The Medieval Agricultural Revolution: New Evidence

foreign the subject of this evening's lecture is the medieval Agricultural Revolution traditionally referred to as the medieval Agricultural Revolution and traditionally dated to the period between about the 10th and the 13th centuries it involved a major expansion of arable farming and saw the serialization of large swathes of England and indeed of Europe so although I'm talking about England tonight much of what I say could be applied to many parts of Europe it fed an exceptionally rapidly growing population but also fueled wealth disparities this is the period that saw the emergence of England's first landowners its

first local Lords so I'll begin by introducing some of the key elements of the revolution and some of the debates around it for example whether it should be called a revolution then I'll present some new archaeological evidence from a project called feed sacks feeding Anglo-Saxon England feed sacks for short a project that I think is Transforming Our understanding of the conditions in which early medieval crops were grown in England and the timing of key agricultural Innovations so for example were those Innovations already in place by 1066 or were they associated with the Norman Conquest with

the Norman yoke finally I'll conclude with some Reflections on what brought this period of growing agricultural outputs population expansion and relative prosperity to an end so let's start with the serialization of the English Countryside so as I just mentioned the period we're talking about soul is exceptionally rapid population growth and I'm going to show you some figures here all which are really very rough approximations but they give you an idea of the speed with which the population was growing in this period so we think that the population of late Rome in Britain and we're talking

about the third fourth century was somewhere on the order of two and a half to three million in the post-german centuries fifth sixth seventh centuries we're quite confident that the population collapsed really quite dramatically although how dramatically is anyone's guess perhaps by as much as a million maybe even more by the time of the Doomsday Book the population had more or less recovered to Roman levels to late Roman levels and by 1300 it had more or less doubled and you can also see here some estimates for the number of Acres that were under the plow

in these periods so you can see I think really very striking population growth so how did Medieval Farmers manage to feed such a rapidly growing population in many parts of the country but not all this was achieved by various forms of open field farming especially the type known as two or three field farming this is where most of all of a community's arable lay in two or more large unenclosed fields the Holdings of individual Farmers took the form of scattered strips within those fields intermingled with those of their neighbors it's what you see on this

slide are the fossilized Ridge and Furrow Earthworks of such a field system formed by the moldboard plow which I'll say more about later with a village a medieval village at its heart now medieval farming involved several technological innovations including systematic crop rotation in the moldboard plow I'm going to talk about those in a moment um but according to the the grand Narrative of the Agricultural Revolution these Innovations led to a sort of Great Leap Forward in terms of productivity ultimately shifting Prosperity from Southern to Northern Europe now this narrative has rightly been criticized criticized for

many decades as technological determinism and there are undoubtedly problems of the very notion of an agricultural revolution in this period but there is no question I think that the spread of open field farming really was one of the transformative changes of the Middle Ages now we're going to look at some new evidence that should definitely make us think again about this narrative but first I briefly want to mention this book which was published in 2017 against the grain because the author who is not a historian he's not an archaeologist he's a political scientist the author

makes a direct link between cereal farming and wealth inequalities so Scott's focus is on the prehistoric origins of farming he talks mostly about the Neolithic but his General thesis is that in the past as cereal farming increased so too did wealth disparities that by the way isn't really a new idea but he has expressed it maybe most recently and he expresses it in a very sort of engaging way so it's worth the read now Medieval Europe is an obvious example of what he's talking about although in fact he doesn't mention it the new forms of

cereal farming in the Middle Ages that we're going to be talking about generated substantial regular surpluses and that is key it allowed many more mouths to be fed of course but it also allowed landowners to amass and mobilize these surpluses ultimately by exporting the labor of others by exploiting of Labor of those who actually worked the land so in England from the 10th Century onwards Kings granted units of land to local Lords and by the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066 there were thousands of such landowners that each with their own Estates prospering from

rents extracted from peasants who worked the land it is the expansion of cereal farming that made this possible and that brings us back to Scott and here's a little quotation the key to the Nexus between grains and States lies in the fact that only cereal grains can serve as a basis for taxation what does he mean by that I think what he's saying is that cereals and uniquely cereals possess certain qualities that make them an ideal medium for tax collectors I should say cereals uniquely amongst crops they make them make them an ideal medium for

tax collectors so they are they ripen and they are harvested at predictable points of the year they're easily stored easily transported easily measured this means that landowners could enrich themselves more readily from Land sown with cereals than anything else not only are cereals easily taxed but a land unit sewn with cereals will of course feed many more mouths than the same land unit used to graze livestock that's something we're all very aware of at the moment hence the exceptionally steep population growth that we saw earlier question of how early medieval farmers were able to grow

enough cereals to supply this rapidly expanding population as well as the expanding markets of this period has generated a lot of debate for a long time so when were Innovations like the mobile board plow actually first introduced was there really a technologically driven transformative moment or was instead a sort of gradual process of serialization was change driven by top-down pressure from greedy Lords demanding ever larger surpluses or is it evidence of bottom-up peasant agency and on and on many unresolved questions that have been argued over for decades but I think it's fair to say that

the debate has to a large extent reached a kind of impasse with no consensus being reached so why can't we agree I think it's largely because as I say here we lack direct closely dated evidence for medieval Fields themselves and we don't really know anything about the conditions in which crops were grown in this period and well related to this is the fact that researchers have to rely on a relatively small number of indirect sources like maps and Charters you know documents recording land transactions that really don't tell you about farming as such and many

of them were written produced a great deal uh centuries after the period we're talking about the really quite late there's certainly written long after the main period of change and I'll show you here a tiny image I'm sorry it's so tiny the image of a very important map the Laxton map which is a wonderful depiction of a fully developed open field system but it dates the 1635 it's really late for what we're talking about so what is needed really to break this impasse is new preferably direct evidence and that thanks to the the project feeding

angle sacks England we now have such evidence and that is what we're going to look at next so the project which is sort of finished but still the bits of it are still going on it was based at the University of Oxford with a collaboration with Lester and it involved the work of um really quite a large team of experts quite diverse team of experts and here they are it's really just to make the point that this is the result of of the work of an awful lot of different people what you're about to see

now the aim of feed sacks was to generate direct evidence for medieval farming by analyzing plant and animal remains from archaeological excavations our primary source material was not documents was not written evidence evidence but rather bioarchaeological evidence so things like preserved plant remains preserved animal bones and so on so on the left there rather unprepossessing little pile of burnt bits are actually medieval grains and Associated weed seeds that have been preserved by accidental charring so it probably happened when they were trying to dry the grains or maybe a grand rebound down but these these charred

plant remains are really important source of information then we have animal bones and these are in fact the Bones from cattle feed which as you'll see will become important later on to my story and then on the right we have a pollen core so we did look at pollen evidence pollen grains to understand questions about wider land use but I'm not going to talk about that today just because we don't really have the time so where does our source material come from uh well it comes from hundreds and hundreds of excavations from across the country

I'm afraid you will have noticed that an awful lot of them come from Southern and Eastern England areas that were very much dominated by open field farming I'm afraid that snatched all what we wanted it's not for lack of trying to find material from the north and west but there is simply less well-preserved uh bioarchaeological material from the Northern West it's harder to identify its sites and so we've ended up with a reasonable spread but it's not perfectly representative I'm just going to quickly mention the main methods we use are not going to go into

any technical detail don't worry about that but we really looked first of all at weeds at functional weed ecology this is a way of studying the weeds that grew in amongst the crops because as you're about to hear these tell us about the soil conditions in which those weeds grew and therefore the soil conditions in which the associated crops grew different sorts of weeds grow in different conditions then Zoo archeology is simply the study of animal bones from archaeological excavations alchior botany ditto but looking at plant remains and finally we undertook something called crop stable

isotope analysis of medieval grains and that is just another way by looking at the kind of chemistry of those grains it's another way of establishing the soil conditions in which those crops grews it's quite novel we were quite novel in our approach I think so now finally we're going to look at some results and I'm going to present these according to a kind of framing device that I've called the moldboard player package that consists of three key elements of medieval farming the first is extensification I'll explain that in a moment the second is crop rotation

and the third is the use of the moldboard plow so let's start with this the extensification of Serial farming at first I think I'd better explain what I mean by extensification so here is a little diagram that my colleague Amy Bogard has produced I think is a useful way of explaining this if you're a farmer and you want to increase your overall crop yield at least if you're a pre-modern farmer you can do one of two things you can cultivate your land more intensively by investing more input per land unit by input we're talking here

about manure and human labor now you can do that but that tends to limit the amount of land that you can cultivate so intensifying tends to be smaller in scale alternatively you could extensify that is you could cultivate more land while investing less input per land unit so you can see you have labor-intensive methods which tend to be small scale or you have land extensive methods which are larger in scale as cereal farming expanded in scale we would therefore expect to see a trend towards lower input and therefore lower fertility systems so the lower fertility

is a really important Point lower fertility soil conditions open field farming medieval open field farming is an example of a super extensive low input type of farming and that's because fertility wasn't maintained by really intensive manuring but rather by short regular fallow periods when the land rested and was grazed by sheep whose droppings topped up the soil fertility so it's a low input low fertility system so how can you tell how intensively or extensively cereals were farmed well the key here is the weeds I'm going to be talking about weeds quite a lot tonight now

many of you are gardeners but um but you'll be you'll you'll be familiar with some of them so arable weeds are the key the weed seeds that we analyze come from Weeds like corn flour that grew in amongst the medieval cereal crops and were harvested together with them why are they useful well again as you gardeners and allotment holders will know some weeds like Nettles these are Nettles thrive in high fertility conditions While others will not do well in those conditions they prefer poorer soils because arable weeds reflect the soil conditions in which they grew

so different conditions produce different types of weeds they also provide us with direct evidence for the soil conditions in which crops grew that's simply that's the underlying principle it's quite quite simple in order to interpret the medieval weed seeds accurately what sort of soil conditions do they represent we need some Modern Baseline data this is about as technical as it's going to get so bear with me briefly this one slide uh this represents the work of my colleague Amy Bogard in comparing the weeds from Tiny intensively manure cereal fields in Northwest Spain and esturius and

you see that in the top right of this slide to very low input low fertility fields in oat Provence in the south of France which you see in the top left so in the top right these tiny fields are used to grow some sort of special I think it might be a type of wheat that is used to bake a special cake or bread that they only eat once a year so they're really Thai they're almost like kitchen Gardens but they're using them to grow cereals I know it Provence what you can see they look

like you know regular sort of weed Fields very extensive so she conducted technical survey of the arable weeds from both systems and found that the results produced so she then produces sort of discriminate function analysis that you can see at the top of the slide and she found that the weed floras found in the two systems the very intensive and the Very extensive formed two quite distinct groups so it is possible readily to distinguish between the types of weeds that grew in small intensively cultivated fields and those that grew in large extensively cultivated Fields so

that was kind of a test and if you want to try this yourself and I'm not a botanist so I'm I'm only going to present this very simply low-growing slow growing weeds like the one you see there on the left with almost needle-like leaves tend to be associated with very poor low input soils whereas the sorts of weeds that would grow in most people's Gardens in this country which are moderately fertile grow like Nettles relatively fast relatively tall with broad leaves and these are the functional traits I'm not sure if you can see them but

she looks at things like canopy height flowering duration the area of the leaves all these things tell you whether that weed like slow fertility or high fertility conditions so I've spent a little bit of time reviewing that so that you kind of can understand the results which I'm now going to show you when we apply this model to Medieval weed seeds so here are the results there just for the central zone because it was the central zone the Bread Basket of England that really produced most the most samples so produced really the best results basically

each of the dots that you see represents one arcue Botanical sample one one sample of weed seeds and um you can see the date runs along the horizontal axis at the bottom of the slide and along the vertical axis you see um scores from uh six down to minus 10. so scores that are below zero so dots that are plotting below zero represent low fertility conditions those plotting above zero equal higher fertility conditions and essentially what the graph shows clearly is diminishing scores and so decrease infertility over time that's what this dotted line is showing

you it's going down soil conditions are becoming less fertile over time now there is a hint I think of a bit of a step change round about the 8th Century so in these earliest phases you can see the samples are plotting relatively high now we don't have many samples but they are they have relatively high scores but after about 700 pretty much everything is below zero it all counts as extensive low fertility farming now what's interesting is that we know from written sources of the 12th and 13th century mostly that farmers were working really hard

to maintain soil fertility through manuring through hand weeding through planting legumes and other green manures and I've had historians argue with me and say but they were working so hard to maintain fertility well they undoubtedly were but the weeds tell us that whatever farmers were doing it just wasn't enough to reverse that downward Trend that is just an ecological fact that is what the weeds tell us so that's interesting so that's extensification that's all I want to say about that for now let's move on to talk about crop rotation now collective decision making about crop

rotation and fallow grazing was a fundamental feature of the two and three field systems a rotation of course allowed a higher proportion of a Village's arable to be under crop at any one time Now farmers had to agree in a system like this when and in which field is so different cereals and which feel to leave fallow I mean obviously you can't have a you know your sheep Grazing In A fallow field immediately next to a a crop field you have to keep them separate so you have to agree what you're going to do farmers

have had to had to cooperate and had to agree um and they might in a typical system have Autumn sewn wheat in one field springstone barley in another and then the Third Field uh left fallow that's the kind of classical model and then the next year you rotate and you have um barley in what was the wheat field and so on so what we did was to look at the crop stable isotope values in cereal grains specifically it was the nitrogen values that we were interested in to see whether different cereals had grown in the

same soil conditions and therefore potentially in rotation so if barley and wheat for example are grown in rotation the same sense of fields they'll they'll have isotope values that are basically the same if they're different if those values are different they couldn't possibly have been grown in rotation so what did we find we found when we normalized our results across all of our sites well we found this so in the earliest phase which takes us right back to the seventh to ninth centuries you can see the values are really widespread they're all over the place

there's very little evidence here of rotation the different colored dots by the way are different types of cereals oats rye wheat and barley so the earliest phase very widespread you can see in the next phase which takes us to the late 9th century up to the first quarter of the 11th century a little bit that that variability is a little bit reduced and then in the last phase which is the 11th to 13th centuries it really reduces a lot so we think that it is in that period the 11th to 13th centuries that crop rotation

systematic crop rotation has really been quite widely practiced but this is the first sort of direct scientific evidence we've ever had for that we've had to rely entirely really Unwritten sources until now so that's crop rotation and we can now look at this question about the mold Ward plow when did it come into widespread use this this really um kind of disruptive technology of the Middle Ages so what was the moldboard plan what made it so important well the main tillage Implement of the Roman period in the West Was the scratch plow or Ard which

you see it the top here um the art or scratch Powers the name suggests really just scratches a Furrow into the surface of the soil what the moldboard allows you to do is actually turn the soil over as I hope you can see in this diagram this is a nice early medieval image of a moldboard plow so you have a culture that cuts vertically down into the soil and then a moldboard that turns it over and that ability to uh that that that complexity in the moldboard plow allowed Farmers to expand more readily onto heavier

more fertile more productive soils and that's a really key feature of this medieval arable expansion that we're talking about now we know that the mole board plow was around in England quite early already in the 7th century and the reason we know that is that archaeologists have excavated a piece of a moldboard plow in Kent associated with a royal Monastery at a place called limage so we know it existed they knew of the moleboard plow so the real question is when did it change from being a rarified high status piece of kit that you might

use in a Royal Monastery to being something that most Farmers had access to and we know that by the time of Doomsday Book an awful lot of farmers were using the mobile plus so when did that happen when was that that Tipping Point or indeed was there chipping point was it just a gradual increase over time so again weeds are key again you may know that some weeds absolutely thrive in highly Disturbed soil conditions like those produced by moldboard plow so for example thistles which you see on this slide or ground Elder if we're talking

about my guard my garden absolutely infested with ground Elder thistles and other weeds like that positively love being chopped up into little pieces because they regenerate very readily from Tiny bits of root if you leave even a tiny bit behind a new plant will grow medieval writers Like Walter of Henley knew all about this and thistles are much complained about in medieval texts so as he says here if thistles are plowed out before mid-summer for each one shall come up two or three so he said you know thistles are difficult to kill off even with

a moldboard plow in fact they really like the moldboard plow so arts and plows art and plow cultivation produce different types of weeds because there are lots of weeds that don't like the stool they're weeds that that require low disturbance to survive so they would cope with art cultivation others like thistles prefer High disturbance conditions so again we needed some Modern Baseline data with which to compare our medieval samples and this came from two sources the first is Highgrove home Farm yes home of duchy Originals you biscuit lovers out there as you may know they

grow Heritage cereal varieties and they grow them organically they practice crop rotation and our Second Source was a village called Laxton in Nottinghamshire which refers to itself as England's last open field Village and indeed there is a still functioning open field system there and here you see the feedstacks team conducting a Botanical survey at Laxton so we went out and actually looked well what kinds of weeds grow in these systems and again Amy Bogard produced a kind of discriminant function analysis don't worry about this slide too much the point is that it was quite easy

to separate out the sorts of weeds that grew in the really low disturbance conditions in the Hay Meadows at Langston from those on the right here that grew actually in the arable fields that underwent the sort of disturbance of modern players of course they use modern plows at both Ladson and and Highgrove but so it was possible to to separate out High disturbance and low disturbance weeds quite readily we refine the picture using uh some really remarkable data because we thought it was important to look at some fields that are actually being plowed with a

moldboard plow and we found such a place in Germany uh at an experimental farm at the world heritage site of lorsche Abbey which is near Frankfurt or south of Frankfurt um so this is a working farm where they carry out cultivation experiments using really high quality archaeological replicas like the moldboard plow in this in this image and they very kindly supplied us with weed data so that we were able to introduce this into our model so we applied that model then to our archaeological samples and here again we see the weed samples for the central

zone but this time in relation to soil disturbance before it was fertility now we're looking at soil disturbance um so the arrow on the right that blue arrow I hope you can see it I probably should have made it a different color but the arrow indicates our what you might call our moldboard plow line in other words samples plotting below that line grew in low disturbance conditions consistent with the use of an art the samples above the line grew in high disturbance conditions consistent with use of a moldboard plow and here you can see where

a soil fertility was going down through time you can see I hope that disturbance is going up through time it is increasing Through Time although we do see it and you can see this quite readily some continuation of low disturbance cultivation which suggests as we would expect that some farmers were still using an art and we know that the art continued to be used you know throughout the Middle Ages but the mobile plow is clearly becoming more and more prominent Through Time so a leaf plant remains behind and look at the animal bone evidence that

the evidence from cattle bones specifically and what they tell us about the spread of the heavy moldboard plow now the first thing we did was to identify a trend towards more male animals and towards older animals and this trend I think you can see peaked in the 10th and 11th century so we're looking really here at the the darker part of the bar that is uh the proportion of animals that were used for what's what's called secondary products that is dairy and traction but probably in this early period mostly traction and you can see there's

more and more and more until it peaks in that period 850 to 1066. you might wonder why it seems to reduce again after that and we think that is because people are increasingly using horses for traction once you get to that later period but they're definitely increasing cattle are increasingly being used for traction um up until 1066. we then also looked at these foot bones that I mentioned early on and the reason for that is that the strain of pulling a heavy well heavy anything but a heavy moldboard plow would cause pathological changes to the

feet of cattle I mean basically they develop a kind of arthritis over time and these pathologies allowed us to Define what we call a draft cattle signature for some sites and the sites that you see on these maps with a draft cattle signature I hope you can see this I'm marked with a little Ox um so those are the ones with this signature so the maps show how the proportion of settlements excavated settlements with this draft cattle signature increases over time so here on the left you have the period 400 700 and then 600 to

900 and it's really quite a low proportion of sites have this signature but when we move to later centuries 800 to 1100 the proportion goes right up and for a thousand twelve hundred all the sites we looked at produced a really pronounced a really clear draft cattle signature so um something is is clearly going on so having looked at the evidence for extensification for crop rotation and for the use of the moldboard plow we can now compare the timing of their appearance and spread to changes in rural settlement and we say rural settlement but really

we're talking here about farms and Villages actual farms and Villages of this first part of the Middle Ages so that's what I want to do next now rural settlements in early medieval England and when I say early medieval really I'm going actually right up to 1200 in the discussion today but but anyway rural settlement underwent I would say three distinct episodes of change in those centuries and these I think can best be understood when viewed against the backdrop of the changes in farming that we've just looked at so the first of these episodes is what

historians have come to call the long 8th Century so in fact the period from more or less 680 to more or less 8 30. what makes that period different what sort of changes do we see what what Innovations and we see quite a lot of changes in this period mostly in Central and Eastern England but the changes are clear so we start to see settlements become associated with the first post-roman drove ways the first livestock enclosures the first Hay Meadows and so on prior to this we don't have evidence for any of that they had

it in the Roman period and then it all disappears in the fifth sixth seventh centuries and then in the late 7th Century you start to get these features again why is that interesting or why is it important because I think there are two really significant I think implications for the appearance again of things like livestock enclosures and drove racing so on because it tells us that livestock were being managed in new ways that required the movement to be controlled so they didn't just stray off into fields or stray off into farmsteads and start you know

nibbling on the thatch or whatever so they're being somehow they must be being kept close to the settlements and so you have to really manage their movements and make sure they don't get into trouble so that's the first implication and the second one which is equally important I think is that farmers must have been cooperating they must have been pooling their labor in order to construct these drove ways and these very extensive complexes of paddocks Corrals whatever they are these these livestock enclosures because they're they are quite extensive they involve quite deep ditches and banks

that would have involved a lot of work much more than could be done by just one household or even two households so these were large-scale undertakings and I think those two implications are quite significant so we see the driveways the enclosures the Hay Meadows um but we also see investment in this period in the first centralized crop processing and storage facilities since the Roman period the first medieval grain drying ovens and molting ovens like this wonderful molting oven from northamptonshire from Highland fairs they appear for the first time the first medieval water Mills also date

to this period here's a really early one from Kent we even have a few barns known from this period I don't want to exaggerate I don't want to say that they're appearing absolutely everywhere but it is a clear phenomenon and they are popping up increasingly as there is more excavation so these these features like the molting ovens the water Mills bonds and so on I think could be seen as a sort of capital projects Associated invariably with high status settlements Royal sites Royal monasteries and they are of course tangible signs of the wealth generated by

serial surpluses the very serial surpluses they were designed to store and process this is also in the first large archaeological deposits of charred grains appear probably reflecting larger harvests that are being processed and stored in new ways and so they're occasionally catching on fire and being dumped and I think all of this when you put it together reflects a shift from relatively small scale intensive farming that is not leaving much of an archaeological footprint to larger scale new low input regimes and a new emphasis on Surplus production so that's the long eighth century the second

key change happens in the 10th Century might even be able to argue it's the kind of the middle of the 10th century with the appearance of the first distinctively aristocratic settlement sometimes people call them proto-manners um these by the way these are just reconstructions on the left you see cycle cheddar on the right you see another one called fact netherton in Hampshire these were the residences of local Lords who had been granted land and who mobilized the serial surpluses it generated to fund Elite Lifestyles for considerable comfort the evidence indicates that systematic crop rotation and

use of the moldboard plow as we saw first became widespread in the 10th and 11th centuries a study of preserved cereal grains from the same period indicates the development of regional Trends in crop specialization for example bread wheat in the upper Thames Valley or oat in the southwest and also actually in Staffordshire as it happens so the timing of those developments does suggest that if you like top-down Decisions by local landowners did play a role in promoting the spread of the mulboard plow and of systematic crop rotation even if the earlier developments the extensification really

came too early to be have anything to do with with lordship local lordship the third and final change took place during the 12th and 13th centuries this is when nucleated Villages so-called nucleated Villages began to appear in parts of the country again mostly in that central zone and these Villages have these very distinctive planned Arrangements of contiguous clearly defined house plots so these Villages I think we can now be quite sure were associated with the Norman Conquest we don't have any pre-conquest examples and John Blair has described their impact on the landscape as I quote

weightier and more permanent than any since the Roman occupation and indeed of course we can still walk through Villages like this today even so as dramatic as this change is there is nothing in the archaeological record to suggest that there were any major Innovations in farming systems in this period the main Innovations had already happened crop rotation was widespread use of the moleboard plow was widespread extensification had happened centuries earlier there are some changes of course the density of charred grains per sample does increase sharply and you might think that seems a slightly Niche observation

to make but it does imply a scaling up of production and similarly analysis of sheep and cattle bones has suggested to some researchers an increased number of livestock overall written sources and scatters of pottery shirts associated with manuring also indicate that in this period the 12th and 13th centuries Farmers landowners were going to considerable lengths to boost soil fertility by manuring by planting legumes by hand weeding this sort of thing now whether this was driven primarily by a desire to maximize outputs or by concern over declining soil fertility is impossible to know nobody explains why

they're doing it regardless the weed Ecology of those fields demonstrates that these efforts failed to Halt an overall trend albeit a fairly subtle one as we saw towards diminishing levels of fertility the weeds also reflect higher levels of soil disturbance which we think reflects a more systematic use of the mobile plow within two and three field systems you know in some places they were even plowing the fallow two three four times in a cycle so they're really churning up the soil indeed the levels of disturbance from a weeds point of view is comparable to Modern

arable Fields there's really no distinction that was I thought that was remarkable they were able to achieve really high levels of disturbance and tillage using a moldboard plan so the 12th and 13th century saw a really broad continuity of agricultural regimes against a backdrop of of an increase in the overall scale of arable farming so I'm going to bring things gradually to an end so first of all we cannot see from the evidence that feed sacks has produced any single moment of revolutionary change I didn't suppose we were necessarily expecting to but I mean we

might have come out saying oh it's the 10th centuries the 11th century instead what we see could be described slightly tongue-in-cheek as a long Agricultural Revolution it began in the 8th Century with several Innovations the shift to low input large-scale cereal or larger scale cereal farming is arguably the most significant but it began too early to have been the initiative of local Lords local landowners so where did this impulse towards extensification originate of course we don't know for sure we can't know for sure it may have originated on on in Royal monasteries like lemons or

other Royal centers it may have been driven part by population growth indeed the emergence of the first formal markets since the Roman period I haven't mentioned those but they are there and the first coin use uh widespread coin use since the Roman period dates to this period in the 10th and 11th centuries the spread of systematic crop rotation and the mobile plow is nothing consistent with a degree of top-down pressure from local landowners to increase outputs and then the 12th and 13th centuries as we've just seen saw a sort of scaling up of production further

Regional fine-tuning of cropping regimes and a new emphasis on bread wheat the highest value cereal crop you can get the most uh the most for that um at Market but we didn't see evidence of any major Innovations dating to this period and throughout the whole period soil fertility continued to decline um so was there a medieval Agricultural Revolution well the evidence would feed sacks suggests that the different elements of the mobile board plow package so crop rotation extensification use of the moldboard plow did not come together in a single Great Leap Forward impelled by new

technologies instead what we see is a series of Innovations some of which had really quite a long gestation so if you think of the mobile plow we know it was there in England the 7th century but it didn't really see widespread adoption for about 300 years so it doesn't become a widespread practice for several centuries crop rotation probably the same nevertheless the cumulative impact of these changes over 200 300 years was transformative or if you prefer it was revolutionary now where did these transformative changes in arable farming ultimately lead well just over 700 years ago

Europe was emerging from subsistence crisis of such magnitude that it is still referred to today as the Great Famine countless people perished and in marked the end of the period of population growth and relative Prosperity that we've just been talking about the triggers of the brake famine are clear enough uh this is really a question about them they began in 1315 with a whole series of extreme adverse weather events that caused a series of crop failures on top of that there was an outbreak of something called rinderpest so it's a it's a disease a highly

contagious disease that affects cattle and sheep leading to a really catastrophic decline in livestock numbers so all that is undoubted but is it the whole story after all there had been adverse weather events and indeed famines and outbreaks of rinder pass before Bengal Saxon Chronicles full of them so what made this one so much worse was it exacerbated not only by growing wealth inequalities many historians have made that point wealth inequalities that of course were sustained by serial farming serial surpluses but also exacerbated by deterioration in soil fertility the long-term net effect of low input

High disturbance farming regimes was this the end game of extensification experimental work is aren't going to try and answer these questions and to establish how a farming system that had fed a rapidly growing population for centuries seemingly sustainably suddenly crashed those are questions course for another day but I thought I would end by showing you this replica moldboard plow being pulled by oxen at the experimental Farm I mentioned earlier this farm called Lewis ham at Large last time they basically built a replica of a of an early medieval village complete with fields and livestock and

they grow a range of crops using a variety of plows and a variety of Arts prehistoric medieval everything and they record absolutely everything they record weeds they record yields moisture levels fertility everything you name it it's a great site you can visit it it's open to the public I highly recommend it maybe not on a very hot day as I did but still it's remarkable really what we're doing what they're doing there and we're developing a collaboration with them that we hope is going to yield a more data that can be used to address some

of these questions we've been considering this evening and I thought I would just leave you with a short clip of one of their fields being plowed for the first time using a moldboard plow okay so they're they're really now trying to trying to address the need for more data to to really understand the functional weed ecology in fields that have been plowed using a mobile or plow using an art original Furrow no Ridge and feral and so on so I'll leave it there happy to take questions [Applause] [Applause] uh we do have time for some

questions so I'll start off with some from the online audience the first one actually leads in quite well with your last Point what is the next stage of your research and what kinds of other questions do you hope to maybe answer well uh we hope and I sort of touched on at the end I think this question of what happens when you extensify and extensify extensive and the soil fertility goes down and down and the soil disturbance goes up and up can we model what actually would have happened after 200 or 300 years of that

sort of farming because it does have relevance today because there is this trend you may know towards what they call no-till farming and this idea now that this High disturbance type of farming that we've been doing of course for centuries and mechanized now but for centuries is not ideal and actually does damage underlying soil fertility in a variety of ways so it would be really interesting to see well what would what would that impact have been on on the soil so that's that's a big one so we've got a couple of questions that are sheep

related so I'll sort of the first one were you able to take account of the impact of the Sheepfold system on the fertility of soil I did the use of Sheepfold to manure the arable land fall outside the period of your study well it's it's almost Falls outside the period of study I mean folding of sheep almost certainly I mean it certainly took place in the 12th and 13th centuries they undoubtedly did it and and the quite right to to raise that so it wasn't just um you know spreading manure from buyers and from middens

onto Fields but of course sheep were folded onto the fields um that undoubtedly made the decline in soil fertility less than it would otherwise have been but overall the problem is perceptibly to raise fertility soil fertility requires a great deal of manure per planned unit a huge amount and so sheep folding will have helped but clearly it wasn't enough completely to to Halt or reverse the trend so another sheep related one before we open up to the floor is the lack of findings in the north and possibly Wales due to the topography which was more

suited to sheep farming for example and did you look for sheep or other non-bovine remains we did and we actually did a little study of sheep I just didn't have time to talk about it so she so the lack of of um remains in the north and west we do have some animal bones but on the whole the more acidic soils in the north and west the soil conditions in the northern West are less conducive to the preservation of animal bone we didn't have great plant remains either from the north and west to be honest

so um but it's also more difficult to identify early medieval settlements in those regions so I think for all those reasons we had we had less but undoubtedly you know there would have been a hefting of sheep and this sort of thing in the north and west um the things that we looked at were the Sheep bones was to see whether or not there was evidence this is this is going to sound even more Niche than what I was talking about before actually looked at the calculus on the teeth of the sheep to see whether

or not they were spending more time a grazing on stubble Fields because that's very high carbohydrate diet and it would result in increasing amounts of calculus on the teeth so we did get some interesting results on that extensification and how did they reverse the declining soil fertility we didn't check the wheat we only had a few weeds for the 14th century and we didn't look later at all so that would be another project way to look at what does happen to soil fertility in the 14th 15th 16th centuries there certain is as a result of

the catastrophes of the 14th century very dramatic implosion decline in populations you probably know all over Europe and as a result of course the demand for serial farming for cereals decreased dramatically the labor force decreased dramatically and so yes I think we would have seen I would I would guess we would see a reversal of extensification at least a halting but but nobody's actually looked at the weed floors for those periods so it would be a really interesting thing to do it's an important question thanks for a really interesting talk um how I'm fascinated with

who you said who said oh but they were doing all these things to keep up soil fertility and I'm just fascinated by how because you haven't seen so compelling you can square that with the increase in population but also the densification population implied by the creation of nuclear Villages so it's not just the population of England's going up it's also getting dense enough that they're forming these little nucleus cores in the countryside how do those two things that decline in soil fertility and yet this rapidly increasing and densification of population go together is there something

else going on in the background because it's such a fascinating paradox so I think um the increase in population would have made labor relatively cheap so I think that absolutely is in keeping with the written sources that record you know peasants out there spreading manure hand weeding doing up Marling all sorts of really quite you know on the face of it quite labor-intensive activities but the problem is I think these fields had become so extensive so large they were so covered so much of the landscape there just wasn't enough in particular manure to maintain fertility

given how um given the rotations and so on the methods being used so as I said whatever they were doing it wasn't enough to reverse the um the decline in soil fertility the nucleated villages in and of themselves I don't think are the sign of increasing population did increase I think the new faded Villages are really a sign of of gathering um rural populations into a type of village that makes it much easier to extract Surplus from them to put it bluntly it it represents a sort of much more systematic method of surplus extraction of

Taxation and so on I don't think it represents in and of itself it was the result of there have been so many people that they kind of had to sort of group together in that way I think it was a deliberate strategy thank you all for your questions and please join me in thanking Professor hammurray one more time [Applause]