DÉFRICHEMENT
. Literally, the clearing away of brush; more generally, any reclamation of arable land
from the waste. The major medieval rural expansion, although dated slightly differently
from region to region, from 1000 to 1300, is called the grands défrichements. This
conquest of France’s “internal frontiers” has been used to explain the urban growth of the
central Middle Ages, for agricultural surplus was needed to support town specialists and
it was assumed that “frontier” lands were more fertile, gave higher yields and so on. Its
chief architects were thought to be the new monks of the period, such as the Cistercians,
who advertised their practice of manual labor and claimed to found their abbeys “far from
cities.” But the correlations between monks and clearance and between clearance and
town growth were much less direct than once thought. Rural expansion began first on the
margins of settlement, carried out by the population of overcrowded villages, who licitly
or illicitly felled, drained, and cultivated surrounding wastelands, adding extra bits of
land to their fields, or creating the new fields and holdings, called appendariae or
bordariae, adjoining old village lands. More striking was the assarting and draining that
occurred in the great forests and wastes beyond or between existing villages, affirmed by
new place-names like Artigue, Finage, and Bordage. Although the older Benedictine
monasteries were sometimes the lords involved in the founding of new villages in forest
and waste, the actual work of reclamation was carried out by peasant settlers; moreover,
where forest clearance was not a planned activity it was the work of hermits, charcoal
burners, pastoralists, and other anonymous forest folk. The great expanses of land that the
new monks like the Cistercians came to hold were not gained at the expense of forest but
were purchased from these earlier cultivators and settlers.
Constance H.Berman
[See also: AGRICULTURE; CISTERCIAN ORDER; GRANGE; VILLENEUVE]
Berman, Constance H. Medieval Agriculture, the Southern French Countryside, and the Early
Cistercians. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1986.
Duby, Georges. Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, trans. Cynthia Postan.
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968.
Higounet, Charles. Paysages et villages neufs du moyen âge. Bordeaux: Fédération Historique du
Sud-Ouest, 1975.
DENIS
. Patron saint of France and bishop of Paris. The earliest Life of the saint, known from its
incipit as the Gloriosae (ca. 500), stated that Denis (Dionysius) had been sent to preach to
the pagans by a “successor of the Apostles.” Settling in Paris, he built a church and
performed many miracles. Because of his success, he and his companions, the priest
Rusticus and the deacon Eleutherius, were tortured and executed. However, they never
ceased to confess their belief in the Trinity and their faith in the Lord. The pagans had
planned to throw their bodies into the Seine, but a pious matron took them and buried
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