palissade

Palisade comes from French palissade, from palisse (a stake or pale), from Latin palus (a stake, a post). The Latin root also gives English pale, impale, and the phrase 'beyond the pale' — which originally meant beyond the fenced boundary. A palisade was a fence of pointed stakes driven into the ground, sometimes sharpened at the top. It was the simplest and oldest form of fortification, older than masonry walls.

Roman soldiers built palisades every night when they camped on the march. Each legionary carried two pila muralia — pointed stakes — and at the end of each day's march, the legion dug a ditch and erected a palisade around the camp. Julius Caesar describes the process in De Bello Gallico. The technique had not changed in two thousand years when European colonists in North America built palisaded forts along the frontier in the 1600s and 1700s.

The most famous palisade in American history is probably the one that gave its name to the Palisades — the steep cliffs along the western bank of the Hudson River in New Jersey and New York. The cliffs looked like a wall of wooden stakes from the river, and Dutch colonists called them palisaden. The word transferred from the artificial fence to the natural cliff formation because the resemblance was too strong to ignore.

Palisades disappeared from military use by the nineteenth century as artillery made wooden walls useless. The word survives in the New Jersey Palisades, in the chain of Palisades Parks, and in a few frontier fort reconstructions. But the thing itself — pointed stakes driven into the ground around a camp — may be the oldest continuously reinvented fortification in human history. Every army that ever camped in hostile territory drove stakes into the ground.