Peasant farms in the Norman Bocage in the C19th and early C20th were generally very small indeed by today's standards – seldom more than three or four hectares (9-12 acres) and seldom capable of providing more than a subsistence living.

Such farms might have lived off three or four cows, a pig, poultry, caged rabbits, grain from the farm, a well-stocked vegetable garden and whatever game could be shot or trapped. Every farm produced large quantities of cider which matured in several huge barrels in a cool storeroom (with an extra-wide doorway) known as la cave. Much of the cider was then distilled to produce the apple brandy known as calvados.

Occasionally cash might be raised by selling grain for flour at the local mill, selling livestock at the market and by trafficking calvados, usually illegally. But though most farming families lived from hand to mouth until the mid-C20th, some nevertheless were very careful to hide considerable savings and surprising wealth.

Almost without exception our elderly neighbours remember growing up in the one kitchen/living-room (la maison). While their parents slept in a curtained lit coin in one corner of the room, girls slept on the floor and boys in the hay-loft above.

The one room, seldom more than six metres square, consisted of a fireplace for heating and cooking, a table, two benches, a sink, a store cupboard (set into the wall beside the chimney), an elaborate wardrobe (l'armoire) and a large box for logs. Water came from the well. Though electricity arrived in ca.1936, only a few houses were connected before WWll. Few places had mains water until the 1950s and then only in the town centres.

Our neighbours had no books in their childhood – indeed very few had any books in their houses in 2006. The local newspaper was usually the only reading matter. But they say that every family had an annual almanac as well as a chart for calculating market prices per litre or per kilo and, while a drawer of the buffet, contained a pen, a pot of ink and a block of blank writing paper. Valuable documents such as leases and identity cards were kept safely in a drawer in the armoir.

Next to the kitchen/living-room – accessible via a communicating internal door – was la grange – a raised area about two metres wide running the width of the house. Here tools and equipment were stored, grain was threshed in summer, and hay was spread in winter so that cows in the adjoining stable (l'étable) could feed through the baies – timber-framed slots through which the cows heads could pass.

Women or children milked the cows in the stable in winter and in the fields in summer, carrying it back in buckets on a yoke over their shoulders to a small separate dairy building (la laiterie) where a hand-turned machine separated the cream from the whey. From this cheese and butter was made for sale in the local weekly markets.

Until well after the mid-C20th life for the majority of peasant farming families in Basse-Normandie was extremely hard and under these circumstances it's not surprising that an extended family, or group of neighbours, often pooled resources and co-operated in order to reduce their costs. Such co-operative activity continued in the C21st where a group of farmers would work together on each other's farms to bring in and make silage from maize or grass.

Other co-operative arrangements had long been codified in French law to assure certain rights and obligations – notably concerning access to shared wells (puits), shared washing places (lavoirs) and shared bread-ovens (boulangeries) – giving neighbours rights of way over each other's land to use 'communal' facilities.

This naturally led to the formation of 'villages' which are characteristically small groups of houses (seldom more than four or five) which might share these facilities and whose identities are formally recognised to this day – e.g. the village or lieu-dit of Le Boquet near Pont-Farcy, which in total consists of about 5 hectares (13 acres).

[Village names: In this case the name Boquet and Bosquet have become interchangeable though Boquet may have been the name of an early owner as it appears thus in the carte de Cassini in the late C18th. The origins of names of villages are sometimes ancient and often obscure but names ending with ...ère or ...ière usually refer to the name of a family: the Renard family in La Renardière, the La Salle family in La Sallière, or the Champion family in La Championnière, etc. Many other names, such as La Fosse, Le Ménage, Le Côtil, etc., refer to topography or are descriptive of the land, its uses or its tenure.]

This peasant farm-house, between Ste Marie-Outre-l'Eau and Pont Bellanger in Calvados, is typical of tens of thousands throughout the region. Sadly many are now in ruins and most of those built of clay ('argile') have already vanished.

In the C18th and C19th (and well into C20th), a building like this was home to a whole family as well as three or four cows – all living off 3 or 4 hectares of land.

The family would have cooked, eaten and slept in the one downstairs room: an earth floor measuring about 5 x 5 metres beneath an oak-beamed ceiling. A large raised fireplace beneath a massive chimney (supported on timber or granite trans-mural 'corbeaux') provided the only means of cooking and heating.

Above this room was a large hay-loft, accessible through the door in the roof. This often provided a place for boys to sleep, while a similar loft (usually used to store straw, as bedding for cows) occupied the roof-space on the other side of the hay-loft door.

For reasons which are not yet clear the original roof-line was nearly always split at two levels – higher over the living room than the remaining part of the building which was devoted to livestock and farm activities.

Indeed, the roof-line of these houses made a clear visual distinction between the domestic part (with chimney and a higher roof) and the agricultural part (the left-hand half in the picture above).

Careful observation of the stonework and door heights in this particular house suggests that the wall above the two left-hand doorways has been raised and that the roof was indeed pitched more steeply (and therefore finished much lower) before it was recovered with slates.

This sort of alteration usually occurred just after the Second World War when nearly all previously thatched properties were re-covered in cheap, light-weight corrugated iron sheeting. Corrugated iron ('tôle') was adopted for the overwhelming majority of poorer agricultural buildings – to such an extent that, by the end of the C20th, the Basse-Normandie landscape was characterised by rust-red roofs.

However, prior to 1945, almost all peasant farm-houses and out-buildings were thatched with straw or reeds (note the thatching bars on the chimney). Slate roofs were then only seen on the most prestigious town-houses and buildings such as manor houses, abbeys, churches, etc.

In the picture above, the doorway at the far left is the entrance to the 'stable' ('étable') where three of four cows would have been housed and milked during the winter.

The door at the centre gave access to the barn ('grange') which was invariably at a raised level relative to the stable. Indeed, the external door often had a stone step or two leading up to it. This raised 'grange' was used for threshing grain in summer and as a storage area for tools, horse harnesses and other valuable equipment. In winter it also served as a sort of manger for the cows in the 'étable' below: each cow putting its head through a pop-hole ('baie') in a timber-framed partition between the 'étable' and the 'grange'. It should be noted that the stables ('étables') invariably had at least one recess in the wall (about 30 x 30 cms) which served as a storage cupboard for medicines and veterinary kit.

Another clever aspect of this arrangement was that a small internal door often linked the family's living-room with the central 'grange' so that it was possible to go to work in the 'grange' or to feed the cows without having to go outside – a great advantage given the often bitterly cold Norman winters.

But the real purpose of the scheme was ergonomic. Summer hay and autumn straw for bedding was lifted just once into the hay-loft, but thereafter it could be simply thrown down into the 'grange' to feed the cows standing in the 'étable'. And once eaten by the cows the resulting manure could be pushed through the low stable door into a heap outside.

In other words, summer hay-making kept the cows fed and insulated the roof-space above the living-room in winter; the cows helped to keep the family warm; and the farmer, without needing to go out of doors, could rely on gravity to do nearly all the work from hay-loft to manure heap.