In the afternoon, all of us drove about an hour to a medieval French village from the 13th century called Perouges. We got to drive near the river for much of the way, and then on various village roads through round abouts. These are the same roads as get used in the Tour de France and other famous bicycle races and I wondered if any of the cyclists we saw were from the pro peleton. I have to say I was thoroughly disoriented by the time we arrived, since there was no direct path and one is never really sure the direction one is leaving a round about towards..
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| Entrance to the village |
The medieval village was as a lot of fun and all very beautiful. The outer wall was dominated by this old fortress cathedral that had these fantastically brightly colored stained glass windows.
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| Inside the cathedral |
All the streets were cobblestone, which turns out to be fairly tiring to walk on for a long time. There were several beautiful gardens, both for herbs and flowers near the local noble's home/castle. Since the whole city was walled and fortified, and the nobles resident was just one of many building within the compound, I guess you would simply called it his mansion. There were many other smaller homes that were homes or workshops of the guilds and tradesman. What was cool is that a lot of these were now used as either residences or as shops, so much of village still maintained its residential feel. There were no re-enactors, just people living there.
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| Cathedral Tower and courtyard |
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| The nobleman's home |
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| Add caption |
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| One of the gardens in nobleman's home |
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| Another view of the garden |
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| Tradesman shops |
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| Inside the nobleman's home |
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| I took this picture of an ancient clarinet for JPD |
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| One very old bible |
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| View from watch tower |
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| David's daughter has no fear of heights. Kristan looks on. |
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| David's daughters plot their strategy to take over the countryside |
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| The rotund knight takes the tower |
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| Overlooking the gardens from the watchtower |
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| Bernard classifies some herbs |
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| In the main square. |
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| This lime tree is hundreds of years old. Executions and auctions were held here. |
One conclusion that while we have a very romantic notion of kings and queens and knights, etc... the reality is that even someone in the lower middle class today probably lives a thousand times better off than the royalty of that day. Our homes have central heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer. They had to have huge fire places to try to warm large rooms in the dead of winter. With electricity, we can see at all hours of the day. They only had candle light. Our beds are clean and comfortable. While servants clearly did the work for nobles, our machines do the same for us. And we have modern medicine and antibiotics that consistently works against a wider spectrum of disease than apothecary potions. So as beautiful as the place was, I don't think I would willing trade my life today for that in the 13th century, even if I got to be a noble. If I had to be a peasant rather than a tradesman, it would have been very miserable indeed. On the other hand, the beauty that was build from stone and hand tools is very gratifying and frankly one wonders why with modern materials, we build such ugly and non-human scale sort of places.
