Neustria

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When we were in Caen in October, I saw a little place across from our hotel window: Pizzeria la Neustrie.

 

 

Neustria? It rang a faint bell.

 

 

I looked it up. Neustria was an area in northern France, back in the late Dark Ages. It was, in fact, most of the northwest  of France.

 

 

I like thinking of this, even though it’s the memory of a pretty barbaric time. I’ve read Gregory of Tours, and I know that modern France and Germany were a patchwork of principalities and kingdoms in those days, full of petty tyrants and evil queens and benevolent squires. If you didn’t like the area, or the local king or queen, you just put your things in a cart, and rode down the lane a few miles, and you were in someone else’s kingdom.

 

 

Of course, this assumes that you were able to leave your home. Most people weren’t. Most people were desperately poor, and unable to leave their homes, even if the local queen was drinking out of a human skull (as I seem to recall Gregory of Tours recounting).

 

 

But what’s all this? It’s fifteen hundred years later, and everything seemed quiet and charming when we were there, in Caen and Bayeux and Honfleur and Paris.

 

 

And, too, 23andme.com has identified that part of my ancestry comes from Doggerland, which is the land around the English Channel. Which is to say: Neustria.

 

 

I am a Neustrian (partly). And proud of it.

 

 

Bring me a drink in a human skull.

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