Economic Adaptation to Risky Environments in the Late Middle Ages: The Case of the Accrues of the Doubs in Chaussin (Jura, France) from c. 1370 to c. 1500

Located along the meanders of the Doubs, the people of Chaussin had to deal with the particular impact of the river on their environment. Due to the impact of the Little Ice Age on water levels in the area, the Doubs sometimes had special floods, which frequently changed its course from the end of the fourteenth century. As a result, some lands were absorbed, and others emerged, which were called the ``accrues.'' From 1377 the first observation of lost lands appears in the accounts of the castellan, in a petition from landowners who did not want to pay taxes on these fields. More than twenty years later, in the first decade of the fifteenth century, the duke of Burgundy, facing the same situation, found a consistent way to cancel the taxes on the lost lands and to farm the new ones, the accrues. The writ of an original planning management of the territory was clearly developed as a result of a ``long term perception of disaster.'' This type of perception did not lead the inhabitants of Chaussin to deal immediately with each major flood, but to address it periodically, with the cumulative effect of several floods. In this context, the management of the accrues lay in the centre of this way of coping with hydrological risk. Thus they became a new territorial norm in Chaussin in this period.