"Fences in 1870 Northern Europe" Topic

Working on a FPW scenario and was going to add some fencing to my farm houses. There is a large woods in the battle. Would the farms in northern France have wood fences or stone fences? I am leaning towards stone.

Would the farms in northern France have wood fences or stone fences?

It's a stone wall, not a stone fence.

The structure of boundaries entirely depends on the local availability of suitable materials. Where trees are plentiful you are more likely to get wooden fences. Where are there are few trees (such as upland areas) you will be more likely to find stone walls. In some areas also you will find ditches and/or hedges rather than fences or walls.

In Normandy they have hedges.
From Tour de France coverage it seems that many fields for crops rather than livestock have neither fence nor wall.

Druzhina
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Would the farms in northern France have wood fences or stone fences?

Neither really.

As Druzhina says, there is no need for fences or walls if there are no livestock. Turnips aren't that good at escaping! A single cow or horse is much more easily tethered to where it needs to be.

What little fencing there is would not be stone. That requires the local fields to be stony, which they aren't. The availability of wood is rather beside the point. People build stone walls to get rid of the stones in their fields, not to save on wood. (If there is no stone or wood, then they use hedges.)

In lots of areas ditches are the main boundary.

People build stone walls to get rid of the stones in their fields, not to save on wood.

That is only partly true. Otherwise there would never be any wooden fences. Often the stones in the fields aren't big enough to build stone walls with.

This will give you the general idea.
link

If you are talking abut fences/walls around the buildings themselves as opposed to field boundaries, then the same thing the buildings are made of. Which is going to be brick/stone in NE France.

Most stone "fences" around common fields would be there out of centuries of getting those stones that are in the field outward,then they would start making walls.
You'd can get stone walls around orchards to keep game away.
Otherwise if terrain is not so stony you'd get wood fencing esp. if there are many woods!
But you don't have to get fences, these are mostly for cattle. You can also have hedges, most likely messy ones (not British like!) esp. were water is.
By 1870 you could even get wire (not barbed) that was real new and people were not used to it, hard to see from a distance, one of the main problems for cuirassiers at Froeschwiller.
I you get 1914 pictures that would be very much the same. Won't necessarily today though, in the 60s "le remembrement" (agricultural reorganization / resizing fields for efficiency) would often have changed the aspect, especially by getting those fences, walls and hedges away, to have bigger, simpler fields.
Though if in today's pic/ map you have a stone wall or hedge, in the NE -very 1870- part, you can bet it was there back then too.

To have good terrain maps you can use this outstanding site:
geoportail.gouv.fr/accueil
they do have maps of the 1860-70s in there (I used one to correct the 1870 ST game map!!) – carte d'état major 1:40000e. You can superpose it with the today's very accurate one.
I had 2000 1880-1914 postcards from my great-grand father (replacement teacher) that were stolen a few years ago. I believe that could still sometimes be found on the net try "cartes postales" or images with the place you want.
Jc

This was all very informative. The links were great. Sal Sr out!!!

Thanks guys!

Living just north of NE France, and where agriculture is still fairly small-scale, I can only say that there are very few walled fields today. They'd be a pain to move, so I'm guessing they were probably never there except as very low boundary markers – dumps of loose stones. There are still plenty of hedgerows and fences, but very few walls. You also see many ditches as part of field boundaries (usually combined with a fence), probably due to ploughing.

In Europe, the Enclosure/Inclosure movement was strongest in the UK, and was only really systematised in the 1800s. It was much weaker in France due to the nature of land ownership and general shortage of capital. Strong enclosures often only exist to help demonstrate land ownership on the ground, and where that's vague, or contested, there is not much incentive simply because it's so expensive to maintain.

Animals were probably kept very close to the farm, and kept overnight in a barn attached to the house. I doubt they were left to roam very much, so fences wouldn't be needed. Many of the more prosperous farms are still like walled compounds, so feel free to have one or two of them as strongpoints.

One place you do see walls in France is around hunting reserves – to keep the game in and the peasants out. The lower orders were forever knocking holes in these walls to get at the game. These were often wooded, so you should feel free to put a wall round some forest.

There is also a dearth of fences and walls around fields in Bohemia at the APW of 1866 battlefields, again because the livestock was kept fenced in, which required less fencing. In 1996 I noted in Bosnia it was normal to attach an elderly lady to a individual cow, but it was unclear whether this was for the benefit of the cow or of the old lady. It certainly ensured that neither wandered off, so may be a candidate for a programme of care in the community.

Superb Holdfast, reminds me Terry Pratchett's Rincewind asking the peasant holding the ox on a rope if it doesn't get tedious, with the reply 'What is time to an ox?'