Peat Bogs, Marshes and Fen as Disputed Landscapes
79
and the idle rich alike. These last burn it in their hearths, shaping its
sods into little peat “châteaux”, from which surprisingly multicoloured
flames “offrent à la vue un spectacle amusant”.
14 Yet whether it is dug
and cut in Holland, England, Russia or in France, peat is more generally regarded in the eighteenth century as a fuel of the poor; it was for
poor households, for instance, that it was regularly imported and sold
at the Port de la Grève in Paris.
15 This association between peat and
the poor is perhaps reinforced in French by the fact that the word for
peat, “la tourbe”, is also used figuratively to signify a “[m]ultitude
confuse de peuple”.
16 There is a sense here that “peuple” refers pejoratively to a congregation of the vulgar, as in Jean-Baptiste Delisle de
Sales’s notion of “la tourbe des voyageurs”,
17 or more specifically to
the lowest orders of the population, as in Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s
anti-clerical play La Destruction de la Ligue in which a fanatical
Catholic remarks of the Parisian populace: “quant à cette tourbe insensible sur laquelle il y a peu de prise, faisons-lui sentir le fouet de la
terreur”.
18
Nonetheless, peat fields were not immune to the Enlightenment drive to drain marshlands and bogs. Unfortunately, if these reclaimed lands were not then immediately cultivated, drainage could
prove counter-productive and costly. For the exposed and desiccated
peat is prone to shrinkage, wastage and oxidation occasioned by contact with the air, a process which is also accelerated by bacterial action.
19 Thus the exposed earth wastes away and erodes back into the
waters from which it has been reclaimed. In eighteenth-century England, this lesson was quickly learnt, and drained peatlands were
quickly ploughed, limed, manured and harrowed with a fodder crop,
usually oats or potatoes. In fact, the Edinburgh Advertiser of May
1800 carries a detailed account of how best to cultivate “moss and
peatlands” based on the experience of a certain Mr Smith of Swin___________________________
14 La Porte et al, Le Voyageur françois, XX, p. 324.
15 See M. Bagot, “Sur le Charbon de Tourbe exposé en vente par la Compagnie
Callias, au Port de la Grève, à Paris”, Annales de l’Agriculture françoise, XXV
(1806), pp. 46-54.
16 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 4
th ed., 2 vols (Paris: 1762), II, p. 854.
17 J-B-C. Delisle de Sales, De la philosophie de la nature, 3 vols (Paris: 1770), I, p.
129.
18 Louis-Sébastien Mercier, La Destruction de la Ligue, ou La réduction de Paris
(Amsterdam: s.n., 1782), p. 29.
19 Purseglove, Taming the Flood, pp. 12, 57-58.
79
and the idle rich alike. These last burn it in their hearths, shaping its
sods into little peat “châteaux”, from which surprisingly multicoloured
flames “offrent à la vue un spectacle amusant”.
14 Yet whether it is dug
and cut in Holland, England, Russia or in France, peat is more generally regarded in the eighteenth century as a fuel of the poor; it was for
poor households, for instance, that it was regularly imported and sold
at the Port de la Grève in Paris.
15 This association between peat and
the poor is perhaps reinforced in French by the fact that the word for
peat, “la tourbe”, is also used figuratively to signify a “[m]ultitude
confuse de peuple”.
16 There is a sense here that “peuple” refers pejoratively to a congregation of the vulgar, as in Jean-Baptiste Delisle de
Sales’s notion of “la tourbe des voyageurs”,
17 or more specifically to
the lowest orders of the population, as in Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s
anti-clerical play La Destruction de la Ligue in which a fanatical
Catholic remarks of the Parisian populace: “quant à cette tourbe insensible sur laquelle il y a peu de prise, faisons-lui sentir le fouet de la
terreur”.
18
Nonetheless, peat fields were not immune to the Enlightenment drive to drain marshlands and bogs. Unfortunately, if these reclaimed lands were not then immediately cultivated, drainage could
prove counter-productive and costly. For the exposed and desiccated
peat is prone to shrinkage, wastage and oxidation occasioned by contact with the air, a process which is also accelerated by bacterial action.
19 Thus the exposed earth wastes away and erodes back into the
waters from which it has been reclaimed. In eighteenth-century England, this lesson was quickly learnt, and drained peatlands were
quickly ploughed, limed, manured and harrowed with a fodder crop,
usually oats or potatoes. In fact, the Edinburgh Advertiser of May
1800 carries a detailed account of how best to cultivate “moss and
peatlands” based on the experience of a certain Mr Smith of Swin___________________________
14 La Porte et al, Le Voyageur françois, XX, p. 324.
15 See M. Bagot, “Sur le Charbon de Tourbe exposé en vente par la Compagnie
Callias, au Port de la Grève, à Paris”, Annales de l’Agriculture françoise, XXV
(1806), pp. 46-54.
16 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 4
th ed., 2 vols (Paris: 1762), II, p. 854.
17 J-B-C. Delisle de Sales, De la philosophie de la nature, 3 vols (Paris: 1770), I, p.
129.
18 Louis-Sébastien Mercier, La Destruction de la Ligue, ou La réduction de Paris
(Amsterdam: s.n., 1782), p. 29.
19 Purseglove, Taming the Flood, pp. 12, 57-58.