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CHAPTER 2 
Medieval Farming
From early childhood to old age, often until death, the men in medieval villages spent most of their daylight hours at work in the fields in order to grow enough to feed and clothe themselves and their families. Women and girls put aside their work to join the men and boys in the fields when extra help was needed. When winter confined people to their houses, they tended their livestock, repaired their equipment, and generally made ready for the new season. Their entire lives were geared to the unending demands of the farming year. Failure to perform any of the traditional round of farming activities threatened the lives of all the members of the family. Their survival depended on their success in getting a living from the earth. Only when we realize how basic the land and farming were to medieval villagers can we begin to understand their way of life.
THE YEARLY CYCLE OF WORK
A brief visit to one of the great fields of Cuxham (see map) would quickly show the vast differences between what the word "farming" means in America today and what it meant in England in the 14th century. We can imagine ourselves standing at the edge of the North Field at Cuxham on a November day. The 120-acre field (about 50 hectares) seems to stretch far into the distance. We note narrow, unplowed strips that divide the whole area into 15 parts, or furlongs as they are called. No fences are to be seen. But the great field as a whole is bordered by a hedge thick enough to keep animals out.
On several of the furlongs, plowing is in progress. The plows are wooden, although most are tipped with iron. They are mounted on wooden wheels that help to draw them more easily through the soil. On one furlong, two horses form the plow team. But on others, eight oxen are straining to force the heavy plow through the rich, moist earth. In spite of the great efforts of men and animals, we can see that the plowing is going to take many days, for the plow makes unbelievably slow progress through the earth.
In other furlongs the plowing has been finished and planting begun. In the farthest one, a villager is actually scattering the wheat seed "broadcast." As he walks over his plot of ground, he measures out the seed from the basket in his arm in harmony with the regular movement of his body. Following him comes another villager guiding a horse-drawn harrow, which pushes and drags dirt over the newly planted seed so as to keep birds from getting it.
We would have to stay in Cuxham for an entire year to observe the full work cycle of the community. This cycle never varied from year to year. No sooner was the wheat planted than winter set in. Only in late February or early March could the South Field be plowed and readied for planting, with the same backbreaking effort we saw in the North Field. More than half the South Field would be seeded to oats. Oats was the basic winter fodder for the horses, as wheat for bread was the staple year-round food of the villagers. The rest of the South Field would be sown to barley for the villagers' beer. There would also be small patches of peas and beans, valuable for protein and a welcome change from the monotony of the winter fare.
The turning point of the agricultural year came in late June, when the first harvests began. In England haymaking lasted from June 25 through July. It brought in feed for the animals through the winter.
From August 1 to September 29 (the feast of St. Michael, or Michaelmas) the grain harvest took all the energy and time of the community. The very lives of the villagers depended on the success of the grain harvest. A good yield meant food enough to go around. A poor one meant hunger, misery, and even starvation by the end of the winter. A midsummer drought and heat wave could parch the grain, or heavy rains late in the summer could flood the fields and prevent the grain from ripening. Thus, harvest time was a time of worry and fear. But unless the harvest was a total failure, it at least brought a fresh supply of grain for the immediate future. For everyone it meant bread baked with new flour instead of the old, stale, and sometimes worm-ridden supply from last year. For the very poor it might mean the first bread and gruel in weeks or even months. If their grain stocks had already run out, they would have been living from hand to mouth on vegetables, berries, and occasional wild animals.
Harvesters cut the grain with either a hand-held sickle or a larger, more efficient scythe for which two hands are needed. Then they tied it into bundles, of sheaves, each bound together with a stalk of grain. Women gathered the sheaves into piles to be carted to the village. This, too, was backbreaking work. Gleaner followed after the harvesters, picking up the stalks of grain that had been missed.
The harvest left the North and South Fields vacant. When all the grain had been removed, village custom permitted any villager to let his animals run on the fields. As a result the cattle or other animals then had extra feed that would otherwise be lost, and their manure fertilized the soil. Because of the lack of fences, all these animals had to be tended, often by the older village children.
Even after the fall plowing was completed, there were other chores before the year's work was over. People fortunate enough to have extra livestock slaughtered them. Immediately, they started the process of salting and curing the meat so that it would keep through the winter. No one could afford to keep live animals over the winter except for those animals that were needed, for breeding or for work the next season. There was never enough grain to feed both extra animals and all the people.
The grain from the harvest also had to be processed. It was threshed-the seeds separated from the chaff (the broken stems of the plant)-by marching, animals over it or by beating it with a whip-like instrument called a flail. On a windy day the broken grain would be tossed into the air. The seeds would fall to the ground and the lighter chaff would be blown away.
So far, we have looked at the North and South Fields in Cuxham to see what was planted in them and when. But a third major field, the West Field, also formed a vital part of the village lands and made Cuxham what is called a three-field community. The three-field system was common in many of the rich, low-lying river-valley regions of northern Europe, including England. In a three-field village, people farmed two of the fields in any three-year cycle each field was planted twice and left fallow once. In addition, the villagers rotated crops in each Field never planting the same crop in a field two years in succession. Thus the wheat field of one year would have barley or rye the next.
Farmers used this method because continuous farming with the same crop exhausted the soil and resulted in ever smaller harvests. Today, chemical fertilizers make it possible for the same land to be planted year after year. But the only fertilizers medieval knew were animal manure or topsoil carted in from other unused land. Neither existed in sufficient amounts. The only way, then, to avoid soil exhaustion was to leave a field uncultivated at least once in every three years. During that year the villagers plowed under the manure and weeds on the field to help make the land fertile again. At the time of our imagined visit to Cuxham, the West Field was having its period of rest. It contributed nothing to the feeding of the villagers.
Like many other farming communities of northern Europe in the Middle Ages, Cuxham was an "open field” village. That is, the fields of the individual villagers had no hedges or fences separating them from those of their neighbors. To be sure, hedges marked off the outside boundaries of each of the three great fields of Cuxham. But only low ridges or narrow, unplowed strips of land blocked out each of these fields into the 15 or so smaller furlongs mentioned earlier.
We would have to look more closely to notice that each of those furlongs was in turn divided by ridges or lines of unplowed land into many long, narrow strips. Each strip was a few yards wide and a hundred or more long. It usually contained about an acre in all. Some of the strips belonged to the ruler of the village and some were part of the glebe, that is, the lands of the church. The rest belonged to individual villagers who farmed them and had the right to the products grown on them. Most of the villagers had anywhere from one to four or five strips in each field.
These characteristics of the open-field system had a striking effect on the manner of farming. They forced the villagers to act as a unit, or at least to do much of their work in groups. Few medieval villagers owned more than a single draft animal, and only a few owned a plow. Therefore, farmers with strips next to one another pooled their animals to form plow teams and plowed their several strips at the same time. In order to fertilize the fields, the animals were allowed to run on them after the harvest. Each farmer with a strip in an open field could not decide independently when, for instance, to gather his harvest and put his livestock out to graze on his strip. If he did so, the animals would soon wander to the unharvested strips of others and eat up the crops.
Clearly, the villagers together had to set the time for plowing, sowing, and harvesting, and the moment when the whole field became a common grazing ground for all who held strips in it.
With its three great fields and its open-field farming, Cuxham was in many ways a typical medieval village. But in one way its example can be very misleading. It was in a region of especially rich, fertile soil, and it was near roads and many other villages. As late as 1800 there were other areas of western Europe that were, in some ways, more backward than Cuxham had been in 1300. In parts of southern France, for example, horses and the wheeled plow were not in use as late as 1800.
Not all villagers of the Middle Ages lived in open-field villages. In many areas there was a quite different type of farm with enclosed fields. A single farm of this variety would contain a house and yard and several small fields of irregular shape. Sometimes the fields adjoined one another, and sometimes they were separated by wasteland or by fields belonging to others. Enclosed-field farming was common in hilly, upland regions, where the land was uneven. It was also found in much of southern France and Italy. There, soils were lighter, drier, and usually less fertile than in the river valleys of the north. Populations were thin and scattered because the small areas worth farming kept people from living closely together. Some settled in hamlets of just five or six families. Others lived on isolated farms.
THE MEDIEVAL AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION
To a casual observer medieval farming might seem to have been unchanging. The rhythm of the farming seasons was the same year after year, as were farming methods. The same families held the land for generation after generation. Certainly medieval people believed their world to be eternal and fixed. Rarely could in a person in a single lifetime see any great change.
Nevertheless, a slow evolution was transforming the farming world bit by bit between 1000 and 1300. It was not sudden or spectacular. We only learn that it took place at all because historians, with great care, have studied countless land contracts and other such records that have come down to us. But the changes in agriculture had profound results. They affected not only the lives of individual villagers but those of all medieval Europeans. Scholars say that an agricultural revolution took place in these centuries.
Most important was the increased amount of land farmed and the increase in what was produced on a single acre. Closely related was a growth in European population. It rose by between 200 and 400 per cent. As a result, new towns and new rural villages were settled. Population in England rose from between one and two million people to five million. In France and the Low Countries it more than tripled, from six to nineteen million. This growth can be explained in part by the ending of Viking raids and other invasions of Europe. At the same time, the growth of stronger local governments gave greater security from violence at home. These facts no doubt helped produce the steady
rise of the population after the l0th century. But equally or more important was the availability of new land.
Starting in the 11th century and going on for more than three centuries, European villagers, by slow, unceasing toil, achieved a great pioneer work. Land was cleared and settled. This was not an organized movement. Rather it was the work of thousands of small groups, and sometimes just individuals, laboring at the same time in many parts of Europe. With their simple tools, clearing cost them an immense amount of time and hard labor. But their results were impressive. Huge forests were gradually cut back to a small part of their former size. Marshland and swampy areas were drained. New cultivated fields appeared where vast, uninhabited wilds had been. Hundreds of new settlements sprang up. Many bore such names as "New Village" or "New Clearings" to show their origin. The great majority of modern European village and town names are in fact of medieval origin. Population growth in modern Europe has occurred mainly through the expansion of places already founded in medieval times. So thoroughly did the medieval pioneers do their work that a map of communities in early 14th-century Europe is much like one of our own time.
Another side of the medieval agricultural revolution was the slow change toward better farming methods. Better tools were developed which allowed farmers to produce more than they could have earlier. Before 1100, horseshoes and an efficient horse harness had come into use. For the first time in history these objects allowed horses to be used for purposes other than war. In time, horses began to replace oxen as draft animals in many parts of Europe. Horses plowed more rapidly than oxen. Thus farmers could plow more fields in a given productivity. Harrows drawn by horses or oxen we more frequently used. They spread thin layers of earth over newly sown seed to keep birds away and to improve the chances of sprouting. Better carts and wagons were built. Farm tools like hoes, rakes, and scythes were improved, possibly by the use of more iron. In the 13t century, farm manuals began to be written and read. Most, like the Treatise on Husbandry by Walter of Henley, had information about better methods of agriculture.
Records of these centuries show the importance of these improvements. They indicate an increase in the number of bushels of grain that could be produced from the same acres of land. By the end of the 13th century, a. bushel of seed might be expected to produce 3.5 to 4.5 bushels at harvest time. This compared with 2.5 to 3.5 a century or so earlier. In Cuxham the yield was quite a bit better than average. For the years 1290 to 1350, the yield of grain at harvest was nearly 6.5 bushels to each acre planted, one of the highest figures recorded in England at the time. While even this is still very low by 20th-century standards, the overall increase in Europe was high. It must have been one of the chief causes for the large growth of medieval population from the 11th through the 13th centuries.
By the 13th century another important change was beginning to take place in European agriculture. The type of farming we have described in Cuxham was subsistence farming. We have pictured the villagers as trying to supply all their own needs. They consumed everything they raised. In the earlier Middle Ages, conditions did not permit any other way of farming. Villages had to be almost completely independent of the outside world. They had to grow their own grain and vegetables, and cultivate flax and hemp for linen, rope, and thread. They had to raise cattle for dairy products and sheep for wool. They brewed their own beer, or in warmer climates, made their own wine. Village smiths made whatever tools they needed. What goods they could not produce villagers obtained by barter since very little money circulated in the countryside. But by the 13th century, in some areas, subsistence farming was being somewhat modified. Villagers were beginning to sell some of their farm products in the markets of neighboring towns.
Production for sale to outsiders was the result of the growth of towns, for townspeople could not produce their own food and fibers. They had to buy these things, and they had the money to pay for them. Although villagers continued to raise most of what they themselves needed, they also began to specialize. Thus they concentrated more on producing extra amounts of basic foods like grain and dairy products. (Townspeople ate more meat, cheese, and butter than villagers.) With the money from the sale of their commodities, villagers could buy some of the articles skilled workers were making in the towns.
The medieval agricultural revolution brought many villagers more food. It also gave some of them a small reserve of money for buying things not available in earlier times. But it would be wrong to say that these changes greatly improved the lives of the whole body of villagers. Hunger, famine, and shortage of basic items still constantly threatened rural people. In fact, there was a series of disasters in the early 14th century. A long agricultural depression began then and lasted until the early 15th century. It plunged rural Europe from modest prosperity back to the depths of suffering and hardship.
A number of factors help to account for this long period of calamity. There were cycles of unusually cool, rainy weather in the early 14th century. As a result, crops were ruined year after year in large parts of northern Europe. Far more disastrous was the highly contagious bubonic plague, known as the Black Death. Carried by rats, it spread rapidly and relentlessly like wildfire from the mid-14th century. Taking a horrifying toll in human lives, the Black Death turned out be one of the greatest natural catastrophes ever to strike western Europe.
Many a village was wiped out completely. Many others saw their populations drastically reduced. Cold, impersonal statistics barely hint at what must have been a numbing tragedy. In Cuxham, in the year 1349, the men of all 12 of the most important village families died. Although no figures survive for them, many women and children must also have died. The village survived this disaster. But its population in 1377 was still only one-third its size in 1348. Several houses had been permanently abandoned, and production had fallen sharply. People who escaped or recovered from the plague often faced a desperate situation. Those who counted on townspeople to buy their surplus crops saw that market fall off as the disease struck towns and cities. Other villagers whose ranks had been thinned by death found themselves short of help to work their own land. A serious labor shortage hit many parts of Europe.
In part, the depression stemmed from a crisis in European agriculture itself. There are many signs that bad weather and the plague happened just when a long period of growth and expansion was coming to an end. Hunger and hardship were clearly related to a decline in the yield of the land on many English estates in the early 14th century. At Cuxham, for instance, the wheat yield dropped by one-third and that of oats by one-half in the decade from 1350 to 1359. This change occurred after three centuries of prosperity. It almost certainly had two chief causes. On the one hand, the steady expansion of European population had led, to the colonization of most of the land best suited to agriculture, given the tools and techniques of the day. There were even land shortages. When poorer lands were farmed, they produced less. The people who attempted to work them found their standards of living going down. On the other hand, even in the richer regions there are unmistakable signs of soil exhaustion. It seems as if the desire for profits was driving people to try to get more from the land than it was capable of yielding. The great agricultural depression of the 14th century and early 15th century loomed as a grim warning to villagers of that day. They and their ancestors had accomplished much through sweat and hard labor. But they still could not produce enough to provide against emergencies and sudden shortages. They continued to be a prey to the ups and downs of weather that have always threatened farming populations. By now it should be clear that the limits in their tools and farming techniques held them back. Modern farmers have power equipment like tractors to perform the work of many animals and people in a fraction of the time. Medieval villagers, however, had only a few simple tools and a horse or a cow for their tasks. Some people lacked even work animals and did everything by hand, patiently turning the soil with hoes, rakes, and shovels. Naturally this slowed down the business of farming to a snail's pace and greatly reduced production. Inability to fertilize the soil properly reduced it still further. Even after the improvements of the agricultural revolution, from the 11th to the 13th centuries, the yield of the land was quite low by our standards.
As a result, people got enough to eat only through never-ending, backbreaking toil on the land. The labor of every able-bodied person was used. No one was exempted: man, woman, or child. Even so, most villagers just managed to survive. Not until mechanized farm equipment and chemical fertilizers brought another revolution in agriculture in the 19th century would European farmers be able to produce huge surpluses. Until then, shortages had remained a constant menace.
