Medieval France
Use of pasture for domestic animals in the forest and common lands of a village; the word also refers to the grazing lands themselves. Originally public rights vested in Carolingian officials, rights to pâturage came to be part of the seigneurial or banal rights of lords, who began in the central Middle Ages to exact fees for or to limit use of and access to such grazing lands. Such pasture rights also included rights to graze animals on fallow, to allow pigs into the forest to eat acorns and other nuts, to collect bedding for animals, and other forest uses essential to the village economy. Pasture lands (generally, pascua in Latin) should not be confused with meadows (Lat. prata, Fr. prés), which were much more valuable holdings in particularly well watered, sometimes even irrigated, locations along streams, where they would produce multiple cuttings of hay each summer.
Constance H.Berman
[See also: AGRICULTURE; ANIMALS (DOMESTIC); TRANSHUMANCE]
Duby, Georges.
Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, trans. Cynthia Postan. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968.
——, and Armand Wallon, eds. Histoire de la France rurale des origines a 1340. Paris: Seuil, 1975.
Slicher van Bath, Bernard H. The Agrarian History of Western Europe: A.D. 500–1850, trans. Olive Ordish. London: Arnold, 1963.
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