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Forestry rings?

A topic by ericscheid created Aug 12, 2020 Views: 817 Replies: 4
Viewing posts 1 to 3

Not sure where I read it, but (IIRC) medieval towns had not just farmfields surrounding them but also a ring of cultivated forest. These were not wild woodlands, but careful agricultural efforts, with trees typically being regularly coppiced. These plantations were a source of wood as materials (poles etc), and also firewood (which any medieval town would need a lot of).

Would you be interested in adding foresty rings as an option (i.e. along side of farm fields)? Visually I guess they'd be depicted as a dot filled ring section, as well as lots of dotted boundaries to rural roads/fields.

Developer

I've never heard about it, so I doubt it was a common practice.  Reforestation sounds like a relatively modern idea to me, but I am in no way an expert. Deforestation became a problem relatively early, that's true, but I imagine that it was mostly dealt by reserving existing woodlands.
Anyway, such rings would be planted much further from the city, than what is mapped by the generator. The lands right behind the city walls were too valuable.

(+1)

I found the reference for forestry rings, and it includes academic references. Offered here more out of joy of knowledge than any expectations. It's a fascinating read.

https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-part-i-the-ideal-city/

Developer

Hi, thanks for the link! This is indeed a great post. I've only read this one, but I'm going to check the rest of the blog as well.

Can't help making a couple of notes :)

  1. No actual forestry rings are mentioned. That green circle on the diagram is just an illustration of the idea that forests would be situated farther from a city than gardens and closer than crop fields. Even on a "featureless plain" forests wouldn't be planted as rings because of roads.
  2. The author describes pre-modern cities, but in some aspects ancient and medieval cities differ enough to deserve separate treatment. In spite of the amount of maps from Civitates Orbis Terrarum (late XVI c) the author seems more interested in ancient history and some of the his concepts are harder to apply to middle ages. It's not related to forestry rings :)

Cheers!

(+1)

Forestry management was a big thing back in the day, mostly in the form of pollarding and coppicing (not so much wholesale replantation).

What I meant by "rings" though might not have been clear – not an actual contiguous ring encircling, but rather woodlands that are a particular distance from the city. Forestry, like other agricultural efforts, naturally settled into areas a particular distance according to (mostly) consequences of travel and transport time: soft delicate vegetables & fuit nearest, forestry (frequent firewood needs mean closer), easily transported agriculture (grains, infrequent transport), and finally agricultural product that come equipped with their own 4 legs furthest away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing

I don't actually recall just how far these distances were, so quite possibly further away than what MFCG maps. All good.