History Question: Food Production

[Anaris]

As an indifferent student of Medieval history, I would like to tap the collective hive-mind of the BattleMaster community to benefit the development effort.

In examining our assumptions about food production, in order to try and provide a solid foundation for any future changes to the distribution of food and population across the game, I have realized that I do not know how much food, relative to his own needs, any given farmer would have produced during the Medieval period.

So if anyone has some information—or general ideas about where I could look for information—about production per farmer or production per unit land area, I would greatly appreciate it.

(And naturally, this will be an incomplete picture of actual food consumed by people, as there would be hunting, gathering, and fishing, too—though if anyone has data about that, I would definitely appreciate it, too!)

[Vellos]

I use this resource for developing settings for DMing various games:
http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm

It's pseudo-intellectual, but easily applicable.

I also did a JSTOR search on my university's account for medieval crop yield information. Here are a few estimates for wheat production:

5.68-15.92 bushels/acre for "low productive lands" (maybe badlands in BM?), 10.26-22.98 bushels/acre in better/moderately fertile lands.
Cleaning the Medieval Arable
David Postles
The Agricultural History Review , Vol. 37, No. 2 (1989), pp. 130-143
(this is an article about WEEDING PRACTICES in Medieval England. God I love academics.)

9 bushels/acre in English fields primarily
Convertible Husbandry vs. Regular Common Fields: A Model on the Relative Efficiency of Medieval Field Systems
Harry Kitsikopoulos
The Journal of Economic History , Vol. 64, No. 2 (Jun., 2004), pp. 462-499

5-36 bushels/acre, depending on the year
Crop Failures on the Winchester Manors, 1232-1349
G. H. Dury
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers , New Series, Vol. 9, No. 4 (1984), pp. 401-418

Somewhere in the low teens seems about right for bushels per acre.

Of course, that's an annual measure. That's crop yield in wheat for a WHOLE YEAR. And arable land probably isn't even close to 100% of the land of any BM continent.

So for yield probably assume arable land is somewhere between 15% and 50% of a region's area (depending on type and specific geography maybe). Then figure out how many acres there are (simple conversion I think). Then multiply by some value that strikes your fancy in the ranges given, again, probably adjusted for region type. That supplies you the total ANNUAL yield, if we want to be historically correct.

PS- I'm still in favor of adopting a 1-harvest-a-year model... pretty pretty please?

[Anaris]

Somewhere in the low teens seems about right for bushels per acre.

So how much would a given peasant working that land eat in that same amount of time? And how many peasants would it take to work that acre?

PS- I'm still in favor of adopting a 1-harvest-a-year model... pretty pretty please?

Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen in the foreseeable future. There would need to be a lot more changes to the food system to accommodate that.

[Longmane]

I remember one of the books I have going into harvesting and the like in detail, ie two and three fields systems, crop rotations ect,  so I'll have a look-see soon as I get the chance.

[Longmane]

Although I've been unable get back to continuing with my thread yet due to lack of time, I did get the chance pick out a few pieces from my book that might be useful in some way, insomuch as getting a fair idea of the actual size/population of a medieval village.

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Under the abbot of Ramsey’s holdings in Norman Cross Hundred, Elton was listed with a new spelling:

M. [Manor] In Adelintune the abbot of Ramsey had ten hides [assessed] to the geld [a tax]. There is land for four plows in the demesne apart from the aforesaid hides. There are now four plows on the demesne, and twenty-eight villeins having twenty plows. There is a church and a priest, and two mills [rendering] forty shillings, and 170 acres of meadow. T.R.E. [in the time of King Edward, 1042-1066] it was worth fourteen li. [pounds] now sixteen li.

The “ten hides” credited to Elton tell us little about actual acreage. Entries in Domesday were assessed in round numbers, usually five, ten, or fifteen hides. Evidently each shire was assessed for a round number, the hides apportioned among the villages, without strict attention to measurement. Furthermore, though the hide usually comprised 120 acres, the acre varied.

~~~~

No further information about Elton appears until a manorial survey of about 1160; after that a gap follows until the middle of the thirteenth century, when documentation begins to proliferate. Drawing on the collection of documents known as the Ramsey Abbey cartulary, on a royal survey done in 1279, on the accounts and court records of the manor, and on what archeology has ascertained from deserted villages, we can sketch a reasonably probable picture of Elton as it was in the last quarter of the thirteenth century.

The royal survey of 1279 credited the “manor and vill” of Elton with a total of 13 hides of arable land of 6 virgates each. Originally designed as the amount of land needed to support a family, the virgate had come to vary considerably. In Elton it consisted of 24 acres; thus the total of village arable was 1,872 acres. The abbot’s demesne share amounted to three hides of arable, besides which he had 16 acres of meadow and three of pasture. Two water mills and a fulling mill, for finishing cloth, successors ofthe two mills that Dacus’s wife had claimed in 1017, also belonged to the abbot.

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Elton in the late thirteenth century was a large village, capable of summoning 327 residents to a harvest in 1287. The royal survey of 1279 lists 113 tenants, heads of families.  Allowing for wives, children, and landless laborers, a figure of five to six hundred for the total population might be reasonable. This accords with Hilton’s estimate that 45 percent of the villages of the West Midlands had a population of between 400 and 600, with 10 percent larger, the rest smaller.