Coppicing and Faggot Making

Given that so much is said about sustainable energy resources, it is perhaps surprising that the ancient art of faggot making is more in the public eye – until forty or fifty years ago, millions of people across Europe used faggots to fuel their homes and their businesses, without causing any depletion of energy resources or leaving the slightest carbon footprint.

What are Faggots?

In the past, most people living in rural Brittany did not burn logs on their fires, but instead burned faggots: logs require the felling of trees and the use of heavy equipment, but faggots can be made by hand, by more or less anyone. Faggots are basically bunches of twigs and small branches, which were traditionally tied together with a piece of willow; they can, however, be tied equally well with string. Once made, the faggots are stacked up until they are completely dry, and then burnt on the fire. Because they are made of a mixture of branches and twigs, they are ideal for both heating the home, and for cooking. On farms they were also used to fire the bread oven, the kiln, and the still, and to provide fuel for a blacksmith’s forge. On average, a large household could have burned about two thousand faggots per year.

How do you Make Them?

In the old days, the Breton countryside was divided up into small fields, each one less than half an acre in size, and these fields were surrounded by banks topped mainly with a mixture of hazel, willow, and oak trees. The hazel and willow trees were chopped down to the ground every nine years (on average), and all the side branches were cut off the oaks, also in regular cycles. All this work could be done with a bill hook, and all the material gathered could be bundled together into faggots.

The basic technique is to select a bank that has not been cut for several years, and to work along it, cutting everything down to the ground. The cut material is trimmed to the required length – usually about three or four feet long – and tied together in bundles, each bundle being a faggot. All the side branches can be trimmed off the oak trees at the same time, so that they are left as a single, straight trunk, with no large branches.
The trees that have been cut will regrow from the stumps so that they can be harvested again in nine years time – this process is known as coppicing, and for thousands of years was the defining activity of the Breton countryside.

How Does it Work?

It seems that trees that are coppiced can live almost indefinitely. Whereas an uncoppiced hazel, for example, would not be expected to live to be more than a hundred years old, there are regularly coppiced trees in existence which are believed to be several thousand years old.

Very little is known about why or how this should be the case – at least partly because only a negligible amount of academic work has ever been done on the subject of coppicing and faggot making, in spite of the fact that trees have been coppiced across Europe for thousands of years, and are still the only truly sustainable form of energy available to the region.

As far as one tell, the process of cutting certain trees – most notably hazel and willow in this area – down to the ground, serves as a check to the development of the roots. The roots die back each time that the tree is coppiced, so that they are in a constant cycle of degeneration and regeneration which can, apparently, go on for ever. The degeneration is not instantaneous, so that the roots have enough energy within them to give the shoots a super-charged boost during the first couple of years of growth after the stems are cut, and then the newly-grown stems pour energy back into the roots during the years prior to the next cut. This is obviously far more efficient than cutting mature trees for firewood, and in fact captures more of the solar energy per square metre per year than any other known method.

The Economics of Faggot Making

There are two aspect to the economics of faggot making – local and global. On a local level, faggots represent an extremely attractive proposition; they allow people to heat their homes, and provide most of their energy needs for no cost. A reasonably-skilled worker can make enough faggots to last their household for a year, in ten to twenty days of work, meaning that it is quite compatible with work and family responsibilities.

Two hectares of traditional fields have enough trees to provide more than enough wood to supply even a large household. This effectively means that it is within almost everyone’s grasp to have as much untaxed energy for heating and cooking as they want. So valuable are faggots, that in the past they were used as an informal unit of local currency, being exchanged for products and services amongst friends and neighbours.

On the scale of global economics, however, faggots have little relevance: they are labour intensive, bulky, and the cost of transport and storage is prohibitively expensive. They were never used to supply fuel to large cities or to industrial-scale businesses, and they have never been included in calculations of ‘Gross Domestic Products’ or economic output. In terms of global economics, faggots have always been invisible, which perhaps explains why their use has now all but disappeared.

What Replaced Faggots?

It is interesting to note that prior to the Industrial Revolution, over ninety per cent of the population lived in the countryside, and that most of these people used faggots for cooking, and for heating – i.e. almost everyone enjoyed tax-free, sustainable, eco-friendly heating, which also provided them with a few days of healthy exercise collecting wood in the open air every year.

This was replaced by:

• Logs – which are less sustainable, because they involve killing trees rather than coppicing them, and also less efficient in terms of the capture of solar energy, and also more hazardous, because of the danger involved in felling trees.
• Coal – the exploitation of which required miners to work in inhuman conditions, and which also causes serious air pollution, and contributes to global warming, and creates the problem of slag heaps.
• Oil and Gas – the extraction of which also forces people to work in unpleasant conditions, and which also contribute to global warming. The politics of oil have also played a major role in the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
• Nuclear Power – which has always been closely linked to the nuclear weapons industry, and which has already been involved with several catastrophic nuclear disasters. In addition, there is no known safe way of disposing of the waste products created by the nuclear power industry.

All the above share an added disadvantage: it is beyond the means of individual people to supply themselves with energy from these sources, so everyone has to pay for them, which many people cannot afford to do.

Sustainable Resources

In recent years, the media, politicians, and academics have united to spread the message that we have to move, at least in part, to more sustainable forms of energy. However, the ‘sustainable’ forms of energy that they have so far been recommended are such things as solar panels, heat pumps, and, most spectacularly, wind turbines. All of these require complex manufacturing processes, are expensive, and yield substantial profits to business. Almost nothing is heard about the use of faggots, which require no machinery, are genuinely sustainable, leave no waste products, are free of charge, and yield no profit to anyone other than the person that uses them. This could cause one to question the integrity, or the intelligence, or both, of those who have been giving advice in this field.

The Remembrement

Part of the reason why the authorities in Brittany cannot recognise the value of coppicing is because of the “remembrement”, which took place in the 1960s and 1970s. This was the culmination of two centuries of effort on the part of the national government to bring Bretons into line with their thinking; it involved the wholesale felling of trees and bulldozing of banks to transform the countryside from a mosaic of tiny fields into the sort of landscape that we see today – large fields suitable for large machinery. Over the course of twenty years, a network of banks and coppiced trees that had been in place since pre-Roman times, and which was capable of providing all the energy needs of everyone living the the Breton countryside, was wiped away with the help of EU subsidies.

This is still viewed as a success by civil servants, largely because the coppices that were destroyed yielded a product that was never recorded in figures for economic output, whilst everything grown on the large fields that have replaced them does find its way into the official economic statistics.

The Way Forward

Even though the majority of Brittany’s banks have been destroyed, so little of what remains is being used that there is no actual shortage of material for faggot making. Country roads are still more often than not lined with trees, which, in the past were coppiced. Today these trees are usually kept in check by cutting machines paid for by the commune or the highway authorities; the branches that are cut off are usually left in piles beside the road. There is no reason why people should not make faggots from these branches, which they can then take home for private use.

Many farmers welcome people who are prepared to do a more systematic job on these banks than can be done by machine, since it is better for the crops in the field if the surrounding trees can be returned to a proper coppicing cycle. One bank will yield several hundred faggots, and provide a significant proportion of a year’s fuel needs.

In the longer term, the solution is to replant the banks that were destroyed forty or fifty years ago. If you own a piece of land, search out a copy of the ‘plan cadastre’ and see if any of the old banks are still marked on it. If not, try to guess where they would have run by joining up lines marked out by existing paths and banks. The old banks were laid out in such a way as to maximise the capture of solar energy. The spacing and orientation of the banks took into account the gradient of the land and its orientation, so that each tree received the maximum possible amount of sunlight. If possible, it is therefore always advisable to follow the line of the old banks rather than to just take a guess as to where a bank might be appropriate.

It is not necessary to buy trees for replanting, in fact it is probably preferable not to buy too many of the trees, but, instead, to stock the bank gradually over the space of a few years, using tree saplings collected locally. It is generally best to first move the tree seedling, or sapling, from wherever you find it into a nursery area of your garden, and to let it grow there for one or two years before moving it again to its final growing position. It is also advisable to respect local traditions in stocking the banks, which for most of Brittany means using predominantly hazels, with some willow in wetter areas. Oaks can be interspersed with the hazels, but these should not be coppiced, but pollarded. Other species, such as yew, holly, hawthorn, and ash will find their own way into the bank over the course of time.

In conclusion, it should be remembered that what faggot production is really about is independence. The average cost of heating a home is cited as being around 1000€ per year, but this is just what people are being charged under current conditions. This price does not take into account the cost to the environment of burning fossil fuels (or of using nuclear energy), nor does it take into account the impact that the oil and gas industry has on global instability. At any time, factors could come into play which would involve people having to pay significantly more for their fuel, and individuals would be powerless to do anything about it. This is not the case with faggot production; it remains within the scope of everyone to collect their own fuel, in the form of faggots, and to replant the countryside, so that those who live here in the future will have no shortage of energy.