So
often, when planning a games table that we are going to spend many
hours building and detailing, we ignore the actual landscape upon
which it is based. We probably get hills, rivers, roads &c. in
the right places, but do we look close enough at the style of
buildings? Of field types and boundaries or the area covered by
woodlands or types of trees? What sorts of crops were grown? The
nature of the landscape to some extent affected the style of warfare,
so it's good to get it right.
Thanks
to Rob Thompson for allowing me to use the following piece which fits
in so well with the “Atlas” themed pages.
Landscapes and Terrain in Central Europe ( with specific reference to the seats of wars 1740-1813 in Silesia, Saxony, and Bohemia) - Notes for Wargamers:
First The Bad News: Why it is Tricky to Generalise:
Even
if we took the most restricted possible definition of the theatres of
war, in order to get the smallest area of study, the variation within
it would still be massive. The (good news ?) is that there
would be (and still are) some commonalities across the broadly
similar landscape and climate of Central Europe. These commonalities
arise from a long period of fairly static, and broadly common farming
methods, exploiting a broadly similar environment. However, within
that large chunk of land, there would still be (and still is )
significant variation in landscapes, and, actually a series of
variationS (plural), superimposed on top of one another, at a variety
of scales. As soon as one strays from the Northern European Plain the
degrees of localised variation in landscapes increases markedly as
the terrain (and climates) become significantly different. This then
impinges on settlement patterns, social organisation and farming
practices. Culture and ethnicity also plays a part.
What
Area is covered?
It’s the area of the upper Oder / Odra and
Elbe Rivers as shown on this map of Seven Years War battle sites, at
the centre and right centre of the map:
This
area was also fought over by Austria Prussia and Saxony in the
1740s, 1780s, to a more limited extent in 1806 and again in
1813 – the map below shows the rival armies lining up to contest
the region in 1813:
The
Northern European Plain:
This lies on the Northern fringe of
the area which this appraisal is primarily concerned with.
A few comments about it are in order as the term can be
misinterpreted.. It is called a
plain but the word can be misunderstood by wargamers and others. Like
almost all plains it isn't as flat as a pancake or as flat as a table
top. It has no mountains, . . . . but certain areas might
still be of "high relief" i.e. rugged / hilly with
reasonably steep slope angles, ravines, incised river valleys with
abrupt edges to their flood plains etc On this map
(below) it is NOT all the land within the ring, (the ring
unhelpfully includes the mountainous areas of the Sudeten and
Carpathian mountains between modern Czechia and Solvakia to the
south, and SE Germany and Poland to the north). The plain
is rather where the words are located on the map:
What
Were The Common Identifiable Landscape Attributes of the Central
European Battlefields’ Zone’s Countryside Areas?
1)
Data on the % of land which was woodland vis a vis today is very
poor. For Silesia, possibly about the same amount overall in 1750 as
today, so far more than there was in say 1945. Photos of Lower
Silesia from the 1930s and 40s of agricultural areas show far fewer
trees then than in today's landscape, in every single case. But in
1750 the population was far less, and hadn't entered the cycle of
rapid population growth associated with agricultural and industrial
revolutions, which is what reduced the numbers of trees. Post the
1945 population exchanges there were less people in Silesia, and
rural to urban migration since then also has meant plots of farmland
have reverted to scrub woodland in Silesia. Bohemia and Saxony
changed somewhat less, as they were not subjected to wholesale
population transfers in 1945. It is rather more likely that there
were slightly more trees in Bohemia and Saxony in 1740-1813 than
today.
2)
There are many more extensive and medium sized forested areas than
there are in the UK. Many communities relied on having access to
forest, and the population density being much lower meant that a lot
less land had been cleared of trees. Usually the land left
forested was hillier, or was on the sides of ravines (too steep to be
cultivated and thinner soils) or, it was the most distant land from
the villages. Plus there would have been large tracts of totally
uninhabited forest areas, 90% of the Sudeten / Carpathian mountains
would have been like this, but also big tracts of uninhabited forest
(pines) on areas of glacial sands where settlers had realised that
the soils were barren and had kept out. The so called "Pine
Barrens" which Prussia was infamous for, and helped explain why
Federick the Great was very keen to get hold of the generally
agriculturally richer lands of Silesia. There are however some
“Pine Barrens” within Silesia.
3)
No hedges. British wargamers often make the
understandable error of assuming there must have been hedges around
fields, but this isn’t the case, as there had been nothing
comparable in Central Europe to the “Enclosure Acts” which
had shaped the landscape of much of lowland UK.
4)
No Yorkshire Dales type stone walls, surprisingly, not even in the
mountains where stone was lying about in abundance.
5)
An occasional wooden fence, but not around the main "fields"
(strips). It was quite common to have a small area (veg plot / fowl
run) fenced off around, or adjacent to, a house. Fences were
usually made from vertically placed irregularly shaped slats of wood:
(without the glass jars!)
6)
Long thin strips of land were the rough equivalent of what are termed
fields in the UK. Size today varies a bit and shapes can be irregular
where terrain is hilly or cut up by ravines, but most common
dimensions would be 20 to 40m wide by 100 to 500m long. Its likely
that since 1750 some strips have been consolidated and back then
there would have been more of the smaller ones. "Field
boundaries" would have been often not very obvious due to 3) 4)
5). At certain times of year, and according to what crops were being
grown they would show up. Eg peasant x has done his ploughing but
peasant y next to him has not yet. Often there was a small "baulk"
- a tiny unploughed strip to mark the strip boundary, but this could
be absent and instead the ploughing pattern would generally be
turning soil away from the boundary on each side, so this formed a
shallow ditch with the soil surface in the ditch being say 10-20cm
deeper than the strips. In some areas some or all strip ends’
boundaries would be marked with a few big rocks.
7)
The end 8m or so of each strip was mostly not ever ploughed in pre
tractor times, as it was the turning area for the plough team. There
might also be a crude drainage ditch running along the strip ends
adjacent to the road, and quite often the banks and environs of this
might have been colonised by a few trees.
The
most common village form is dispersed linear. Dispersed - each
farmstead (house and any associated barns etc) would be situated 30
to 200m from the next house. The houses would typically straggle
along both sides of a routeway, sometimes, but not always, often
only one dwelling deep, so that each peasant had easy access to the
road. This made for very long thin straggling villages compared to
the more compact ones found in most parts of the UK. Alternatively
there could be a network of tracks on one side of the routeway.
This is a modern picture and the buildings have been
modernised or replaced but it illustrates atypical sprawling
village layout with the long strips running to left and right from
the village:
9)
The long axes of the strips are most often laid out perpendicular to
the road or track which they abut, this is so every farmer/peasant
can get to one end of the land he works via a track.
10)
Village buildings - in many cases one end of a building was the barn
the middle or the entire ground floor was for animals and the human
accomodation would mainly be upstairs at one end. Before the
Prussians had colonised Silesia in numbers (1780s onwards), and then
built some enormous farms, most houses were relatively small.
This
is a 1910 photo, but it is of a certified and listed farm building
from renaissance times (part of it, internal, and not visible in this
shot, at the back, is actually medieval). The house still stands, and
still looks very similar. It is in the village of Karlowiec, between
Gryfow Slaski and Mirsk in Lower Silesia, now Poland. It is about 2km
from my home in the next village. It is being renovated by friends of
ours, using the old construction methods, though they don't have to
re-thatch it. I've been helping them occasionally with some bits of
the work. One can tell it used to have thatch as a roof material, by
the very steep pitch (slope) of the roof. The far end is all barn.
The middle of the ground floor to the right of the central entrance
door, has a brick vaulted ceiling (as is typical) , and very
obviously has been a piggery. It has its own bread oven. This would
have been one of the larger farm houses in existence before the
Prussian colonisation which got underway at pace from the 1780s. The
incoming Prussians noticeably built bigger farmhouses, but
colonisation was reltively slow. Ground floor walls of the
nearest 2/3 are mainly made of rough irregular local stone and some
very poor quality brick. Actually there are unfired bricks on the
inside of the end wall! All the barn and all higher bits are big wood
frame structure with wattle and daub infill originally, some infill
has been replaced by brick at a later date. [This half timbered style of house is called "Fachwerk".]
11)
Farms were pretty much all "mixed" ( = all farms had both
animal and crop production) but few quadruped animals were kept.
Reasons were they ate too much of the crops, people were often hungry
and their diets were less meat and dairy rich than today. The
conversion of plant calories to animal calories would have been well
below 10% efficiency, so having lots of animals was risky and
wasteful. A median peasant might have one or two cows and a calf. The
better off ones might have three times that many and would have owned
oxen / steers and or a horse or two. A cow would be walked out to
graze a field each morning and tethered there. It might be walked
home to drink water from a well at lunchtime and then go back to the
field again.
12)
Chickens ducks and geese were all commonly kept. Most farms would
have one or two pigs; the richer ones would have more.
13)
Sheep and goats would have been almost unknown outside of some of the
very mountainous areas.
14)
Grains were the main crops in terms of areas planted, but potatoes
were becoming more and more common as the 18th Century
progressed. Just what proportion of the land was under potatoes
is hard to say, but more by 1813 than there had been in 1740.
The grains cultivated were a mix of Wheat, Oats, Rye, Barley
and Buckwheat. Most of the ploughable land away from
floodplains would be under one of these staple crops - perhaps 60%
(?) of the total ploughable land. There was no pre-winter sowing, all
were spring planted, so harvested quite late, but staggered in time.
The first 4 could get up to head high on the best land by late
summer. Buckwheat takes longest to mature and doesn't get so
tall – more like waist high. A buckwheat field at all stages
looks really quite different to the others, it becomes mainly a
darkish brown with reddish stems prior to harvest.. Some of what was
not cereal land would be growing vegetables - a bit of cabbage (it
could be preserved easily as sauerkraut), some turnips and beetroot,
and plenty of protein rich beans / peas for drying than
anything else. Some flax (with blue flowers) for local cloth
production as well. Maybe 20% of the land may have been
under these non-cereal crops. The remaining 20% or so would be down
to grass for grazing pasture, or hay making. Possibly some was left
fallow, but I'm uncertain of this. There was no
yellow flowering oilseed rape until well after WW2.
Below is some buckwheat which has been cut and left to continue
drying ripening in stooks in the field. This was sometimes also done
with the other cereal crops.
Buckwheat crop in mid summer:
15) Land very close to small rivers would not be used for
crop cultivation due to the flooding risk. Thus it would tend to be a
water meadow and down to permanent grass and used for grazing or,
sometimes, for hay making. Unlike property developers and
speculators today, buildings were not built on flood plains.
Settlements large and small would be often on the first river terrace
– one small step up from the at risk area.
16)
Small orchards were very common and were usually located near the
farm buildings. Trees were typically big and tall, not dwarf
for easy picking and pruning, like many modern varieties.
17)
Fish ponds for carp and trout were also very common but there were
more in certain areas where the soils were heavy enough to retain
water well, or where nearby clay deposits were available to line
them. Old ponds were usually quite small say 10 x 10 or 10 x 20m.
A
few towns would be dotted about across the rural landscape.
Most would be small – more like what we might term a large
village. Approx one every 15-25km or so. Each town would
typically have a large market square at its centre. Many but not all
had walls around them though not necessarily in a good state of
repair, and by 1813 a still fully walled town was becoming unusual.
The reason being that simple stone walls were vulnerable to
artillery.
By 1740-1813 wealthier townsfolk were
building in brick and were having tile rather than thatched roofs
(occasionally slate but only in a few rare areas). Maybe one
in four of the villages would also have a “posh” manor
house, or a chateau-like pile or a “palace”.
19)
Finally, bear in mind that even away from the Sudeten and Carpathian
mountains themselves, all of Bohemia, a lot of Silesia,
(especially in the south), and Saxony are really very hilly.
Using Google earth street view to get a sense of the relief is a
good thing to do.
_____________________________________________________________________
These
notes are my own observations, research and interpretations.
I’ve brazenly stolen/ copied the photos (for educational
purposes not for personal gain). I first produced a fair few
of these notes for a SYW facebook group enquiry. But since the
same question comes up every now and again, I thought I’d make
them into a file to be put into a few wargaming facebook groups
I decided to tidy the notes up, expand them a bit and add a few
points made by others in the discussion, and to add some more
pictures. They may not be entirely accurate, and as I
pointed out at the start, there is quite a bit of local variation,
but I expect they are a fairly good starting point for wargamers
wanting to model terrain.
I've
lived in the extremity of SW Poland (former Lower Silesia) for some
years now (we have a small farm there just 10km from the Izery
Mountains and within spitting distance of Czechia and
Germany). I grew up on a UK farm, and I worked on local farms,
but then I spent many years teaching both History and Geography,
including the evolution of rural landscapes, and I've travelled
fairly widely in the region, visiting numerous battlefields.
Mainly the 1813 ones, but also some from the 1740s and 1750s.
It is an interesting landscape and region. If anyone
wants some help and advice about visiting the region then feel free
to message me on facebook. You will be able to find me as I am a
group member of this facebook group. [ Bruce
Quarrie Rules and Napoleonic Wargame Group
]
Rob Thompson
09/03/2021
To
some extent, Rob's description of the landscape where he lives in
Poland echoes the area of the Britain where I live on the
“Humber-head Levels.”. The dispersed linear villages are the
same, built along higher points and low ridges that the roads
followed in what was once a seasonal wetland, whilst it has only been
within the last 10 years that the old mediaeval strip field systems
that were exactly as he describes.
-
