartre defended the abbey's traditional right to forest products in the stretch of "forêt de Rouvray" that is now the Bois de Boulogne.[4]

From a decree of 14 February 1488, Hector de Chartres was named maître des eaux et des forêts de Normandie et de Picardie by Charles VI of France, charged with simplifying the old customs of the forested lands. He had the charge of the forests of Rouvray and Toumare, but the Forêt verrte, donated by the archbishop of Rouen to the monks of Saint-Ouen, eluded his care. However, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, the forest had been decimated: a municipal decree of Rouen, of 24 April 1506, estimated, perhaps with some exaggeration, that if demands were met, within the space of three years the forest of Rouvray would be gone; the pressures came from timber needed for house construction and ship-building downstream, and for charcoal. In 1613 a decree from the Conseil du Roi specified that the products of Rouvray and other woods near by should be limited to the uses of Rouen, but in the seventeenth century, tile-works and pottery kilns[5] set up round the edges of the forest were consuming its timber for fuel. The oaks were replaced by birch; fern, bracken and broom invaded the depleted soils, and the aristocratic owners[6] were replaced by local bourgeois who saw the woodlands as a resource.

At the time of the reordering of the badly cut-over forest in 1669, it was estimated that the oldest of the trees was about twenty years old, with most growth ranging from eight to fourteen years. Little was done to stem the erosion of the forests; the Wars of Louis XIV took their share of timber of any size, and the cold winters of the "Little Ice Age" required firewood for Rouen. By 1750, three of every eight arpents of "forest" was actually irremiably turned to open wasteland and heath on the impoverished soils. That was the year that Nicolas Roneau, Grand maître des eaux et de forêts began planting open heath with chestnuts and pines— the first planted pine woodlands in Normandy— as a first step towards a managed forest.

The Revolution saw the woodlands informally exploited once more, as a "public good", but the introduction of British coal for industrial purposes in the nineteenth century was what really saved the remaining reserves of woodland. In the twentieth century, the Second World War, the construction of highways, the new phenomena of forest fires[7] and acid rain, which selectively weakened conifers, have also taken their toll.

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[edit] Notes

  1. ^ General accounts are Léon de Vesly, "Exploration de la forêt de Rouvray," Bulletin archéologique du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques. (1902); Notice archéologique sur les forêts de Rouvray et de La Londe. 1922.
  2. ^ On the right bank, to the west, is what is left of the Forêt de Roumare, another former royal forest.
  3. ^ Jérôme Chaïb, L'Homme et les forêts rouennais de la guerre des cent ans à nos jours (Agglomération de Rouen) (pdf file). Historical details in this article are largely drawn from this source.
  4. ^ [http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/cartulaires/mtmartre/acte114/ Édouard de Barthélémy, ed. Receuil des chartes de l'abbaye de Montmartre, pp 211f.
  5. ^ In the late seventeenth century Rouen became a center of faience manufacture.
  6. ^ The crown sold off sections of its holdings from 1655.
  7. ^ Between 1968 and 1971 about 750 ha, about a quarter of the remaining forest, burned and was replanted, in sessile oak (Q. petraea) with an understorey of beech (saplings), on poorer soils, hornbeam and Nordmann Spruce, and on the most degraded soils, red oak and chestnut. according to T. Blais, "Mésures sylvicoles propres à réduire les risques d'incendie dans la zone tempéré", in Tran Van Nao, ed. Forest Fire Prevention and Control (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe) 1982:189-90. ISBN 9024730503