Forest of Rouvray
The once vast Forêt de Rouvray (French pronunciation: [fɔʁɛ də ʁuvʁɛ], "Forest of Rouvray", from Gallo-Romance ROBORETU “oak wood″ or more probably French rouvre “sessile oak” and old suffix -ey (ill spelled as -ay, modern -aie), meaning a “collection of the same trees”) was a forest that extended from west of Paris in the Île-de-France region westwards into Normandy, virtually unbroken, threaded by the winding loops of the River Seine, traversed by forest traces and dotted with isolated woodland hamlets, as far as Rouen. A rural relict is the 5 100 ha of the protected Forêt Domaniale de la Londe-Rouvray, at Les Essarts, Normandy, near Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, south of Rouen, on an upland massif above the left bank of the Seine, which makes a wide arc enclosing it. On the right bank, to the west, is what is left of the Forêt de Roumare (the Rouennais), another former royal forest.
According to his early biographers, it was while riding in the forest of Rouvray that William the Conqueror decided to assert his rights to the throne of England.
The old-growth forest that extended to the floodplain of the Seine was incrementally cleared by the monks of a congregation established about 1154 at the priory of Grammont, facing the city from the left bank of the Seine. Forest was cleared also at the abbey of Saint-Julien and others. At the end near Paris, in 1424 the abbess of Montmartre defended the abbey's traditional right to forest products in the stretch of "forêt de Rouvray" that is now the Bois de Boulogne.
In February 1389, Hector de Chartres was named maître des eaux et des forêts in Normandy and Picardy by Charles VI of France and was charged with verifying and authentifying the old customs of the king's forests users. Along with Jean de Garancières, who was also maître des eaux et forêts at the time, he began in 1402 the general inspection of the king's forests in Normandy. According to a recent publication by Ch. Maneuvrier, D. Gardelle and B. Nardeux, it was Jean de Garancières, and not Hector de Chartres, who visited Rouvray, along with most forest in the region.
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