The Peasants: Advances in Agricultural Technology, 800-1000

Agricultural Technology

The villages were organized for the growing of grain, wheat in most places, but oats, rye, barley or whatever the soil and climate permitted. The peasants lack some of the basic tools upon which the productivity of modern agriculture depends. They had no chemical fertilizers and lacked the resources to raise a sufficient number of animals to provide an adequate supply of manure. Soil exhaustion was a constant problem, and the peasants were usually engaged in the laborious process of clearing new land to supplement their old, worn-out fields. They lacked pesticides and often made do by providing homes for pigeons and doves who would not only eat insects, but provide a small but highly-concentrated amount of fertilizer for use in the gardens. They also lacked an herbicide, and weeds were always ready to invade their fields. The basic organization of village agriculture was conditioned by the need to overcome those difficulties.

The village acted as a plowing cooperative since the cost of plow and draft animals was too great for a single family to bear alone. Each family owned portions in both of the two fields into which the arable lands of the village were grouped. There were no fences between properties - which is why this arrangement is called the "open field system" of agriculture - although brush hedges were piled around the field under cultivation. There is a village in England by the name of Laxton that, for various reasons, never had its open fields broken up. The people in Laxton still till their open field in much the same manner as in medieval times. Click here if you would like to know more.

One of the fields was plowed in the early spring and planted in grain. The other field was then plowed, but left unplanted to let the air and sunshine restore some of its fertility. Weeds were allowed to grow. The weeds diverted some of the attention of insects and provides pasture for the villages animals who would manure the field as they grazed. Just before the weeds in the fallow field were ready to seed, the field was plowed a second time and the weeds turned under. The process was reasonably effective in achieving the goal of restoring fertility and holding back weeds. But the system carried a heavy price. The villagers could utilize only half of their land each year but had to expend the effort of plowing fallow land.

Weather was a constant worry. Wet springs could cut plowing time, rot seed in the ground, and so reduce the harvest. Fall rains could wet the grain before harvesting and make it impossible to dry and thresh. Production was not great -- seven to ten bushels per acre was considered good, and two or three of those bushels had to be saved for seed. Part of the peasants' harvest was taken as taxes, and part by the church as a tithe, so taxes and seed grain took about 60 percent of each harvest. That being the case, a peasant might be able to gather as his own only a bushel or two from each of his strips. A family of four needed about 35 bushels a year to survive, so it was imperative that the village be able to plow between thirty and forty acres for each household. Given the relative scarcity of plows and animals, and the possibility that the plowing season might be cut short by a long winter or a rainy Spring, peasant life was a meager and precarious thing. In that turbulent period between the Carolingian Empire and the emergence of Feudal Europe, however, the European peasants introduced new agricultural technologies that greatly improved the efficiency of agriculture.