The tour moved on to an area of France where the people still, to this day, do not consider themselves French. A review of the Hundred Years War and subsequent events tell why. The area has pretty towns of old beam work and fine stone churches. The pictures below, though, are still in Normandy.
Phenomenal!
Superb brickwork
No part is insignificant.
No room for a garden? Grow things up a wall.
We always note the manhole covers.
Drains can be interesting, too.
And random corners of buildings. When you next build something, don’t forget artistic corners.
Especially on important streets.
And they find the old worth preserving.
But…the Hundred Years War was generations ago. How is it possible that in this modern world anyone is holding onto such? How did they successfully stay in the past?
ReplyDeleteEthnicity and origins still show through. The Bretons started from Celtic peoples, pushed out of England about the time of King Arthur, when the German tribes were coming in to fill the vacuum left by the withdrawal of the Romans. For a long time they kept their Gaelic language, and language is culture, and culture is identity. Add to that the changes of politics and rulers in that area, from English to French and back and forth, plus the very fractured politic lines - there was no “France” for a long time, especially there, then those people had time to grow their identity into that soil. France has many regional identities, so this was one more. In our times, post-post-modernism, clanishness is favored, so they have more incentive to keep theirs, even with the opposite tug of uniformitarianism from media culture. SMB
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