Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 248

Many readers of this review will have passed through Toury without realizing it, because the commune is traversed by one of the railway lines between Paris and Orléans and by the route royale described by Marc Bloch, which is now identified as route nationale 20. Samuel Leturcq, lecturer in medieval history at the Université François Rabelais in Tours, begins his monograph with a methodological introduction that draws the distinction between agrarian structures (landscapes) and farming systems (rotations), summarizes research on open-field and bocage by historians, geographers and archaeologists, and recognizes the contrast between deliberately simplified ‘models’ and the messy complexity of the empirical record. Of particular interest is the rejection of the old belief that nucleated settlements in areas of open-field cultivation, such as the Beauce, were necessarily original features. Another hypothesis sees them as the result of spatial reorganization in the past when small settlements disappeared to the benefit of surviving central places. These remarks indicate that Leturcq’s study of a village in the Beauce will provide a much more complex account than the stereotypical image of an arid, tree-less plateau, whose broad horizons are only broken by the church steeples of nucleated villages.

Adopting a ‘retrospective’ approach, the author presents the collective rural structure of Toury between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, making particular use of a detailed terrier and plan that date from 1696 following the transfer of property from the abbey of Saint-Denis to the benefit of the nuns of Saint- Cyr. The pattern of strip fields at Toury was highly fragmented and most property units were extremely small (especially gardens and vineyards), but only seven owners held one-third of the total area. Landowners lived not only in Toury but also in surrounding parishes and in more distant towns, including Blois, Orléans and Paris. Functioning farms were complex assemblages of owner-occupied and rented strips dispersed widely across the parish and beyond. Far from involving three great ‘fields’, or sections of territory, the three-fold rotation operated across three dozen clusters of strips whose geography reflected the existence of four tiny hamlets in the parish in 1696 and hinted at the presence of others that had disappeared in the past. Collective stubble grazing of vast flocks of sheep was practised not just within the parish, or across the territory worked by farms located in Toury, but in a zone that extended as far as the seven villages in adjacent parishes, on average four kilometres away. Here, Leturcq introduces some elementary notions of spatial analysis. Collective obligations were certainly important but so, too, were individual rights in the tiny plots surrounding the village of Toury and its dependant hamlets.

Thanks to the survival of an array of medieval fiscal documents relating to Toury, and to the parish of Rouvray-Saint-Denis further north, it is possible to reconstruct communal agrarian activities in this central part of the Beauce between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. Outlying hamlets were more important than in subsequent times and the results of archaeological field walking give very strong evidence for the location of one of two deserted hamlets. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the settlement pattern of Toury parish was concentrated to a greater degree on the central village. Some useful diagrams relating to regularly repeated distances between settlement clusters suggest how this may have happened. A sideways look at Rouvray-Saint-Denis not only provides complementary information on patterns of strips and crop rotations but also indicates the presence of ‘waste’ that was being brought into cultivation in the late fifteenth century. This process of défrichement emerged emphatically from the record left by abbé Suger in the early twelfth century that described properties in the Beauce held by the abbey of Saint-Denis. The final section of the book moves further from archival evidence into the application of ideas and hypotheses derived from other studies of the evolution of rural settlements and agrarian structures. For example, the north-south alignment of the route royale appears to have played an important role in structuring the arrangement of cultivated strips. Archaeological evidence dating from Gallo-Roman times suggests the presence of several small settlements, of which one (Toury) came to dominate the local area, whilst others survived as tiny hamlets or isolated farms, and some were abandoned completely.

In addition to this interpretation, Samuel Leturcq provides a thorough discussion of the challenges confronting the researcher. Agrarian and fiscal vocabularies in the past are shown to have been complex and variable across both time and space. Functioning farms did not correspond neatly with property units, with many examples extending into surrounding parishes and a mixture of owned and rented strips being commonplace. Ecclesiastical parishes conformed to administrative entities but some agricultural practices extended across wider territories (in the case of stubble grazing), whilst others operated over smaller areas around the ancient hamlets. This fascinating monograph is enhanced by an array of detailed interpretative maps and is supported by a large bibliography. It reveals a rural world that changed across the centuries, in response to economic trends, modified land ownership, warfare, disease and a host of other factors, and whose landscape expression was transformed by the process of plot consolidation (remembrement) completed in 1951. Four decades later, production of wheat and sugar beet across the Beauce was accompanied for several years by the imposition of set-aside that evokes some of the fluctuations in land use recorded in medieval times.