Medieval farming practices. pt 1

[Longmane]

With the question of food production ect having been brought up, I thought I'd begin a thread to post excerpts dealing with it, either specifically or in general, from a book I have. "-Life in a Medieval Village-, Frances and Joseph Giles."

I appologise in advance not only for the size of the posts but also how uninteresting they'll likely be for most.


In the tenth century the first villages destined to endure appeared in Europe. They were "nucleated"—that is, they were clusters of dwellings surrounded by areas of cultivation. Their appearance coincided with the developing seigneurial system, the establishment of estates held by powerful local lords.

In the Mediterranean area the village typically clustered around a castle, on a hilltop, surrounded by its own wall, with fields, vineyards, and animal enclosures in the plain below. In contrast, the prototype of the village of northwest Europe and England centered around the church and the manor house, and was sited where water was available from springs or streams. The houses, straggling in all directions, were dominated by the two ancient types described by Tacitus, the longhouse and the sunken hut. Each occupied a small plot bounded by hedges, fences, or ditches.

Most of the village land lay outside, however, including not only the cultivated fields but the meadow, marsh, and forest. In the organization of cropping and grazing of these surrounding fields, and in the relations that consequently developed among the villagers and between the villagers and their lord, lay a major historical development.

Crop rotation and the use of fallow were well known to the Romans, but how the application of these techniques evolved into the complex open field village is far from clear. The theory that the mature system developed in Germany in the early Middle Ages, diffused to France, and was brought to England by the Anglo-Saxons has been exploded without a satisfactory new interpretation gaining consensus. In Anglo-Saxon England a law of King Ine of Wessex (late seventh century) refers to "common meadow and other land divided into strips," and words associated with open-field agriculture turn up in many other laws and charters of the Saxon period.

Recent research has revealed common pasturing on the post-harvest stubble as early as the tenth century. Possible contributory factors in the evolution can be discerned. The custom of partible inheritance—dividing the family lands among children, or among male children—may have fragmented tenements into numerous small holdings that made pasturing difficult without a cooperative arrangement. A rising population may have promoted cooperation. The increasing need for land encouraged "assarting," in which a number of peasant neighbors banded together to fell trees, haul out stumps, and cut brush to create new arable land, which was then divided among its creators. An assart, cultivated in strips, usually became a new "furlong" in the village field system. A strong and enlightened lord may often have contributed leadership in the enterprise.

What is clear is that a unique form of agrarian organization gradually developed in certain large regions. "On most of the plain of Northern Europe, and in England in a band running southwest from the North Sea through the Midlands to the English Channel, the land lay in great open stretches of field broken here and there by stands of trees and the clustered houses of villages."  This was the "champion" country of open field cultivation and the nucleated village, in contrast to the "woodland" country of west and southeast England and of Brittany and Normandy.

In woodland country, farming was typically carried on in compact fields by families living on individual homesteads or in small hamlets. Neither kind of landscape was exclusive; hamlets and isolated farmsteads were found in champion country, and some nucleated villages in woodland country. In champion (from champagne, meaning "open field") country an intricate system evolved whose distinctive feature was the combination of individual landholding with a strictly enforced, unanimous-consent cooperation in decisions respecting plowing, planting, weeding, harvesting, and pasturing.

Scholarly controversy over the beginnings of the system has a little of the chicken-and-egg futility about it. Somehow, through the operation of such natural forces as population growth and inheritance customs on traditional farming methods, the community organized its arable land into two (later often three) great fields, one of which was left fallow every year. Within each field the individual villager held several plots lying in long strips, which he plowed and planted in concert with his fellow villagers.

Common agreement was needed on which large field to leave fallow, which to plant in fall, which in spring. To pasture animals on the stubble after the harvest, an agreed-on harvest procedure was needed. Exploitation of the scarce meadow available for grazing was at least smoothed by cooperative agreement, while fencing and hedging were minimized. By the year 1200, the open field system had achieved a state of advanced if still incomplete development. Some degree of cooperation in cultivation and pasturage governed farming in thousands of villages, in England and on the Continent.

The broad surge, economic and demographic, that marked the eleventh century continued fairly steadily through the twelfth and thirteenth. Settlements—homesteads, hamlets, villages—were planted everywhere. The peasant villagers who formed the vast majority of the population cultivated wheat above all other crops, followed by rye, barley, oats, beans, peas, and a few other vegetables. Low and precarious crop yields meant that most available land had to be consigned to cereal, the indispensable staff-of-life crop. The value of manure as fertilizer was well understood, but so few animals could be maintained on the available pasture that a vicious circle of reciprocal scarcity plagued agriculture.

Yet there were notable improvements in technology. The heavy, often wet soils of Northern Europe demanded a heavier plow and more traction than the sandier soils of the Mediterranean region. The large plow that evolved, fitted with coulter and mouldboard and requiring several plow animals, represented "one of the most important agricultural developments in preindustrial Europe."  It favored the open field system by strengthening the bias toward long strips.

The Romans had never solved the problem of harnessing the horse for traction. The padded horse collar, invented in Asia and diffusing slowly westward, was joined to other improvements—horseshoes, whippletrees, and traces—to convert the horse into a farm animal. Faster-gaited and longer-working, the horse challenged the strong, docile, but ponderous ox as a plow beast and surpassed it as a cart animal. One of the earliest representations of a working horse is in the Bayeux Tapestry (c. 1087).

The ox also profited from technical innovation in the form of an improved yoke, and refused to disappear from agriculture; his slow, steady pull offered advantages in heavy going. Indeed, the debate over the merits of the two traction animals enlivened rustic conversation in the England of Queen Victoria, though the horse slowly won ascendancy. The horse's needs for fodder stimulated cultivation of oats, a spring crop that together with barley, peas, beans, and vetches fitted ideally into open field rotation. Stall-feeding became more prevalent, permitting more use of fertilizer, while the leguminous fodder crops restored nitrogen content to the soil.

The cooperative relationships of the peasants belonged to what might be called the village aspect of their existence; that existence also had a manorial aspect. In Northern Europe and in England following the Norman Conquest, the countryside came to be organized into land-management units called manors. The manor is usually defined as an estate held by a lord, comprising a demesne directly exploited by the lord, and peasant holdings from which he collected rents and fees. The village might coincide with the manor, or it might not. It might be divided into two or more manors, or it might form only part of a manor. The combination of demesne and tenants, a version of which dates back to the late Roman Empire, is first specifically mentioned in documents of the ninth century in northern France, and in the tenth century in central Italy and England. By the eleventh century it was well established everywhere.

It fitted comfortably into the contemporary political-military order known as feudalism. Evolving in medieval Europe over a lengthy period and imported to England by the Normans, feudalism united the European elite in a mutual-aid society. A lord granted land to a vassal in return for military and other services; lord and vassal swore reciprocal oaths, of protection by the lord, loyalty by the vassal; the vassal received as fief or fee a conditional gift of land, to "hold" and draw revenue from.

Older historians, including Marx, used the term feudalism for the whole medieval social order, a peasant society dominated by a military, land-owning aristocracy. Modern usage generally restricts the word to the network of vassal-lord relations among the aristocracy. The system governing the peasant's relation to the lord, the economic foundation of medieval society, is usually designated the "manorial system." Feudalism meant much to the lord, little to the peasant.

The relationships embodied in the feudal and manorial systems were simple enough in theory: In the manorial system, peasant labored for lord in return for land of his own; in the feudal system, lord held lands from king or overlord in return for supplying soldiers on demand. In practice the relationships were never so simple and grew more complicated over time. All kinds of local variations developed, and both peasant labor service and knightly military service were increasingly converted into money payments.

Whatever the effects of the two overlapping systems, they did not prevent villages from flourishing, until everywhere villages began to crowd up against each other. Where once the silent European wilderness had belonged to the wolf and the deer, villagers now ranged—with their lord's permission—in search of firewood, nuts, and berries, while their pigs rooted and their cattle and sheep grazed. Villages all over Europe parleyed with their neighbors to fix boundaries, which they spelled out in charters and committed to memory with a picturesque annual ceremony. Every spring, in what were known in England as the "gang-days," the whole population went "a-ganging" around the village perimeter. Small boys were ducked in boundary brooks and bumped against boundary trees and rocks by way of helping them learn this important lore.

A thirteenth-century European might be hazy about the boundaries of his country, but he was well aware of those of his village.

[Shizzle]

The houses, straggling in all directions, were dominated by the two ancient types described by Tacitus, the longhouse and the sunken hut. Each occupied a small plot bounded by hedges, fences, or ditches.

As a student in archaeology this really rustles my jimmies. Might read on later :p

Also, I think your citation is incorrect, their surname is Gies. And the book dates back to 1991, so perhaps rather outdated.

[Longmane]

I've no idea how I managed make the mistake in the first place, let alone miss it, as that's only 1 of 4 of their books I have  ;D

[Longmane]

Medieval farming practices. pt 2

I should have thought to put something about the book at the start on the thread, but then again I should probably have had my head read even at the thought of starting the project      :D

PROLOGUE: ELTON
IN THE DISTRICT OF HUNTINGDON THERE is a certain village to which far-distant antiquity gave the name of Aethelintone," wrote the twelfth-century monk who chronicled the history of Ramsey Abbey, "on a most beautiful site, provided with a course of waters, in a pleasant plain of meadows with abundant grazing for cattle, and rich in fertile fields."

The village that the Anglo-Saxons called Aethelintone (or Aethelington, or Adelintune), known in the thirteenth century, with further spelling variations, as Aylington, and today as Elton, was one of the thousands of peasant communities scattered over the face of Europe and the British Isles in the high Middle Ages, sheltering more than 90 percent of the total population, the ancestors of most Europeans and North Americans alive today. Many of these peasant settlements were mere hamlets or scattered homesteads, but in certain large areas of England and Continental Europe people lived in true villages, where they practiced a distinctive system of agriculture. Because England has preserved the earliest and most complete documentation of the medieval village, in the form of surveys, accounts, and the rolls of manorial courts, this book will focus on an English village.

Medieval villages varied in population, area, configuration, and social and economic details. But Elton, a dependency of wealthy Ramsey Abbey, located in the East Midlands, in the region of England where villages abounded and the "open field" agriculture associated with them flourished, illustrates many of the characteristics common to villages at the high point of their development.


7
THE VILLAGE AT WORK
FOR THE MEDIEVAL VILLAGER, WORK WAS THE ruling fact of life. By sunup animals were harnessed and plows hitched, forming a cavalcade that to the modern eye would appear to be leaving the village to work outside it. Medieval people felt otherwise. They were as much in their village tramping the furrowed strips as they were on the dusty streets and sunken lanes of the village center. If anything, the land which literally provided their daily bread was more truly the village. The geography was a sort of reverse analogue of the modern city with its downtown office towers where people work and its suburban bedroom communities where they eat and sleep.

Whether Elton had two or three fields in the late thirteenth century is unknown. Whatever the number, they were twice subdivided, first into furlongs (more or less rectangular plots "a furrow long"), then into selions, or strips, long and narrow sets of furrows. Depending on the terrain, a village's strips might be several hundred yards long; the fewer turns with a large plow team the better. The strip as a unit of cultivation went far back, probably antedating the open field system itself. Representing the amount of land that could conveniently be plowed in a day—roughly half a modern acre—it probably originated in the parcellation of land forced by a growing population. By the late thirteenth century the distribution of a village's strips was haphazard, some villagers holding many, some few, and all scattered and intermingled. The one certainty was that everyone who held land held strips in both or all three fields, in order to guarantee a crop every year regardless of which field lay fallow.

The furlong, or bundle of strips, was the sowing unit, all the strips in a given furlong being planted to the same crop. Many furlongs appear by name in the Elton court records: "Henry in the Lane [is fined] for bad plowing in Hollewell furlong, sixpence," indicating, incidentally, that the lord's demesne land was scattered, like the peasants'.

Within each furlong the strips ran parallel, but the furlongs themselves, plotted to follow the ambient pattern of drainage, lay at odd angles to each other, with patches of rough scattered throughout. A double furrow or a balk of unplowed turf might separate strips, while between some furlongs headlands were left for turning the plow. Wedges of land (gores) created by the asymmetry of the furlongs and the character of the terrain were sometimes cultivated by hoe. The total appearance of an open field village, visible in aerial photographs of many surviving sites, is a striking combination of the geometric and the anarchic.

Beyond the crazy-quilt pattern of arable land stretched meadow, waste, and woodland, hundreds of acres that were also part of the village and were exploited for the villagers' two fundamental purposes: to support themselves and to supply their lord.

But the most significant component of the open field village was always its two or three great fields of cultivated land. The difference between a two- and a three-field system was slighter than might appear at first glance.

Where three fields were used, one lay fallow all year, a second was planted in the fall to winter wheat or other grain, the third was planted in the spring to barley, oats, peas, beans, and other spring crops. The next year the plantings were rotated. In the two-field system one field was left fallow and the other divided in two, one half devoted to autumn and the other to spring crops.

In effect, the two-field system was a three-field system with more fallow, and offered no apparent disadvantage as long as enough total arable was available. If, however, a growing village population pressed on the food supply, or if market demand created an opportunity hard to resist, a two-field system could be converted to three-field. Many two-field systems were so converted in the twelfth and especially the thirteenth century, with a gain of one-third in arable. Multifield systems, which could accommodate crop rotation, were also common, especially in the north of England.

In some places, the ancient infield-outfield system survived, the small infield being worked steadily with the aid of fertilizer, and the large outfield treated as a land reserve, part of which could be cultivated for several successive years (making plowing
easier) and then left fallow for several.

But in the English Midlands, and much of northwest Europe, the classic two- or three-field system of open field husbandry prevailed. It involved three essentials: unfenced arable divided into furlongs and strips; concerted agreement about crops and cultivation; and common use of meadow, fallow, waste, and stubble.

Implied was a fourth essential: a set of rules governing details, and a means of enforcing them.

NB I'll continue this in the next part.

[Longmane]

Implied was a fourth essential: a set of rules governing details, and a means of enforcing them.

Such rules were developed independently in thousands of villages in Britain and on the Continent, at first orally, but by the late thirteenth century in written form as village bylaws. The means of enforcement was provided by the manorial court. Surviving court records include many bylaw enactments and show the existence of many more by citation.

For stewards, bailiffs, reeves, free tenants, and villeins, they spelled out a set of restrictions and constraints on plowing, planting, harvesting, gleaning, and carrying. They gave emphatic attention to theft and chicanery, from stealing a neighbours grain to "stealing his furrow" by edging one's plow into his strip, "a major sin in rural society" (Maurice Beresford).

Bylaws stipulated the time the harvested crop could be taken from the fields (in daylight hours only), who was allowed to carry it (strangers not welcome), and who was allowed to glean. All able-bodied adults were conscripted for reaping.

Bylaws ruled the period when the harvest stubble should be opened to grazing, and for which kind of animals, when sheep were barred from the meadows, and when tenants must repair ditches and erect, remove, and mend fences. (Only the lord's land could be permanently fenced, and only if it lay in a compact plot.) Repeatedly, through the year, the village animals were herded into or driven off the open fields as crop, stubble, and fallow succeeded each other.

The regulation of grazing rights was fundamental to the operation of open field farming. The lord's land was especially inviolate to beastly trespass.  On some manors grazing rights were related to the size of the holding. A Glastonbury survey of 1243 found the holder of a virgate endowed with pasture enough for four oxen, two cows, one horse, three pigs, and twelve sheep, calculated as the amount of stock required to keep a virgate of land fertile.

The open field system was thus not one of free enterprise. Its practitioners were strictly governed in their actions and made to conform to a rigid pattern agreed on by the community, acting collectively. Neither was it socialism. The strips of plowed land were held individually, and unequally. A few villagers held many strips, most held a few, some held none. Animals, tools, and other movable property were likewise divided unequally. The poor cotters eked out a living by working for the lord and for their better-off neighbours who held more land than their families could cultivate, whereas these latter, by marketing their surplus produce, were able to turn a profit and perhaps use it to buy more land.

How much of his time a villager could devote to cultivating his own tenement depended partly on his status as free or unfree, partly on the size of his holding (the larger the villein holding, the larger the obligation), and partly on his geographical location. In England "the area of heavy villein labor dues—say two or more days each week—was relatively small," consisting mostly of several counties and parts of counties in the east. In the rest of the country, though rules varied from manor to manor, the level of villein obligations tended to be lower. In several counties in the north and northwest they were very light or nonexistent.

Huntingdonshire, containing Ramsey Abbey and Elton, was in the very heart of the heavy-labor region, where the obligation was basically two days' work a week. In Elton, the dozen free tenants owed very modest, virtually token service. The cotters owed little service because they held little or no land. Only the two score villein virgaters owed heavy week-work, amounting to 117 days a year (the nine half-virgaters owed fifty-eight and a half days). In addition, the Elton virgater owed a special service, the cultivation of half an acre of demesne land summer and winter, including sowing it with his own wheat seed, reaping, binding, and carrying to the lord's barn.

Some question exists about the length of the work day required of tenants. A Ramsey custumal for the manor of Abbot's Ripton stipulates "the whole day" in summer "from Hokeday until after harvest," and "the whole day in winter," but during Lent only "until after none (midafternoon)." In some places a work day lasted until none if no food was supplied, and if the lord wanted a longer day, he was obliged to provide dinner. Another determinant of the length of the working day may have been the endurance of the ox (less than that of the horse).

The annual schedule of week-work at Elton divided the year into three parts:

From September 29 (Michaelmas) of one year to August 1 (Gules of August) of the following year, two days' work per week (for a virgater).

From August 1 to September 8 (the Nativity of the Blessed Mary), three days' work per week, with a day and a half of work for the odd three days. This stretch of increased labor on the demesne was the "autumn works."

From September 8 to September 29, five days' work a week, known as the "after autumn works."

Thus the autumn and post-autumn works for the Elton virgater totaled thirty-one and a half days, half of the two critical months of August and September, when he had to harvest, thresh, and winnow his own crop.

The principal form of week-work was plowing. Despite employment of eight full-time plowmen and drivers on the Elton demesne, the customary tenants, with their own plows and animals, were needed to complete the fall and spring plowing and the summer fallowing to keep the weeds down. Default of the plowing obligation brought punishment in the manor court: "Geoffrey of Brington withheld from the lord the plow work of half an acre of land. [Fined] sixpence."  "John Page withholds a plowing work of the lord between Easter and Whitsuntide for seven days, to wit each Friday half an acre. Mercy [fine] pardoned because afterwards he paid the plowing work."

By the same token, the main kind of work the villein did on his own land was plowing. Stage by stage through the agricultural year he worked alternately for the lord and for himself.

~~~~~~

I decided it might be useful to give the definitions of a few of the more obscure words that have/could come up.


AD CENSUM Status of villeins who pay a cash rent in lieu of labor services.

AD OPUS Status of villeins owing labor services.

BOON-WORK Obligation of tenants for special work services, notably the lord's harvest.

BYLAWS Rules made by open-field villagers governing cultivation and grazing.

CENSUARIUS Tenant ad censum.

COTTER Tenant of a cottage, usually holding little or no land.

DEMESNE Part of the manor cultivated directly by the lord.

FARM Lease.

FEE, FIEF Land granted by a lord in return for services.

FURLONG Plot of arable land, subdivision of a field.

HIDE Tax assessment unit of land area, varying in size, theoretically 120
acres.

HUNDRED Administrative division of English shire (county).

MANOR Estate consisting of lord's demesne and tenants' holdings.

QUARTER Unit of volume, eight bushels.

RING Unit of volume, four bushels.

SELION Plow strip.

SERF Peasant burdened with week-work, merchet, tallage, and other
obligations; bondman, villein.

VILLEIN English term for serf.

VIRGATE Land unit theoretically sufficient to support a peasant family,
varying between 18 and 32 acres (in Elton, 24).

WEEK-WORK Principal labor obligation of a villein, comprising plowing and
other work every week throughout the year.

[Longmane]

pt 2


The first plowing in spring, to turn under the residue of crop and the weeds and grasses, was done early enough to allow time for decomposition of the organic material. A second, shallower plowing aerated the soil, preparing it for seeding. The plowman began just to one side of the center line of the strip to be plowed, effected the laborious turn at the end, and returned on the other side of the center. Peas and beans were planted in the furrow, grain on the ridge. Spring, or Lenten, sowing was done as soon as the soil was warm and frost no longer a danger. Patterns of ridge-and-furrow from the Middle Ages are still visible in aerial photographs, sometimes with the boundaries between neighboring selions indicated by balks or rows of stones.

Demesne plowing might cease at none or at vespers, but a man working his own land might keep his hand to the plow longer, under pressure of time or weather. The first winter wheat plowing, in April after the spring crops were sown in other fields, was shallow. A second, in June, went deeper, as did a third in midsummer. The field was then harrowed and the last clods crumbled with a mattock or long-handled clodding beetle. Grain seed was sown from a straw basket, two bushels (or more) to the acre. Seed was not sown casually. In 1320 four Elton villagers were fined threepence apiece for carelessness in planting, in one case on the part of a servant who allowed "four or five beans" to fall into a single hole "to the damage of the lord." Besides scarce manure, the peasant cultivator might supply equally scarce marl, a clay containing carbonate of lime.

Walter of Henley warned that spring plowing done too deep too early might make fields muddy at sowing time. Spring crops—barley, oats, peas, beans, vetch—were usually planted more thickly than winter, about four bushels to the acre. For autumn sowing, Walter recommended small furrows with narrow ridges, and planting early enough to allow the seed to take root before the frost. Heavy rain within a week after sowing, followed by a sharp frost, could destroy a winter wheat crop.

It is probable that Elton villagers had their own meadowland. If so, it was doubtless allocated, in accordance with an ancient tradition, by a lottery among all the holders of arable, both free and unfree. Hay was always in short supply because of the lack of artificial meadow, for want of suitable irrigation, and was precious because it was by far the best winter feed available.

Mowing required care and skill. The grass had to be thoroughly dried (tedded) for storage, and if rained on had to be retedded. Demesne mowing at Elton was assigned entirely to the villeins, among whom it was not notably popular; many fines are recorded for failing to do the job properly. They may well have resented being kept from their own mowing. Some lords sweetened the mowing chore with a bonus in the form of a sheep for the mowers to roast, or as on some Ramsey manors, by the game of "sporting chance." At the end of the haymaking, each man was permitted to carry off as large a bundle of hay as he could lift and keep on his scythe; if the scythe broke or touched the ground, he lost his hay and had to buy an obol's worth of ale for his comrades. In Elton, at least by 1311, mowers were being paid a cash bonus.

After haying, the meadow had to be left alone for three or four weeks to allow the grass to grow; consequently another communal agreement was needed about reopening the meadow for grazing. A good hay crop could take the animals through the winter; a good grain crop could do the same for the human beings.

The tension of June, relieved by the drudgery of weeding in July, was redoubled in August and September as the fields reached maturity. First in order of priority came the lord's harvest boon. Not only villeins ad opus but free tenants, censuarii, cotters, and craftsmen, women and children as well as men, turned out—all save those "so old or so weak [that they] could not work"—reaping, gathering, binding, stacking, carrying, and gleaning. Even a villein rich enough to employ labor was not exempt, though he was usually not asked to wield the scythe himself, only to "hold the rod over his workers," as the custumals phrased it.

The word "boon" or "bene" in "harvest boon" or "boon works" literally meant gift, something freely bestowed, but the usage savored of irony, as the court records indicate: "Geoffrey Gamel...made default at the boon works of the autumn. Sixpence." "Richard in Angulo, late in his carrying boon works. Sixpence." On the other hand, a dinner of rare abundance was served in the field to the harvest army. For the 329 persons who turned out for the Elton harvest boon of 1298, the reeve, Alexander atte Cross, listed the victuals consumed: eight rings (thirty-two bushels) of wheat, an almost equal quantity of other grains, a bull, a cow, a calf, eighteen doves, and seven cheeses. The second day's work required only 250 hands, who however ate bread made from eleven rings, along with eight hundred herrings, seven pence worth of salt cod, and five cheeses. A partial third day's boon was exacted from sixty villeins, who were fed on three cheeses and "the residue from the expenses of the [manor] house." Of nineteen recorded harvest boons at Elton, this was the only one to last three days. Seven others lasted two days, eleven only
one.

The food supplied at boon-works was an important article of the ancient compact between lord and tenants. Size and composition of the loaves of bread made from the grain were commonly stipulated in writing. At Holywell boons, two men were to share three loaves "such that the quantity of one loaf would suffice for a meal for two men," and the bread was to be of wheat and rye, but mainly wheat. At the Ramsey manor of Broughton in 1291 the tenants actually struck over what they deemed an insufficient quantity of bread supplied them, and only returned to work when appeal to the abbey cartulary proved them mistaken. Reapers liked to wash down their wheat bread with plenty of ale, typically a gallon a day per man, according to one calculation, and "some harvesters consumed twice as much."

Wheat was cut with a sickle, halfway or more up the stalk, and laid on the ground. Binders followed to tie the spears in sheaves and set them in shocks to dry. In demesne harvesting, one binder followed every four reapers, advancing in echelon at a rate of two acres a day. That similar teamwork was applied in village harvesting is a reasonable supposition. Oats and barley were mown with scythes, close to the ground.

Harvesting of all three crops left much residue, making gleaning an important function. It was too important, according to Warren Ault, to support a famous assertion by Blackstone in the eighteenth century that "by the common law and custom of England the poor are allowed to enter and glean upon another's ground after the harvest without being guilty of trespass." In the medieval village, gleaning was strictly limited to the old, the infirm, and the very young, less out of charity than to conserve labor, all able-bodied adults of both sexes being needed for the heavier harvest work. Bylaws generally forbade gleaning by anyone offered a fair wage for harvesting, usually meaning "a penny a day and food" or twopence without food (Walter of Henley recommended paying twopence for a man, one penny for a woman). Bylaws welcomed strangers to the village as harvesters while barring them as gleaners.

After cutting, gathering, binding, and stacking their sheaves, the villagers carted them to their barns and sheds to be threshed with the ancient jointed flail and winnowed by tossing in the air from the winnowing cloth or basket, and if necessary supplying breeze with the winnowing fan. Besides the grain crops, harvest included "pulling the peas," the vegetable crops that matured in late September and whose harvest also required careful policing against theft.

Yields for the villagers could scarcely have exceeded those of the demesne, which enjoyed so many advantages. Three and a half to one was generally a very acceptable figure for wheat, with barley a bit higher and oats lower, and bad crops always threatening. R. H. Hilton has calculated that an average peasant on a manor of the bishop of Worcester might feed a family of three, pay a tithe to the church, and have enough grain left to sell for twelve or thirteen shillings, out of which his rent and other cash obligations would have to come. If he was required to pay cash in place of his labor obligation, he would need to make up the difference by sale of poultry or wool, or through earnings of wife or sons. As Fernand Braudel observes, "The peasants were slaves to the crops as much as to the nobility."

Harvest time was subject to more bylaws than all the rest of the year together. "The rolls of the manor courts are peppered with fines levied for sheaf stealing in the field, and a close watch had to be kept in the barn as well," says Ault. The small size of the medieval sheaf, twenty to a bushel, contributed to temptation, Seneschaucie mentioning as familiar places of secreting stolen grain "bosom, tunic, or boots, or pockets or sacklets hidden near the grange."

Another communal agreement was needed for post-harvest grazing of the stubble. Sometimes a common date was set, such as Michaelmas, for having everybody's harvest in. Bylaws might specify that a man could pasture his animals on his own land as soon as his neighbors' lands were harvested to the depth of an acre. This was easy to do with cows, which could be restrained within a limited space. Sheep and hogs, on the other hand, had to wait until the end of autumn.

The lord's threshing and winnowing were followed by the villagers', with whole families again joining in. Winter was the slack season, at least in a relative sense. Animals still had to be looked after, and harness, plows, and tools mended. Fences, hurdles, hedges, and ditches, both thelord's and those of the villagers, had to be repaired to provide barriers wherever arable land abutted on a road or animal droveway. Houses, byres, pens, and sheds needed maintenance. So did equipment: "The good husbandman made some at least of his own tools and implements."

[Longmane]

pt 3


For most of the time, in most peasant households, the tasks of men and women were differentiated along the traditional lines of "outside" and "inside" work. The woman's "inside" jobs were by no means always performed indoors. Besides spinning, weaving, sewing, cheese-making, cooking, and cleaning, women did foraging, gardening, weeding, haymaking, carrying, and animal-tending. They joined in the lord's harvest boon unless excused, and helped bring in the family's own harvest. Often women served as paid labor, receiving at least some of the time wages equal to men's.

R. H. Hilton believes that peasant women in general enjoyed more freedom and "a better situation in their own class than was enjoyed by women of the aristocracy, or the bourgeoisie, a better situation perhaps than that of the women of early modern capitalist England." The statement does not mean that peasant women were better off than wealthier women, only that they were less constricted within the confines of their class. "The most important general feature of their existence to bear in mind," Hilton adds, "[is] that they belonged to a working class and participated in manual agricultural labor."

For many village women one of the most important parts of the daily labor was the care of livestock. Poultry was virtually the woman's domain, but feeding, milking, washing, and shearing the larger livestock often fell to her also.

The biggest problem with livestock was winter feed, the shortage of which was once thought to have provoked an annual "Michaelmas slaughter." Given the high rate of loss to natural causes, an annual slaughter would have threatened the survival of a small flock or herd. The feed shortage certainly played a role in keeping numbers of animals down, but some successful peasants just as certainly overcame the problem. At Bowerchalk in Wiltshire, twenty-three tenants are known to have owned 885 sheep, or 41 per owner; at Merton, eighty-five tenants owned 2,563 sheep, and one is known to have owned 158. Individual ownership within a combined flock was kept straight by branding or by marking with reddle (red ochre), many purchases of which are recorded.

Among peasants as among lords, sheep were esteemed as the "cash crop" animals. Though worth at best only one or two shillings, compared with two and a half shillings for a pig, they had unique fivefold value: fleece, meat, milk, manure, and skin (whose special character made it a writing material of incomparable durability). Lambing time was in early spring,  between winter and spring sowing, so that the lambs, weaned at twelve weeks, could accompany their mothers to graze the harvest stubble of last year's wheatfield. The sheep were sheared in mid-June and the fleeces carted to market, probably, in the case of Elton, to Peterborough, about eight miles away. Medieval fleeces weighed from a pound to two and a half pounds, much below the modern average of four and a half pounds.

Pigs were the best candidates for a Michaelmas slaughter, since their principal value was as food and their meat also preserved well. A sow farrowed twice a year, and according to Hosbonderie was expected to produce seven piglets per litter. Records at Stevenage, Hertfordshire, for the late thirteenth century show sows producing up to nineteen offspring a year, "a good enough figure even by modern standards."  They could be eaten "profitably" in their second year, and supplied scarce fat to the medieval diet.

Pigs foraged for themselves on the acorns, beechnuts, crab apples, hazelnuts, and leaves of the forest floor. For the privilege, exercised mainly in the autumn, their owners paid the lord pannage, in Elton on a sliding scale of a quarter penny to twopence, depending on the pig's size. Probably pannage was originally a fine for overuse of the limited forest mast, which might deprive the wild boar, favored lordly hunting quarry. Feed for pigs was more of a problem in winter, but might be supplemented by whey, a by-product of the cheese-making process.

Unlike sheep, pigs could take care of themselves against predators and so could be allowed to run free. This led to the problem of their rooting in somebody's garden, especially in winter, leading in turn to numerous bylaws requiring rings—bits of curved wire—in their noses beginning at Michaelmas or another autumn date.

Cattle were the most expensive animals to keep through the winter but were rarely slaughtered. Cows gave about 120 to 150 gallons of milk a year, far below modern yields, but at a half penny per gallon not a negligible contribution to a peasant income. Calving percentages were high, somewhat contradicting the theory that cows were seriously underfed in winter. Such better-off Elton villagers as John of Elton, Nicholas Blundel, Richard of Barton, and Richer Chapelyn bought grass from the demesne pasture or from the millpond. Other resources included mistletoe and ivy from the forest.

Goats, from the point of view of husbandry a sort of inferior sheep, were seldom kept in the lowlands (though the Ramsey manor of Abbot's Ripton kept a herd), but in mountainous regions could thrive better than any other stock.  Nearly all the villagers kept poultry. Geese were a favorite, producing, according to Hosbonderie, five goslings apiece per year. The marketing of animals was done mainly before Christmas, before Lent, and at Whitsuntide.