The essential change in the agrarian economy during the central Middle Ages was the expansion and eventual intensification of land use in response to population growth. In the older settled and most densely populated parts of Europe, demand for food prompted agrarian clearance and changes in land management. Hamlets and dispersed farms yielded in most regions to villages. Previously forested land on the edge of villages and between villages was brought under the plough. Inducements were offered to skilled technicians in the densely populated Low Countries to move east and drain swamps along the Baltic coast. The resulting land was used first for pasture, then for farmland as the soil was desalinized. The most famous reclamation occurred in Flanders, Artois, and the Pas-de-Calais, but diking and drainage of the Po delta in northern Italy also created considerable new arable land. By 1180 the density of place names in Picardy and parts of England was as high as it would be in the nineteenth century, although this does not mean that the locations bearing these names were as intensely settled as later.
There is also an external component to the expansion of arable land. Entirely new villages were established, first in ‘old’ Europe, then in the German/Slavic East. In England twenty-one new towns were founded between 1066 and 1100 and another nineteen by 1130; only eight were established before 1150 in the German areas, but some 3,000 small towns were founded there in the thirteenth century. Lords, eager to attract labourers to clear land that was bringing them no profit, vied to found markets that would lure settlers and trade to their domains, not only by giving privileges to make their new villages attractive, but also by trying to centralize trade in their chief towns. Massive German and Flemish colonization extended east of the River Elbe in the thirteenth century. Colonization in the Iberian peninsula happened in tandem with conquest from the Muslims, as it was associated in the East with Christianizing the Slavs and the Baltic peoples.
Reclamation and the consequent growth of the food supply have been associated with the ending of serfdom, and this equation works in parts of continental Europe, particularly in the more economically developed areas. Lords gave freedom from many labour services and payments to their colonists, and in some cases complete legal emancipation (see Chapter 1). But ‘freedom’ is essentially a legal and social issue that must be divorced from economic questions, which are concerned with the delivery of goods and services.
The most prosperous agricultural regions of Europe were England and the German/Slavic East, both of which had numerous serfs (in the latter case the Slavs), and the southern Low Countries and northern France, where most peasants were free by 1200. Economically there was often little difference between free and unfree peasants, who lived side by side in the same village. In some English villages in the late thirteenth century the serfs (villeins) held more land on average than the free tenants.
On the ‘classic’ manor the tenant farmer paid his landlord rent for the land that he occupied by doing labour services on his ‘demesne’, the portion of the estate that the lord did not lease to tenants. This was an efficient organization, in which the larger estates were centres of administration for smaller farms and places where the lord’s power was less extensive—for example, when he held only part of the village. As lords’ powers grew, these estates were enlarged, and peasants whose ancestors had lived on the outskirts were brought under the ‘ban’* (the power of command over free persons) of the lords.
But the classic manor began to weaken in the eleventh century and was almost gone by 1300 except in England and eastern Europe. In the Low Countries, Germany, and the economically developed parts of northern France, labour services, which initially had been owed throughout the year, were normally confined by charters to planting and harvest, the peak seasons of the year, and lords hired occasional labour for the rest of the year as needed. The practical distinction between serf and freeman was reduced further as the serfs’ obligations to do labour services on the demesne were reduced in favour of rent. Thus, although there are plenty of exceptions, by 1180 the bonds of most peasants to their lords were expressed most cogently in rent rather than in legal subjection, and this change would be accelerated in the thirteenth century.
The expansion of the food supply has been associated with an ‘agricultural revolution’, but recent research has weakened this thesis. It was associated principally with Lynn White and Georges Duby,25 who thought that three-field agriculture expanded at the expense of two-field: with only one-third, not half, of the land lying fallow, it theoretically increased the amount of land under cultivation on a given estate by 33 per cent. They also thought that the diffusion of the heavy northern plough, with coulter and ploughshare that raised the soil to the mouldboard that turned it, led to an increase in yields on grain and thus supported a denser population. The ox - or horse collar, which threw the weight of the plough to the animal’s withers rather than to his neck, gave him more endurance.
There are problems with all of these hypotheses except for the collar. The heavy plough was not intrinsically superior to the ‘sling’ plough, which could plough adjacent furrows, while the mouldboard turned the soil to one side, creating a ridge. Given the difficulty of turning the wheeled plough, it was best suited to long strips of land. The sling plough dominated agriculture in the Mediterranean, where soils are thin, but it was also found elsewhere, including parts of the East and mountain areas, although the German colonists in east-central Europe preferred the wheeled plough. Thus the use of the heavy plough cannot explain the growth of farm productivity.
Most importantly, the fact that a technique is known to have existed does not necessarily mean that it was widely practised. Although the new villages founded in the colonial east after the twelfth century usually had three fields, the transition was harder in Germany west of the Elbe and in France and England, for new fields had to be laid out and incorporated into an existing diversified structure of fields and hamlets. Rarely did villages once under a two-field structure convert to three. Some villages had more than three fields, particularly in the thirteenth century, as lords and some tenant farmers experimented with non-food crops that had industrial applications, including dyes such as madder. While three-field agriculture predominated in areas of intense grain cultivation, two fields remained the standard in the Mediterranean countries as well as parts of northern Europe.26
Furthermore, it is not entirely certain that yields on grain improved significantly in the first phase of the central medieval expansion. By the most optimistic calculations, in the ninth century wheat got 4:i-5:i on good soil and when the weather was favourable; more often it was 3:i-4:i. Rye and maslin (a wheat/rye mix) got 6:i-8:i. Evidence from the twelfth century is within this range, suggesting that there was little amelioration of yields until the thirteenth century, when population pressure forced more intensive cultivation. Farmers had to hold back a substantial part of one year’s crop to use as seed corn for the next year. This, combined with rent payments in kind, tithes, and work week and boon services, meant that per capita productivity was low and that it was difficult for an individual peasant to accumulate a surplus for sale.
Lords, however, could do so. The economic expansion of the central Middle Ages required considerable human and financial capital, which only lords could mobilize. Secular lords who wished to have land cleared would publicize their new foundations and the advantages that they were giving to tenants, on their own overpopulated estates and also in partnership with churches, which could make the opportunity known on the estates of their affiliated houses. Clearing even a few acres of trees required a massive labour force.
Lords’ powers remained substantial even in villages that had charters. They owned the watermills, which were numerous everywhere, the windmills, which appear around 1180 but could be used principally in coastal areas of the Low Countries and England, where winds were strong and relatively constant, and the machines that they powered. The village bakery and wine press required capital as well as a specialist to operate them. These banalites, or expressions of the lord’s bannal power, are often considered abuses, and some charters ended the peasants’ obligation to use his facilities, but in fact before the thirteenth century few village communities and fewer individuals were able to maintain such establishments on their own.
The lord’s bannal power is critically important for understanding the production and extraction of surpluses. Most landlords collected more food as rent than could conceivably have been consumed in their households. The surplus was sold on markets, some of which developed at the gate of the castle, church, or monastery or around a storehouse. As population and production grew, the surpluses were taken to more distant localities. Very few individual tenants could afford the high transport costs; indeed, some charters of village liberties, such as the famous one given to the French village of Lorris, stipulated both that a market would be held in the village and that the tenants were obliged to provide cartage for the lord’s goods to more distant places, usually a town or the lord’s other domain centres, where they could be sold.
The market economy presupposes the intersection of supply and demand. Peasants who held too little land to feed their families could clear more land or move (either of which involved both permission of the lord and considerable risk), or they could sell their skills and services in return for food or for money, which could buy food on the village market, much of it coming from the lord’s granaries. Through the late eleventh century the exchange economy fostered by the use of rents in kind operated mainly at a local level; but with improved transportation thereafter and the development of towns that could act as conduits for the re-export of goods, farm products came into interregional trade as well. The village clearly came to contain more wealthy but also more impoverished peasants as the market orientation of the rural economy quickened.
World History
