Tim Bannerman's Cider Chronicles - The Apple Tree Fair 1

What better way to celebrate the end of war, the banishing of pestilence and a mood of hope after so much fear and loss and deprivation – than a fair?

The morning of 24 March 1459 was indeed a fair morning in the city of Lisieux. A day’s ride to the East of Caen, they had been liberated only 9 years before from the English invaders who had wreaked havoc and destruction on the people of France for the last 100 years. Joan of Arc must have been smiling in her grave.

Horses, carts, sheep and cattle began to arrive before the light of dawn had illuminated the top of the tower of the great Gothic cathedral at the heart of the city. Children were already out, excitedly playing in the streets as the stallholders set out their wares.

Soon the streets were full of trees. As far as the eye could see, one street after another became avenues of beech, oak, ash, chestnut, lime and, most of all, apple trees and their Rosaceae cousins, the pear. What was a city of narrow streets with their timbered houses and open drains had become a magical, courtly forest garden, just like in the best-selling novel of the time, the Roman de la Rose itself.

This was the first of what became an annual event to mark the arrival of Spring. But who among those first pepiniéristes, the cultivators of trees in farms all round this part of the Pays d’Auge in Normandy – who could have imagined that 561 years later, the Lisieux Foire aux Arbres would still be going, in the same place, at the same time of year?

In those days, back in the Middle Ages, the fair was full of a thousand diversions, in addition to the selling of trees. Jugglers, troubadours, performing bears, steaming pots of delicious smelling wild boar stews, roasting nuts and jugs of cider on every stand on every street. Children and dogs, pigs and chickens chased each other round and through the legs of laughing pedestrians. And everyone dressed in their finery for the occasion with many a young swain eyeing many a fair maid, and vice versa, the light of love and haystacks in their shining eyes. It was like a combination of a village scene by Pieter Breughel the Younger and, for the even more finely dressed, an illuminated Book of Hours with its brilliant reds, blues, silver and gold, crowned by the clear blue March sky above.

Gould-book-Marc-Coussin

These days at the beginning of March, you will still find the streets lined with trees, mostly with their roots bare, tied in bundles according to their variety and size. Proud cultivators vie to tell you every detail of their quality and virtues. For here you will find the heart and stomach of the Pays d’Auge – in cheese, lamb, beef, trees and cider and calvados, not to mention pommeau, a luscious combination of the two – all grown in the unique and fecund terroir of the region.

But it is the faces and the voices that make the connection. This connection goes all the way back to that first Foire des Cendres, as it became known. Cendres refers to ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’, as in Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, associated with fasting and penitence in the lead up to Easter. Something of an oxymoron given the inherent contradiction between a fair and fasting…

Faces are still straight out of a Breughel painting – the prominent, weather-beaten features you could find any evening in the public bar of the Luttrell Arms or the White Horse in Washford. Country folk who have spent their lives working with their hands in all weathers – hands bearing the scars and swellings and callouses of a thousand winter days out in the fields and orchards, tending sheep and trees, no matter how the chilblains bite, thorns scratch, wire cuts.

Voices still hold the hardship in their flattened vowels and spare vocabulary best suited to the work they do. But in there is a softness too, the gentleness they give to new born lambs, sick ewes and those they love. Not to mention a passion for the fruits of all their labours, no matter the disappointments, challenges and occasional disasters along the way. 

And all coloured by the cadences that take their tone from the hills and valleys, woods and streams, the very sweetness of the earth itself –  next to the harsher bocage that caused such trouble to tanks and troops in the last war, 75 years ago now, let alone those of the centuries gone by.

While the faces and the voices remain the same, there are no jugglers, troubadours or bears today. Or there weren’t when my wife and children and I went to buy our Bedan, Noel des Champs, Saint Martin and others, to fill the gaps in our old orchard in the village of Tordouet, just 20 minutes by car from Lisieux.

20 years later, when consecrating a corner of our new orchard in Herefordshire as a ‘P’tit Coin du Pays d’Auge’, in honour of our apprenticeship to cider-making back in the early 1990’s, not much had changed. Maybe a few less trees in a few less streets. Otherwise, all was as it was and, jugglers and bears aside, much as it had been 550-odd years ago. And this without missing a single year – even when war, or pestilence, were at subsequent heights.

So when Martin asked if I would like to contribute to his Lockdown Diary with my ‘Cider Chronicles’ over the last few weeks, there was one piece of the story missing amongst the anecdotes of our time back in the innocence of those days.

It was the time when Martin came over on a mission. 

The mission was to investigate the state of cider-making and the world of apples and pears, as compared to that in the West Country – principally the counties of Somerset and Devon, with a nod to Herefordshire as well (I hope). 

Armed with a questionnaire compiled by Phil Stone at the Department of the Environment, based at County Hall in Taunton and some research I’d made from my side of things in France, we set off to learn the truth of the matter from la bouche du cheval, or ‘ow you say in English, ‘the horse’s mouth’.

We started at the Foire aux Arbres in March, 1992. And the results of our findings will be on this website very soon…