The History of Garden Design: French Gardens

Although the Spaniards failed to make anything distinctive of the Italian garden when it reached them, the French took it and, after a very short time, made the idea of glorious outdoor fountains their own. The French garden in its brightest form was the product of the Italian idea grafted on to the moated chateau; the process was gradual and the result was quite different in style and spirit from anything in Italy. Owing to the bewildering success of the English at the pitched battles of Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt, the French resistance to the invaders during a great part of the Hundred Years' War was defensive and static. Castles and fortified towns were of much more practical value in France during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries than in Italy or in England, which both enjoyed periods of comparative domestic peace. While the Black Prince and Henry V were racketing about in French territory the French became a very `shut up' people who lived in tight little island groups amidst an ocean of dangerous desolation. Like mice they appeared when the cat had gone by and hurriedly foraged the land because they dared not farm it. Since the classic way of capturing the fortified places to which they retreated was by mining and since the greatest deterrent to a miner was water, most castles were moated. People do not always live as they wish but as they are compelled; and what they do by long compulsion can become a habit that persists when the compulsion ceases. When at last the English were defeated and Burgundy fell apart, the French monarchy and aristocracy emerged from their moated mansions and, as they were no longer bullied from the north, they went off to do a little bullying on their own account in the south. But their castles kept their moats.