The Peasants: Advances in Agricultural Technology, 800-1000

Improvements in Agricultural Technology

One group of innovations centered on plowing and the extended use of the old German heavy wheeled plow. This plow had an iron plowshare that could cut through the earth and a mould-board that turned the sod over. This made the traditional criss-cross double plowing of fields unnecessary. The mould-board plow could also plow deep to make more soil minerals possible, and could plough the heavy but fertile soils of northwestern Europe. The problem with using a heavy plow is that it took a great deal of tractive power. Teams of animals were needed and, since the operation required so much more capital investment, those teams had somehow to plow more land in less time than oxen, the traditional draft animals, would cover the necessary distance. This difficulty was overcoming by using horses as draft animals. Horses were faster and had greater endurance than oxen and could be controlled by voice commands, thus eliminating the need for an additional man in the plow team to guide the ox or oxen with a sharp pole. Several innovations were needed to make use of horses, however: horseshoes to keep the horses' hooves from softening in the wet earth of plowing time, the horse collar since horses do not have well-defined shoulders as oxen do, and harnessing. The peasants also developed tandem harnessing, which allowed as many horses as one had to be hitched to the same vehicle. This gave the medieval peasants almost unlimited tractive power and made possible the widespread use of the heavy plow.

Another set of innovations centered on field utilization and involved the development of a rudimentary but effective system of crop rotation. Peasants started using peas and beans as a complement to their grain crops. Peas and beans are legumes and so restore nitrogen to the soil; they are vines and so choke out weeds; the vines and pods are succulent and so provide excellent silage for winter stock feed; and their vines cover the ground so thickly as to keep the soil friable and thus make plowing easier. Added to all of these advantages was the fact that they were an excellent addition to the diet of humans. They could be dired and kept indefinitely - no small advantage in an era in which food preservation was a constant problem - and, although this was beyond the peasants' ken, were a source of relatively good protein.

Many villages divided their two fields into three, and planted them in a rotating sequence of beans, winter wheat, summer wheat, and fallow. With good planning, this could result in three annual harvests in place of the traditional one.

3. Results

These innovations not only increased production, but also increased the peasants productivity to such a degree that a smaller portion of the population had to be directly engaged in the raising of food. The increased production of food not only permitted an increase of population but provided better nutrition to the population as a whole. The increased productivity of the peasants permitted the some people to devote themselves to the full-time pursuit of small-scale manufacturing and processing.