A Summer In Gascony Read online

  Eleanor retained all the lands she had inherited from her father, about a quarter of present-day France – probably the biggest divorce settlement in history! Less than two months after the annulment of her marriage, this femme formidable married the ambitious and charismatic young Henry Plantagenet. The wedding took place in a secret ceremony in May 1152. Eleanor was 30, Henry just 19. At the time he was Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou.

  Eleanor’s second marriage changed the course of history. Two years later, in 1154, Henry succeeded to the throne of England as King Henry II, with Eleanor as his queen. Gascony became the southernmost land of the great Plantagenet empire, stretching from Berwick-upon-Tweed to the Pyrenees. So began the long association between England and Gascony that was to endure for the next three hundred years, give or take a year or so.

  English officials were sent out to administer the province of Gascony. The governor was known as the Lieutenant du Roi, a viceroy appointed by the king of England to represent his interests. Gascon nobles visited England often to gain knowledge of English ways and administrative methods, before returning to take up positions back home. Anglo-Gascon coins were struck in various towns in Gascony. Gascon military nobles, ever ready for adventure, fought alongside Englishmen against the French, the Welsh and the Scots. Some were rewarded for their efforts with grants of land in England. Considering the distance and the cost of the journey, the extent of the comings and goings was astonishing for the age.

  English and Gascon men and women settled and made new lives for themselves in one another’s countries. Many English merchants became citizens of Bordeaux, Saintes, Agen and Toulouse. The town of Libourne on the river Dordogne took its name from Sir Roger de Leyburn, Lieutenant du Roi, who established the port there in 1270. The small town of Bâa, founded in 1287 near Bordeaux, got its name because the land there belonged to the Bishop of Bath and Wells and the locals couldn’t pronounce Bath. The area known as Guienne, to the southeast of Bordeaux, was so called because the English couldn’t pronounce Aquitaine. The small town of Hastingues, up river from the port of Bayonne, was named after – no surprise – Hastings.

  Gascony was a prosperous province for England. The relationship was characterised by one aspect above all: commerce. And this commerce was defined by one product: wine. From the beginning of the thirteenth century the English encouraged wine production in Gascony and provided the almost exclusive market for its export. When a mediaeval Englishman talked of wine, he had in mind only the wine of Gascony. The development of the vineyards by the English was a boon for the province: its soils and climate were well suited to the vine, and large areas of quite barren land were improved and made fertile for vines to be cultivated commercially. The maps that still designate many of the vineyards of the Bordelais were drawn at this time, such as those forming the jurisdiction of Saint-Emilion, fixed by Edward I in 1289. The English formed the Jurade to administer the town of Saint-Emilion and make sure the wine flowed freely. In the cavernous underground church carved out of the rock beneath the town, traces of painted English roses can still be seen decorating the ceiling, reminders of the English love of Gascon wine and the affection the Gascons had for the English who bought their wine.

  Bordeaux was the thriving commercial centre of the Anglo-Gascon wine trade. Its position at the confluence of the Garonne and the Dordogne, at the head of the estuary of the Gironde, made it a natural trading port. Bordeaux had old links with the British Isles. As far back as the first century BC, records tell of an ancient British wine merchant set up in business on the waterfront at Bordeaux. In the Middle Ages, the trade with England brought about a massive and sustained economic boom; the city doubled in size during the first half of the thirteenth century. Great fairs took place when the ships arrived from England to collect the new vintage. English traders and mariners congregated in the Rocela district of the city, near the quays where their ships moored. The Rocela district is now the Rue de la Rousselle. With a population of around 30,000, not much less than London at the time, Bordeaux was in a sense England’s second city. The names of its mayors tell their own story: Sandwich, Swynburne, Molton, Lutherell, Bukton, Radcliff, Merbury and Redford. King Louis XI later acknowledged that if Bordeaux was one of the greatest and most populous cities in his kingdom, it owed its wealth to the English, who brought gold and silver that they converted into Gascon wine.

  The demand for wine was considerable and Gascony exported enormous quantities to slake the thirsts of mediaeval Englishmen and women. The English liked the light, young red wines produced around Bordeaux, at Pessac, Barsac, Saint-Macaire, Langon and Saint-Emilion. This clear new wine was known in French as clairet; the English acquired a taste for it and called it claret. What would mediaeval claret have tasted like? We can only speculate. It would certainly have been younger than modern Bordeaux red and would probably have been much lighter, with the refreshing cut of a present-day Beaujolais nouveau. The idea of vintage wine did not exist, as wine would barely keep until the next year’s harvest and usually from late spring it was unpalatable. Glass bottles were not yet used; wine was stored and transported in 240-gallon wooden barrels known as tonneaux.

  The great mediaeval wine fleets left Bordeaux en masse each autumn, laden with the new vintage and bound for English ports: Plymouth, Bristol, Southampton, Winchelsea, Sandwich, London, Boston and Hull. Wines from the south of Gascony were exported through the port of Bayonne, on the river Adour. The wine ships were called cogs, their rounded, capacious hulls carrying 200 tonneaux per vessel; although the biggest cogs, the supertankers of their day, carried 300 tonneaux. According to the records, in the year 1300 no fewer than 900 cogs left Bordeaux for England. The crossing to London could be made in about ten to twelve days, but delays and stopovers for victuals meant it often took longer. The constant plying back and forth of the wine ships greatly improved the seafaring skills of the English merchant navy. 1309 was the bumper year for the wine trade, with over twenty-five million gallons imported. That’s over six gallons of Gascon wine for the year for every man, woman and child in England.

  Many Gascon wine merchants set up businesses in London, for which they were given economic incentives in the form of trading privileges and reduced duties. Some commercial districts of London became ‘Gasconised’. An area near the Vintry wharves on the Thames was known as La Riole, because it was frequented by so many merchants from the town of La Réole on the Garonne. The Gascon merchants in London established their own professional association, the Merchant Wine Tonners of Gascoyne, based around the church of St Martin in the Vintry. One wine merchant left his native Bergerac to set up in London and eventually rose to become the King’s Chamberlain and Taker of Wines. Wine in mediaeval times was subject to all sorts of regulations and duties and was taxed several times en route. Plus ça change!

  In exchange for wine, England supplied Gascony with corn, wool, cloth and dried and salted fish, especially herring, hake and salmon. England even exported preserved meat and cheese to Gascony. These exports made the outward journey profitable for the merchant venturers who had to lay out huge sums of money to finance the voyages. England and Gascony needed each other. When England was at war and limits were imposed on the export of corn, an exception was usually made for Gascony. In return, more wine was bought to keep the troops happy.

  Wine jugs were imported from Gascony. These were luxury items for well-to-do English families and were more finely crafted than the jugs made in England. They were hard earthenware, usually with floral designs in yellow, green and brown, finished with a thin salt glaze. A feature was the spout, pinched with the thumb into the shape of a beak. A continuous rim behind this spout stopped any sediment and allowed the wine to pour freely without spillage. There is a good example in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight.

  Gascony supplied England with that other essential commodity for mediaeval living: salt. It was obtained from the evaporation of seawater in the lagoons along the western shore. The action of the
tides, the warm winds blowing off the ocean and the hot southern sun on the bays and inlets along the flat coastline made ideal conditions for salt extraction. As the seawater reduced in the salt pans, the salt would crystallise in the shallower parts. Barefoot salt panners, wearing broad caps to protect themselves from the relentless glare of the sun, used longhandled wooden shovels to push the salt into heaps, which they covered with straw and then left to dry in the open. Once dry, the salt was shovelled into sacks. The trade was highly lucrative – in the Middle Ages salt was known as ‘white gold’. It was a valuable resource in an age when it was almost the only means of preserving food.

  The Gascon language flourished under English rule. Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry Plantagenet’s most famous son, Richard Coeur de Lion, wrote poetry in Gascon. This was the age of the Troubadours, the minstrel-poets from across the pleasure-loving provinces of southern France, who composed love songs about gallant knights and fair ladies. Troubadours were often accompanied by jongleurs, all-round entertainers with a variety of tricks in their routine. The Gascons were renowned jongleurs, performing popular songs along with juggling and acrobatic stunts. They were especially admired for their military dart-throwing skills.

  Péguilhan almost has a famous son in the Troubadour Aimeric de Péguilhan; I say almost because he was born at Toulouse, around 1175, the son of a cloth merchant. He probably had a family connection with Péguilhan. Aimeric was a wandering minstrel, ending his days in Lombardy in 1230. According to his contemporaries, he was a good songwriter but a bad singer.

  Times weren’t always peaceful, but on the whole the three centuries of English rule in Gascony were a time of growth and good fortune. The English made Gascony a colony in the true sense of the word, from colonia, meaning a farm. The negative impact of English rule in Gascony was that so much land was planted with vines that Gascony could not grow enough food to feed itself and became dependent on imports from England, but on balance this was profitable for the growers and the merchants on both sides.

  England’s empire in Europe shrank through the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Only Gascony remained an English-ruled enclave in the southwest. The endless hostilities between England and France during the Hundred Years War cut off the land route, leaving Gascony reachable only by sea. The sea passage could be perilous; with limited navigation equipment, the ships had to hug the coast and were vulnerable to pirates and bad weather.

  The English tired of their colony: it was far away, and difficult and expensive to maintain. The French were no longer prepared to tolerate the presence of the Godons in what they regarded as their land. The French army fought its way ruthlessly through Gascony, taking it piece by piece, as Anglo-Gascon resistance gradually crumbled. King Charles VII, after years of war and wrangling, succeeded in wresting the province away from English control. The decisive battle took place at Castillon-la-Bataille, on the river Dordogne, in July 1453. Lord Talbot, the commander of the Anglo-Gascon army, was impetuous and, believing false rumours of a French retreat, attacked with only part of his forces. Some said he charged without his lance or his sword. The battle turned into a rout. Many Anglo-Gascon soldiers drowned in the river as they fled and Talbot was slain. Castillon has been described as the Waterloo of Gascon nationality.

  Bordeaux was the last city to fall to the French. It had always been the most loyal bastion of English rule in Gascony. The Bordelais did not want to become French, nor did they want to lose their lucrative trade with England. The French army laid siege to the city from August to October of 1453. The Bordelais, supported by the English garrison in the city, held out through the siege for as long as they could. When the city finally surrendered, the English who were left there were escorted to the coast under safe conduct, by heralds and men-at-arms, to return to England by sea. The Bordelais city governors and many local leaders left with them; refusing allegiance to the French crown, they abandoned their native land to take refuge in England. On 19 October the banners of France were unfurled over the city walls, signalling the end of English Gascony. The French, to be fair, allowed the English another six months to ship out the 1453 wine vintage – after all, trade had to go on and the growers and merchants had to stay in business.

  The fall of Bordeaux brought about the demise of the Anglo-Gascon wine trade. The vineyards of Gascony became so depleted that only after the Second World War did wine production in Gascony again reach the levels it had achieved during the prosperous years of the early 1300s. The vineyards around Bordeaux and along the Médoc peninsula benefited from substantial investments by aristocrats during the eighteenth century and bankers and entrepreneurs during the nineteenth century, but in Gascony as a whole, wine production took five hundred years to recover from the departure of the English.

  Whereas the English had allowed the Gascons to speak Gascon and to retain their Gascon identity, the French made them speak French and tried to make French subjects out of them. The Gascon tongue nevertheless remained the popular language among country people and the language of folklore.

  Having conquered Gascony, the French made little investment in it. Over the centuries that followed it became a forgotten backwater. The isolation in the countryside and the stubborn, steadfast character of the people meant that Gascony kept its own traditions and its sense of independence. Paris was seen as another country. A Gascon heading there would be said to be ‘going to France’.

  The Anglo-Gascon legacy in the southwest caused English ways of thinking to leave their mark on French literature. Two of France’s greatest writers – Montaigne and Montesquieu, who also happened to be Gascons – kept the spirit of independence alive. The humanist writer Michel de Montaigne, famous for his essays, whose château lay to the east of Bordeaux, close to Castillon-la-Bataille, thought himself more a Gascon than a Frenchman. His great-grandfather had been a Bordeaux merchant, trading in wine, salt fish and woad. He patriotically referred to the defeated English commander Lord Talbot as ‘our’ Talbot. In a letter to a friend dated 1570, Montaigne complained that he was having difficulty getting his work published ‘up there’ in Paris, where they considered his Gascon style unpolished.

  The family seat of the Enlightenment philosophe Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, was the Château de La Brède, a turreted fortress standing in an idyllic setting, on a lake of running water, fed by a natural spring rising beneath the château, a few kilometres to the south of Bordeaux. Montesquieu loved his family home and spent every summer there until the grapes had been harvested in his vineyards. Montesquieu’s mother tongue was Gascon: he spoke Gascon with the locals, les gens du coin, and French with his fellow aristocrats and literary friends. Montesquieu travelled in England and was impressed by the English system of government, which he wanted to see adopted in ancien régime France. He was pragmatic and forward thinking – traits the French begrudgingly attribute to the English. In the 1730s, the French authorities introduced restrictions on the planting of new vineyards, and Montesquieu saw this as protectionism by the established producers. He knew many of the wine merchants who traded in Bordeaux and he vociferously opposed the ban. What did they want to do, give the new business to the Portuguese?

  The old alliance between England and Gascony has been forgotten. But it is tempting to speculate: even after five and a half centuries of being officially part of France, do some affinities remain between England and Gascony? Where do the Gascons get their simple and dry sense of humour? Why is rugby their favourite sport? How did they make the classic English culinary association between duck and green peas? Until recently, two of the most popular makes of car bought in Gascony were Rovers and Land Rovers. Even today, driving along the esplanades in the coastal resorts of Arcachon and Cap Ferret, typical status symbols for the wealthy are Range Rovers and Aston Martins. And the Gascons seem to feel closer in some ways to England than they do to northern France. Jacques-Henri once remarked pithily: ‘Everything north of the Loire is not France!’

  BRE
AKDOWN BEND

  THE KITCHEN GARDEN, THE CASAU, OCCUPIED THE AREA JUST behind the farmhouse. Its sole purpose was to supply the vegetable needs of the family and the restaurant. Local speciality vegetables were grown to give the menu an authentic flavour. The main crops were haricots, courgettes, cornichons, peas, artichokes, potatoes, lettuce, onions and garlic.

  Two spreading rosemary bushes stood sentinel, one on each side of the main path into the casau. It became a quiet ritual for me, each time I entered the garden, to run my hand through the fragrant foliage or pinch off a hard, narrow leaf to smell. I find the scent of rosemary delicious in small doses, but sickening if inhaled too deeply. Other aromatic herbs were planted among the vegetables: parsley, sage, marjoram, tarragon, fennel and thyme. Taking pride of place in the middle of the plot was a bay tree, known in French as a laurier-noble or a laurier-sauce, depending on whether it is viewed as a fine tree or a culinary ingredient.

  There was no hosepipe for watering the vegetables as there was for the tomatoes; the whole garden was watered laboriously by hand, using an old galvanised watering can kept tucked behind one of the rosemary bushes and filled from a cobalt blue plastic water butt standing by the top wall. The wooden handle of the watering can was worn hard and smooth from years of use. It was heavy to carry and awkward to hold. In addition to frequent watering, the casau needed constant work, some of it hard, such as hoeing the weeds, digging the onions and furrowing the potatoes.