Frequently the verger was surrounded by a protecting wall, of more or less architectural pretense, with towers and accessories conforming to the style of the period, and decorative and utilitarian fountains, benches and seats were also common accessories.
The old prints, which reproduced these early French gardens, are most curious to study, amusing even; but their point of view was often distorted as to perspective. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, perspective was almost wholly ignored in pictorial records. There was often no scale, and no depth; everything was out of proportion with everything else, and for this reason it is difficult to judge of the exact proportions of many of these early French gardens.
The origin of garden-making in France, in the best accepted sense of the term, properly began with the later years of the thirteenth century and the early years of the fourteenth; continuing the tradition, remained distinctly French until the mid-fifteenth century, for the Italian influence did not begin to make itself felt until after the Italian wars and travels of Charles VIII, Louis XI and Francis I.
The earliest traces of the work of the first two of these monarchs are to be seen at Blois and, for a time henceforth, it is to be presumed that all royal gardens in France were largely conceived under the inspiration of Italian influences. Before, as there were primitives in the art of painting in France, there were certainly French gardeners in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. One of these, whoever he may have been, was the designer of the preaux and the treilles of the Louvre of Charles V, of which a pictorial record exists, and he, or they, did work of a like nature for the powerful house of Bourgogne, and for René d'Anjou, whom we know was a great amateur gardener.
The archives of these princely houses often recount the expenses in detail, and so numerous are certain of them that it would not be difficult to picture anew as to just what they referred.
Debanes, the gardener of the Chateau d'Angers, on a certain occasion, gave an accounting for "X Sols" for repairing the grass-plots and for making a petit preau. Again: "XI Sols" for the employ of six gardeners to trim the vines and clean up the alleys of the grand and petit jardin.
Luxury in all things settled down upon all France to a greater degree than hitherto in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and almost without exception princely houses set out to rival one another in the splendour of their surroundings. Now came in the ornamental garden as distinct from the verger, and the preau became a greensward accessory, at once practical and decorative, the precursor of the pelouse and the parterre of Le Notre.
The preau (in old French prael) was a symmetrical square or rectangular grass-grown garden plot. From the Latin pratum, or pratellum, the words preau, pré and prairie were evolved naturally enough, and came thus early to be applied in France to that portion of the pleasure garden set out as a grassy lawn. The word is very ancient, and has come down to us through the monkish vocabulary of the cloister.
Some celebrated verse of Christine de Pisan, who wrote "The Life of Charles V," thus describes the cloister at Poissy.