Life in a Medieval Castle by Frances; Joseph Gies

Author:Frances; Joseph Gies
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-03-04T06:56:23+00:00

in the fal , and barley, vetches, oats, peas, and beans in early

Reaping, from the Luttrell Psalter. (Trustees of the British Museum. MS. Add. 42130, f. 172v)

spring. Crops matured and were harvested in August and September.

Agricultural technology, if limited and unimaginative by the standards of a later age, was not entirely static despite the lack of scientific knowledge. The thirteenth-century farmer employed three ways to restore and improve the soil: by fal owing, that is, letting a field rest for a year; by marling, spreading a clay containing carbonate of lime; or by using sheep or cattle manure. But marl was scarce, and shortage of feed limited the number of animals and the supply of manure. To feed his cattle, the farmer had only the grass that grew in the commonly-held “water meadows,” wetlands left until ed, and the stubble of the harvested fields. The advantages of planting grasses or turnips specifical y for cattle feed were not yet perceived. The result was that there was never enough feed to see the livestock through the winter, and some had to be slaughtered every fal , in turn limiting the supply of manure for spring fertilizing. The technique of growing crops of clover and alfalfa to be plowed into the soil as fertilizer also was unknown.

For fal owing, the chief means of restoring the fields’

fertility, the vil agers used crop rotation in either the ancient two-field or the newer three-field system. In the latter, one field was plowed in the fal and sown with wheat and rye.

Each vil ager planted his own strip of land, al with the same seed. In the spring a second field was plowed and sown to oats, peas, beans, barley, and vetches. A third field was left fal ow from harvest to harvest. The next year the field that had been planted with wheat and rye was planted with the oats, barley, and legumes; the fal ow field was planted with wheat and rye; and the field that had grown the spring seed was left fal ow.

In the older but stil widely used two-field system, one field was left fal ow and the other til ed half with winter wheat and rye, half with spring seed. The next year the til ed field lay fal ow and the fal ow field was til ed, with winter and spring crops alternating in the sections that were planted.

The plowman was the common man of the Middle Ages, Piers Plowman, guiding his heavy iron-shod plow, sometimes mounted on wheels to make it go more evenly, cutting the ground with its coulter, breaking it with its share, and turning it over with its wooden mould-board. The medieval husbandman plowed in long narrow strips of

“ridge and furrow,” starting just to one side of the center line of his piece of land, plowing the length of the strip, turning at the end and plowing back along the other side, and continuing around. In the wet soil of northern Europe, this ridge-and-furrow plowing helped free the soil from standing water that threatened to drown the grain.

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