(whooshing music) - 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 cerealization
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 archeological evidence from a project called FeedSax,
Feeding Anglo-Saxon England, FeedSax 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 cerealization of
the English countryside. So, as I just mentioned, the period we're talking about saw this exceptionally
rapid population growth, and I'm going to show
you some figures here, all of 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 Roman Britain, and we're talking about
the 3rd, 4th century, was somewhere on the order
of 2 1/2 to 3 million. In the post-Roman centuries, the 5th, 6th, 7th 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 "Domesday 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 or 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. So, 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 medieval village at its heart. Now, medieval farming involved several
technological innovations, including systematic crop
rotation and the moldboard plow, and I'm going to talk
about those in a moment, but according to 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, it's been 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 archeologist, 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 engaging way, so it's worth a 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 exploiting
the labor of others, by exploiting the 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, 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, make them an ideal medium
for tax collectors. So, 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 sown 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. The 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 moldboard plow actually first introduced? Was there really a technologically driven
transformative moment or was there instead a gradual
process of cerealization? 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, there are 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 from 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, documents recording land transactions, that really don't tell
you about farming as such, and many of them were produced a great deal, centuries after the period we're talking about, they're really quite late, they're certainly written long after the main period of change. I show you here a tiny image, I'm sorry it's so tiny, but an 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 are talking about. So what is needed, really,
to break this impasse is new, preferably direct evidence, and thanks to the the project
Feeding Anglo-Saxon 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 bits of it are still going on, it was based at the University of Oxford, with a collaboration with Leicester, and it involved the work of really quite a large team of experts, quite a diverse team of experts, and here they are. This is really just to make the point that this is the result of the work of an awful lot of different people, what you're about to see. Now, the aim of FeedSax was to generate direct
evidence for medieval farming by analyzing plant and animal remains from archeological excavations. Our primary source
material was not documents, was not written evidence, but rather bio-archeological evidence, so things like preserved plant remains, preserved animal bones, and so on. So, on the left there, the 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 granary burned down, but these charred plant remains are a really important
source of information. Then we have animal bones, and these are in fact the
bones from cattle feet, which, as you'll see, will become important
later on to my story, and then on the right,
we have a 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? 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's not
at 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
bio-archeological material from the north and west, it's harder to identify 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, I'm 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 archeological excavations, archeo-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
chemistry of those grains, it's another way of
establishing the soil conditions in which those crops grew, so 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 plow 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 cereal farming. First, I think I'd better explain what I mean by extensification. So, here is a little diagram that my colleague Amy
Bogaard has produced, that 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, and 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 intensive farming 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, the lower fertility is a
really important point, lower fertility soil conditions. 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. I don't know how many
of you are gardeners, but you'll be familiar with some of them. So, arable weeds are the key. The weed seeds that we analyzed come from weeds like cornflower 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 the underlying principle, it's quite simple. Now, 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. This represents the work
of my colleague Amy Bogaard in comparing the weeds from tiny, intensively
manured cereal fields in Northwest Spain, in Asturias, and you see that in the
top-right of this slide, to very low input, low fertility fields in Haute 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 tiny, they're almost like kitchen gardens, but they're using them to grow cereals. In Haute Provence, you can see they look
like regular wheat fields, very extensive. So she conducted a botanical
survey of the arable weeds from both systems, and found that the results produced, she then produced a
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 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 likes low 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, they're just for the central zone because it was the central zone, the bread basket of England, that really produced the most samples, so produced, really, the
best results, basically. Each of the dots that you see represents one archeo-botanical sample, one sample of weed seeds, and you can see the date runs
along the horizontal axis at the bottom of the slide, and along the vertical axis, you see scores from 6 down to -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 decreasing fertility 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 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. 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
to sow different cereals, and which field to leave fallow. I mean, obviously, you can't have your sheep
grazing in a fallow field immediately next to a crop field, you have to keep them separate, so you have to agree
what you're going to do, farmers had to cooperate and had to agree. And they might, in a typical system, have autumn-sown wheat in one field, spring-sown barley in another, and then the third field left fallow, that's the kind of classical model, and then the next year you rotate and you have 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, in
the same sets of fields, 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 7th to 9th 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 can see, in the next phase, which takes us to the late 9th century up to the first quarter
of the 11th century, that variability's 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, is really being 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, on written sources until now. So that's crop rotation, and we can now look at this question about the moldboard plow, when did it come into widespread use, this really disruptive
technology of the Middle Ages. So, what was the moldboard plow, 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 at the top here. The ard, or scratch plow, as 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 colter that cuts vertically down into the soil and then a moldboard that turns it over. And that ability, 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 moldboard
plow was around in England quite early, already in the 7th century, and the reason we know that is that archeologists have excavated a piece of a moldboard plow in Kent, associated with a royal monastery
at a place called Lyminge, so we know it existed, they knew of the moldboard plow, so the real question is when did it change from being a rarefied,
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 "Domesday Book," an awful lot of farmers were
using the moldboard plow, so when did that happen, when was that tipping point? Or indeed was there a tipping 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 garden, my garden's 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. As he says here, "If thistles are plowed
up before midsummer, "for each one shall come up two or three," so he said thistles are
difficult to kill off even with a moldboard plow, in fact they really
like the moldboard plow. So ards and plows, ard
and plow cultivation produced types of weeds, 'cause there are lots of weeds
that don't like this at all, there are weeds that require
low disturbance to survive, so they would cope with ard 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, 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 FeedSax 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 Bogaard produced a
discriminate 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 Laxton from those on the right here that grew, actually, in the arable fields that underwent the
disturbance of modern plows. Of course, they use modern plows at both Laxton and Highgrove. So it was possible to separate out high disturbance
and low disturbance weeds quite readily. We refined the picture using
some really remarkable data, 'cause 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, at an experimental farm at the World Heritage
site of Lorsch Abbey, which is near Frankfurt,
or south of Frankfurt. So, this is a working farm where they carry out
cultivation experiments using really high quality
archeological replicas, like the moldboard plow 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 archeological 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. 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 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 ard, the samples above the line grew in high disturbance conditions consistent with the use
of a moldboard plow. And here you can see, whereas 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, 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 ard, and we know that the
ard continued to be used throughout the Middle Ages, but the moldboard plow is clearly becoming more and
more prominent through time. So, we'll leave plant remains behind and look at the animal bone evidence, 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 centuries, so we're looking, really, here at the darker part of the bar, that is 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 up until 1066. We then also looked at these foot bones that I mentioned earlier on, and the reason for that is that the strain of pulling a heavy, well, a heavy anything, but a heavy moldboard plow would cause pathological
changes to the feet of cattle, basically, they develop a
kind of arthritis over time. And these pathologies allowed us to define what we call a draft cattle's signature for some sites, and the sites that you see on these maps with a draft cattle signature, I hope you can see this, are marked with a little ox, 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 1000 to 1200, all the sites we looked at produced a really pronounced, a really clear draft cattle signature, so something 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 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 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 830. What makes that period different, what sort of changes do
we see, 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 droveways, 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 5th, 6th, 7th 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 droveways, and so on, 'cause it tells us that livestock were
being managed in new ways that required their
movement to be controlled so that they didn't just
stray off into fields or stray off into farmsteads and start nibbling on
the thatch, or whatever, so 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 droveways and these very extensive complexes of paddocks, corrals, whatever they are, these livestock enclosures, because they are quite extensive, they involve quite deep ditches and banks, they 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 droveways, the enclosures, and the hay meadows, 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 malting ovens, like this wonderful malting
oven from Northamptonshire, from Higham Ferrers, they appear for the first time. The first medieval water
mills also date 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 features, like the malting ovens, the
water mills, barns, and so on, I think could be seen as
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 cereal surpluses, the very cereal surpluses that they were designed
to store and process. This is also when the first large archeological 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 archeological footprint to larger scale, low input regimes and a new emphasis on surplus production. So that's the long 8th century. The second key change
happens in the 10th century, you might even be able to argue it's kind of the middle
of the 10th century, with the appearance of the first distinctively
aristocratic settlements, sometimes people call them proto-manors. These, by the way, these are just reconstructions, on the left, you see
a site called Cheddar, on the right, you see another
one called Faccombe Netherton, in Hampshire. These were the residences of local lords who had been granted land and who mobilized the cereal
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 moldboard plow and of systematic crop rotation, even if the earlier developments, the extensification, really came too early to have anything to do
with 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
archeological 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 moldboard 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's 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 sherds 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 note, 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 moldboard plow within two and three field systems. 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, I thought that was remarkable, they were able to achieve really high levels of
disturbance and tillage using a moldboard plow. So, the 12th and 13th centuries saw a really broad continuity
of agricultural regimes against the backdrop 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
FeedSax has produced, any single moment of revolutionary change. I don't suppose we were
necessarily expecting to, but I mean we might have come out saying, oh, it's the 10th century,
it's 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 in
royal monasteries like Lyminge, or other royal centers, it may have been driven in
part by population growth, and indeed the emergence
of the first formal markets since the Roman period, I haven't mentioned those, but they are there, and the first 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 moldboard plow is, I think, 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 for that 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. So was there a medieval
agricultural revolution? Well, the evidence from FeedSax suggests that the different elements of the moldboard plow package, so crop rotation, extensification, use of the moldboard plow, did not come together in a sort
of 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 moldboard plow, we know it was there in
England in 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 a subsistence
crisis of such magnitude that it is still referred to
today as the Great Famine. Countless people perished, and it marked the end of the period of population growth
and relative prosperity that we've just been talking about. The triggers of the Great
Famine are clear enough, there's really no question about them: it 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, it's 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 rinderpest before, "The Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle's" 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 cereal farming, cereal surpluses, but also exacerbated by
deterioration in soil fertility, the longterm net effect of low input, high
disturbance farming regimes? Was this the endgame of extensification? Experimental work is ongoing 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, of
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 Lauresham, at Lorsch. At Lauresham, they've basically built a replica 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 ards, 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 they're doing there. And we're developing a
collaboration with them that we hope is going to yield 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. (plow creaks)
(shrubbery rustles) So they're really now
trying to address the need for more data to really understand the
functional weed ecology in fields that have been plowed using a moldboard plow, using an ard, ridge and furrow, no ridge and furrow, and so on. So I'll leave it there, happy to take questions. (audience applauds) - Thank you, Professor Hamerow. 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, we hope, I sort of touched on it at the end, I think this question of what happens when you extensify, and
extensify, and extensify, 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? Of course, 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 that impact
have been on the soil? So that's a big one. - So, we've got a couple of questions that are sheep related, so I'll start off with the first one: "Were you able to take account "of the impact of the sheepfold system "on the fertility of soil, "or did the use of sheepfold
to manure the arable land "fall outside the period of your study?" - Well, it 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 quite right to raise that, so it wasn't just spreading manure from byres and from middens onto fields, but of course sheep were
folded onto the fields. 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 land unit, a huge amount, and so sheepfolding will have helped, but clearly it wasn't enough completely to halt or reverse the trend. - Sorry, 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, the lack of 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 north and 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, but it's also more difficult to identify early medieval
settlements in those regions. So I think for all those reasons, we had less, but undoubtedly, there would
have been hefting of sheep, and this sort of thing, in the north and west. The things that we looked
at with the sheep bones was to see whether or
not there was evidence, 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 grazing on stubble fields, because that's a 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. - [Moderator] Thank you. - We love sheep at FeedSax, we love sheep. - [Questioner] After extensification, did they reverse the
decline in soil fertility? - Well, we didn't check, we only had a few weeds
for the 14th century, and we didn't look later at all, so that would be another
project, in a way, to look at what does
happen to soil fertility in the 14th, 15th, 16th centuries. There certainly is, as a result of the catastrophes
of the 14th century, a very dramatic implosion,
decline in population, as you probably know, all over Europe, and as a result, of course, the demand for cereal farming, for cereals decreased dramatically, the labor force decreased dramatically. And so yes, I think we would have seen, I would guess we would see a
reversal of extensification, or at least a halting, but nobody's actually
looked at the weed floras for those periods, so it would be a really
interesting thing to do, it's an important question. - [Questioner] Thanks for
a really interesting talk. I'm fascinated with the people who said, oh, but they were doing all these things to keep up soil fertility, and I'm just fascinated about how, 'cause your evidence seems so compelling, you can square that with
the increase in population, but also the densification of 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, the decline in soil fertility and yet this rapidly increasing and densification of
population go together, is there something else
going on in the background? 'Cause it's such a fascinating paradox. - So, I think the increasing population would have made labor relatively cheap, so I think that absolutely is in keeping with the written sources that record peasants out there spreading manure, hand weeding, marling, all sorts of really
quite, on the face of it, quite labor intensive activities. But the problem is, I think, these fields had become
so extensive, so large, they covered so much of the landscape that there just wasn't
enough, in particular, manure to maintain fertility given the rotations, and so on, and the methods being used. So as I said, whatever they were doing, it wasn't enough to reverse
the decline in soil fertility. The nucleated villages
in and of themselves, I don't think, are the sign of increasing population, population did increase, I think the nucleated villages are really a sign of
gathering rural populations into a type of village that makes it much easier to
extract surplus from them, to put it bluntly, it represents a much
more systematic method of surplus extraction, of taxation, and so on. I don't think it represents,
in and of itself, or was the result of
there being so many people that they had to group
together in that way, I think it was a deliberate strategy. - [Moderator] Thank you
all for your questions, and please join me in thanking Professor
Hamerow one more time. (audience applauds)
