Johnston R.A. All Things Medieval: An Encyclopedia of the Medieval World

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Agriculture

Some time in the seventh or eighth centuries, Europe entered a period of

climate warming. The Medieval Warm Period increased average tempera-

tures by several degrees, which opened higher elevations for farming and

spurred a long expansion in farm productivity. During the ninth century,

Europeans began to use a new plow, the moldboard plow, and their farm-

ing methods shifted to include other new technologies.

In most of Europe, farmland was owned by a lord or a monastery. The

land was divided into several large ﬁ elds. Peasants each held a certain strip

of the ﬁ eld for their personal farming. The peasants cooperated with each

other in plowing and harvesting but tended and proﬁ ted from their own

strips. They also owed free labor to the landowner, so they helped farm his

strips as well. In the late Middle Ages, when the plague had badly reduced

the peasant farming population, this system broke down, and landowners

were forced to hire plowmen and harvesters.

Plows

Settlement in Northern Europe required some changes in technology. In

the Mediterranean region, the soil was light and dry. It could be adequately

plowed with a simple wooden scratch plow, which drew a stick through the

surface, pulled by one ox. In Northern Europe, greater rainfall and clay

content made the soil heavier. A shallow plow could not exploit the richer

nutrients of the soil. In the sixth century, Slavs had developed the mold-

board plow, a heavy wheeled plow that spread across Europe and revolu-

tionized agriculture.

The moldboard plow had three parts: the coulter that slashed into the

ground, the plowshare that cut horizontally at the grass roots, and the

moldboard that turned the cut slices of turf on their sides. Where the old

plow had cut a rough line in the soil, the moldboard plow sliced the soil

and ﬂ ipped it over, opening a much deeper furrow. The plow was mounted

on wheels, since it was too large for a man to hold up as it cut through the

turf. The wheels acted as a fulcrum so the plowman could bear down on

the plow’s handles or let up so the plow blade rose a little for easier han-

dling. Its blades had to be made of iron, or at least shod with iron, to cut

into the heavy soil and not be dulled by rocks.

The moldboard plow was so heavy it needed to be pulled by four yoke

of oxen in most soil. Because few peasants owned eight oxen, villages

pooled their oxen together and worked each other’s ﬁ eld strips together.

The number of oxen each owned may have determined his share of the

plowed strips. This system, called open ﬁ eld farming, was dominant

through the 12th century. The heavy plow also shaped the ﬁ elds and their

Agriculture

system of measurement. Fields were not square, like modern ﬁ elds, be-

cause it was difﬁ cult to turn the plow. They were long and narrow, and

after a team of peasants plowed them together, they sowed their own strips

with their seed.

The wheeled plow did not work in all kinds of soil. In places where the

ground was too wet, the spoked wheels picked up dirt and became too heavy

and caked to move well. Medieval plowmen also used foot plows and swing

plows, which were similar to the original simple scratch plows. Foot plows

had a board that lay on the surface of the earth and kept the blade from

going too deep, while swing plows had only the blade for the plowman to

control. Some medieval estates owned more than one kind of plow.

Seeds were broadcast by hand, not planted in rows. The sower wore a

bag of seed over his shoulder and walked along the ﬁ eld, broadcasting seed

with his hands; even coverage was the goal. Medieval ﬁ elds are always shown

thickly planted. Different grains were often sown together, since they could

A small wheeled plow, requiring only one yoke of oxen, works a spring ﬁ eld in

late medieval Italy. Larger plows in northern Europe often required a team of up

to eight oxen or horses and two men to work the heavy soil. (Giraudon/The

Bridgeman Art Library)

Agriculture

be used together. Wheat and rye grew together and were harvested and

milled together.

The harrow was invented after the heavy plow and was in use in England

by the time of the Norman conquest. The plow cut deeply into the soil

and turned it, but it left deep furrows and ridges. The harrow was a large

wooden rake with iron teeth; a horse pulled it across the furrows, leveling

them and burying the cast seeds. Even before horses were used to draw

plows, they were used to pull the much lighter harrows.

Harvesters used sickles to cut the seed heads off the grain, leaving the

stalks standing. A second harvesting pass with larger scythes cut the straw.

In the 13th century, harvesters began to use larger scythes to cut the stalks

above the roots and separate grain from straw during threshing. The earlier

method created better straw, so when wheat straw was a valuable thatching

material, it was worth the trouble to harvest twice.

The new plowing methods may have doubled grain yield per acre. In

general, a farmer could expect to get back four times as much grain as he

sowed in seed. Medieval seed heads for wheat and barley were much smaller

than those of modern grain hybrids, so the yield of seed was not great. Each

seed had to grow enough other seeds that the peasant could save some for

next year’s planting, give some to both church and manor in tithes and rent,

and have enough to eat for the year. In bad years, families ate the seed they

were saving for spring planting.

Food production went up quickly with the use of the new plow. New

land could be cleared because this plow could handle the heavy soil of low-

lands near rivers. Europe’s population moved into these more fertile areas,

which had been left wild. They also broke into new lands at higher eleva-

tions on mountain slopes.

Medieval farmers also learned to enrich the soil more effectively. The value

of manure had been known since Roman times. Allowing sheep to graze on

a fallow ﬁ eld left it spread with manure as fertilizer, and, in the early Middle

Ages, manure was a sheep’s most valuable product. Not only animal ma-

nure, but also the stalks of some plants such as hay and lupines, were left

to rot or plowed under the soil. In the late Middle Ages, the Cistercian

monks, who developed many iron-smelting operations, learned to gather

the phosphate slag from their process to use as fertilizer.

Improved crop rotation was the next stage in the medieval agricultural

revolution. Growing the same crop over and over in a ﬁ eld exhausts the

soil, since each plant takes different nutrients and puts out different waste

products. Since ancient times, farmers had known to allow a ﬁ eld to lie fal-

low in alternate years so weeds could replace what the soil had lost to grain.

In the 9th and 10th centuries, European farmers began to farm their strips

in a three-way rotation. When a strip was planted in oats or legumes in the

Agriculture

spring, it could be harvested at summer’s end. It was then replanted in

wheat and rye and later left fallow for a third season.

By using fall and spring planting, farmers could get an extra crop out of

the same strip. On average, it may have added up to as much as 50 percent

more food. The soil, refreshed by nitrates from the legumes, grew more

grain. When rotation included oats, this high-protein grain allowed horses

to be kept through the winter and worked harder.

Around the same time, the invention of the horse collar increased the

horse’s ability to pull heavy loads. The plow could be drawn by eight oxen

or six horses, and sometimes with mixed teams of both. In a pinch, four

horses or fewer could draw the plow. By the 14th century, many farms were

switching over to all-horse teams. Horses increasingly used in farm work

were also available for riding, and even peasants became more mobile, al-

lowing for better access to markets and imported food. As horses replaced

oxen, some small hamlets were abandoned, since the farmers could ride to

their ﬁ elds and keep their family homes in a larger town. Horses could also

pull carts faster and farther than oxen. By the 13th century, horse transport

lowered the price of food in towns and the price of manufactured goods in

rural places.

Even with all these farming improvements, crops frequently failed. Too

much rain was the worst cause; widespread famines year after year in the

early years of the 14th century were caused by torrential, continual rains

that did not permit the crops enough sunshine to grow. Another danger

was a poisonous fungus, ergot, which grew on rye. Ergot was more preva-

lent in damp times, so the early 14th century was also a time of danger from

ergotism. Since even high temperatures did not kill ergot, it was still active

in rye bread. It contained many poisons, including the substance we know

as LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide). A peasant with ergotism had abdomi-

nal pain, skin inﬂ ammation, and delirium. In some cases, it progressed to

gangrene and death.

The Arab conquest of Spain brought another hazard. Arabs imported

the barberry bush, which is host to a black stem rust virus that can devastate

wheat ﬁ elds. Mediterranean farmers did not know that the barberry bush,

whose red berries were edible and medicinal, carried the rot. Famines fol-

lowed these failures of the wheat harvest.

Irrigation

In the early Middle Ages, wetlands were wet and central plains were dry.

By the 15th century, wetlands had been drained or crossed by causeways,

small islands had been built into habitable dry land, and plains were irri-

gated. Flood and drought had not been such serious issues before that time;

the Nile Valley routinely ﬂ ooded, so nobody built houses in the ﬂ oodplain.

Agriculture

After cities built down to shorelines and drained marshes, ﬂ oods became

disasters. Droughts were very serious in places that could not support farm-

ing with their normal rainfall.

Italy inherited Rome’s network of dams, canals, and ditches and, after a

period of disorganization, were maintaining many of them by the ninth

century. Ditches can serve for both drainage and irrigation, but rivers were

usually at lower levels than the land, and early medieval Italy had not yet

installed water wheels or Archimedes’s screws to move water to a higher

level.

Muslim Spain used Middle Eastern methods of small-scale irrigation.

Caliph Abd al-Rahman, in the middle of the eighth century, brought in ir-

rigation technology as well as imported plants from Syria. They used water-

wheel and bucket systems to lift water from a stream into irrigation canals.

The waterwheels were not large and were often operated by animal or hu-

man muscle power. Valencia, in the central plain, was highly dependent on

irrigation for its farming economy. There was a well-developed system of

canals and water gates so farmers could regulate the canal’s depth and how

much water their lands received. The community held a court to make rul-

ings over water disputes; the judges were farmers elected to the court who

made rulings quickly and orally. The Water Court of Valencia is the oldest

continuous self-governing institution in Europe.

Fruits and vegetables from the Near

East came to Spain with the Islamic

conquest. Among these imported

plants, pomegranate trees ﬂ ourished in

the hot southern climate of Granada.

The imported plants soon became part

of the native scenery; the coat of arms

of Granada includes a pomegranate.

The picture shows a ripe pomegranate

carved in relief on stone. (iStockphoto)

Alphabet

The expansion of irrigation allowed Spain’s farming to increase to be-

come a major exporter of some of its specialized products. Arabs brought

to Spain a number of crops not before known in the peninsula, including

rice, hard wheat, sugar, citrus fruits like oranges and lemons, pomegranates,

bananas, spinach, artichokes, and watermelon. They also introduced cotton.

An Arab emissary to Constantinople managed to smuggle out a seedling of

a ﬁ g plant, and ﬁ gs became a major export crop from Muslim Spain.

See also: Beekeeping, Food, Gardens, Horses, Wagons and Carts, Water.