Regarding the trend towards declining fertility, this could also be from expanding the acreage under the plow. Assuming farmers first farm the most fertile land, then any increase of acreage under the plow, has to contend with lower fertility soil. Hence, the average fertility drops.
Classical explanation. This could well be tested in population decrease phases like the Black Death, when the worst plots would be abandoned to eternal fallowness.
@@LuisAldamiz : In areas like Britain there was an alternative. Those who inherited marginally arable landholdings might convert them to pasture in the wake of losing half the agricultural workforce. In particular the black death meant grazing sheep - whose wool was a cash crop - became more efficient; and the resulting animal fertilizer was even better for long-term fertility than fields lying fallow. Except, that is, in dryer climates like Spain where transhumance of the mestas interfered with a return to crop-farming. This caused an endless to-and-fro between cultivators and pastoralists, which the cultivators won partly because of growing international competition from other wool growers.
@@terrycole472 - Hmmm... I understand that La Mesta won the conflict (and that was part of the reason why Castile never developed well, too vested into being a colony of Flanders, unlike England, which broke away from such dependency). Anyhow, sure: fallow plots and lands are for herding, that's part of how they recover some of their fertility.
@@LuisAldamiz : Sort of depends on what you mean by "won". La Mesta won and lost legal battles many times over the ages, as detailed in many reference works, but yes, the received wisdom is that the Mesta and particularly transhumance throttled Spanish economic development. I guess in English there's the famous study by Klein a century ago but I'd give the last word to works in Spanish by eg. Barriguete, to the effect that Hidalgos co-opted the best pastures, never mind the law. Others struggled with a diminishing commons, and by the 1700s ovine profitability diminished owing to overseas competition in the wool market. Cf. Barriguete's envoi in his 1992 'Mesta y vida pastoril': "Mientras que los grandes señores acaparaban las mejores dehesas, el resto luchaba por zonas que hacian poco tiempo eran de libre aprovechamiento, fenómeno agudizado en el siglo XVIII por la rentabilidad de las explotaciones pecuarias, consecuencia de la especial coyuntura del mercado lanero."
And the plow made it easier to farm heavier clay rich more fertile soils. So as always it's complex. I think the fertility of the meadows could have been a bigger problem. The meadows was needed for hay used to feed the animals that was needed to fertilize the crop fields.
In Poland, which Christianized only from 966CE , an agricultural revolution took place from the 9th century to 1300: two field rotation with manuring and spring+autumn sowing was introduced from about 900CE, 3 field rotation a bit later. The Church and its monasteries between 966 and 1300 CE took control of about 40% of agricultural lands, introduced new crops, technological advances such as land drainage and fish farming, education , record keeping and State administration and tax collection. Also health services. Population growth was only possible due to the increased food production.
the same thing happened all over Europe, the monastaries were the big innovators in gardening and farming, they taught the peasants how to do it. For example after the end of the threat from the Avars, Austria started to expand eastwards (Vienna only got part of Austria around that time) and the largest land grants were given to monastaries, mostly Bavarian monasteries. Actually the first mentioning of the word "Austria/ostarrichi" is from such a land grand document to a monastery. Later they expanded this successful system to Hungary and also Transilvania, first using Benedictine monks, later Cistercians. The monks cleared forests, drained swamps, planted orchards and vinyards, brought new crops etc. From about 1300 the peasants had internalized these methods so much, that they didn't need the monks anymore and the local aristocrats started wanting to get rid of the monasteries and sieze the land (and the tax income) for themselves.
... and most importantly (as in England and across Europe), more land was brought into cultivation, as indicated by deforestation from the 8th century onward: it was the combination of this doubling or tripling (or more) of arable acreage and increased yields through technical improvement that sustained population growth, urbanisation and the rise of a commercial economy.
@@ekesandras1481 I think peasants knew how to farm without monks telling them. It's evident that the improvement of techniques and equipment pre-dates the rise of the monasteries, which were in any case understandably more interested in higher-value products for trade than in the bulkier and ubiquitous staples that underpinned population growth. Their big contribution was in organising reclamation and developing trade networks that were later taken over by the merchants themselves.
@@ekesandras1481 No mention of the binding of serfs to their village, town or farms. Why is that? And. "About 1300" did the peasants take over the hospitals, the alms houses, the retirement homes, the pension homes for those crippled, and the feeding of the very poor. I doubt you have ever been in a medieval church and seen that EVERY single one of them had bread cupboards or shelving, for storing the bread that would be shared out to the very poor in the local parish.
Grin. The only thing I know is that there was no grass in the Cretaceus. Probably there wasn't angiosperma too. But yes, I think your specimens are harder to get in order to be accounted for research. LoL Brasil
I understood that the horse harness reached Europe about 1000 AD from China. This allowed a horse to pull a greater load due to distribution of the pressure around the chest , rather than pulling solely on the neck. Great presentation.
@@alexandermalinowski4277 There are plenty of medieval paintings showing horses being used as draft animals in farming, as a ten-second google search will amply illustrate.
Another interesting fact, the horse collar effectively ended certain forms of slavery in Europe......ie. a horse harnessed by a rope around its neck can do the work of 5 people but it eats the same as 5 people so no advantage......put a horse collar on and it can do the work of 10 but still only eats 5X as much......bingo, use hirses, get more done and save on precious food.
Very informative. But Very little mention of the climate change during this period. Medieval Warm Period from 900 to 1300 granted Warm summers with plenty of precipitation, short mild winters, thus perfect growing conditions. Hence agriculture boom, population boom, with people realising almost modern day heights by the end of 1200. This is surely offering the pressure for more production, not 'greedy Lords'. The weather went into freefall from 1300, at the start of The Mini Ice Age. From 1313 to 1316 was three years of endless rain and devastating destruction of crops. Stores fended off starvation to begin with but eventually succumbing in 1315 to 1317 to The Great Famine.
Excellent point. And you reminded me of what I read about how the storms in 13th century may in fact have caused the rise of the English wool industry: Salt water made coastal fields non-arable, so they had to be turned into pastures. And at the same time demand for warm cloth rose because of the cooler climate.
Climate conditions surely played a role, but I wouldn't single them out. There were other factors at play, otherwise in the "little ice age" population wouldn't have grown again after the black plague. Improved agriculture surely played a role in these times. I don't know about England, but in todays Germany the land covered by forests was at an all-time low before the St Mary Magdalene's flood in 1342 and the black plague which followed. Also there were more villages than even today before these events.
The correlation between intensification on cereal use precedes agriculture. In fact, agriculture may be a consequence of cereal intensification, leading to efforts to enhance yields. For example, irrigation seems to have been emerging among hunter-gatherers in the American southwest in the late prehistoric. Canals were constructed that watered otherwise natural stands of grasses, whose seeds were key resources. The grasses were neither planted nor cultivated.
Nettle must have been critical, because it can be boiled into soup and it can be made into fabric. Thank you for making a place for this in your lecture.
I think animal size is an important indicator and determine things like plow size. The pony and small cattle breeds that still exist are indicative of what most people were using. Pound for pound more efficient the large ones we think of today and if you need more power, just make larger hitches with you neighbors teams. This also fits well with keeping them in one end of the house. Even the milk cows and large dogs were worked, even into modern times. I think, with the rise of the Grange we start to see larger dedicated animals.
Not just animals: you can find actual photographs from barely a century ago showing European peasants - sometimes women - dragging a plough in the absence of draught stock. But even in England, livestock sizes remained for the most part barely improved into early modern times: those ancient breeds you mention were closer to the norm rather than exceptional. Monastic records indicate attention to feed rather than breeding, and in that respect they did make a contribution to improving draught capacity, though its effects are generally felt later than the period in question or at least in its later stages.
Cereals have another, perhaps even more important property! They can be stored for long periods of time before going bad. This means that surpluses can be accumulated and traded for other products; like salt. This also means that the landowners start to control all trade with the peasants on their land. This type of monopoly makes select people very rich as the peasants are beholden to their lords for everything. On the other hand a lord has to expend an effort to protect the land and the peasants from possible usupers.
Correct, grains can be a moderate term store of wealth, while silver & gold are longer-term stores of wealth. Turnips, beets, carrots,etc work very well for feeding people & farm animals, but really don't have a store of wealth function due to their high moisture & propensity to rot.
Pulses can also be stored for long periods of time. Peas and fava or broadbeans would have been grown at the time as well but she doesn't mention this. Everything just needs to be kept dry and unavailable to rodents.
... and not just the lords: grain's ability to be stored and traded allows the state too to take a cut in kind or (if there's adequate coin and a functioning market) in cash. And towns are another beneficiary: indeed its no coincidence that they appear just as cereals are established as the staple foodstuff. Lords didn't control peasant trade, though, least of all in labour, a feature that made the model tolerable but also later allowed tenants to buy out customary labour obligations and convert them to a source of wage income. Wage labour had indeed never been absent, but over time demesnes came increasingly to rely on it, even before the 14th-century calamity.
Crop rotation between wheat, barley, rye, oat, is wrong. These plants belong to the same genus (Cereals) and so, generally, draw the same nutrients from the soil. Tru crop rotation, in order to reserve soil fertility, must include plants of different families. (Leguminosae like peas, Brassicaceae, like cabbage, Apiaceae like carrots, Alliums, like onions…) This explains the reduction of fertility.
The presenter mentioned monasteries a few times, but never adressed their role in promoting new technlogies or even literature written in monasteries about thes topics. It is only a guess on my part. But maybe the monasteries were quite influential.
I agree. Not only the monks who lived and worked at the monasteries; but also their influence on their tenants whose choice of crops and livestock the monks would have encouraged or discouraged.
And was it not priests that promoted the use of potatoes some hundreds of years later? It could very well be the church and monasteries promoting changes in agriculture
The talk left me well aware that royal estates and monasteries had the capital to adopt new technologies and methods very early on. That there was a shift from smallholders concerned to increase the fertility of their plots to large scale estate management seeking to improve output by increasing acreage, following the model set by the royal estates. Reflecting the transition to feudalism.
Interestin exposition but I'm a bit concerned about the two original control sites, especially the one in Provence, which is of Mediterranean climate and would thus not apply well to Atlantic Europe.
I assume that's partly why they were chosen, one relatively intensive and "Atlantic", the other low-input and presumably retaining more of Roman practice while the north went off in a different direction. It may be relevant that it's Haute-Provence rather than the more parched Mediterranean fringe. In the event, "the disturbance contrast between the Haute Provence and Asturias regimes was not sufficiently strong to construct a model on the basis of disturbance traits alone", hence the use of Laxton & Highgrove which seeks to address the issue.
I enjoyed the lecture even though there were many aspects which I disagreed with. If I tried to put them here it would just seem negative and I don't want to do that. Is the college doing other similar lectures on the relationship between agricultural production and the feudal system and the new monasticism ?
I have for some time had the impression that record keeping and letter writing preserving and sharing ideas in agricultural mgt. Was the big new thing that made this 500 years more productive than previous times. The written word especially in code eventually played a big part in the peasant revolt. And that came out of decreased population due to black death where people where eating the immune compromising diet of high grains peas beans and the cloudy weather for some years before reduces vit D reducing immunity more. Most plague victims have signs of rickets.
Not really, because most of this is happening without such organisation, still less scientific management of production. Estates may have kept records on a larger scale than has come down to us, but those records pertain to the output of the lord's own portion of the land (a minority of the whole) and to just that part of tenant produce or labour due to the manor. The greater part of the agrarian economy (perhaps accounting for less of the emerging commercial sector but producing most of life's necessities) is down to unlettered peasants individually or within the village community acting without direction from above. 14th-century peasant literacy is a fairly recent development, still often seen as a route out of rural subjection rather than as an asset in management of the holding.
The culmination of the Medieval Agricultural Revolution coincided with the medieval warming or optimum. That period had relatively few crop failures and could support a rapidly growing and developing population. I, as a climatologist was surprised that it was not mentioned at all in the fascinating talk.
The question of differentiating between declining soil fertility or maximizing output may be answered by examination of the local populations' corpses for health and stress markers on the bones (this should be examined across classes)
Two questions... if I plant some cold tolerant plants , that I started indoors, (foe example , Pumpkins ) will a cloche , ( instead of a cold frame) protect them from a possible overnight frost ? AND , you mentioned putting xmas lights in a cold frame to raise the inside temperature a bit , did you mean LED's ??? or regular... Thanks
The political development of the nation state would seem to be an important stimulus for a number of these changes. Strange how the design of the plough was targetted as a reason for change, rather than a symptom. The Anglo Saxon and Brythanic kingdoms were first centrally organised by Æthelstan in 927 creating a larger and more stable market and a recognised hierarchy of authority that laws could be endorsed by. In 1066 the large Norman war horse replaced the Cob pony increasing ploughing by horse and the general value of the horse generally. The Doomsday book also increased accountability and challenged serfs to meet taxation targets. Grains can be stored for a number of years unlike other crops, and they are easily transported and measured. Furthermore, straw and grain can be used to sustain livestock through winter months allowing increases in fertilization and livestock. The Cistercian and Benedictine orders arrived shortly after the Norman conquest which dramatically stimulated economic growth by providing disciplined governance and a formalised alliance with the military government which the older British church had not achieved - it being characterised as a hermetic faith redolent of the pre-Ronan priestly classes. Many modern units of measurement are based upon wheat grains indicating grain's role as money before the introduction of currency endorsed by a central monarch.
By rotating and growing field beans there would be nitrogen-fixing plants, and friable soil ..so that could well improve matters.Field beans were really crucial for healthy survival over winter. Just a thought. What is rotated matters more than just rotating.
Great stuff. So, intensification and small-scale came first. This argues that as society collapses, we will return to intensification as we scale down. This also means the ability to increase soil fertility under a smaller scale.
I think the enclosure movement came much later, when common land was privatized deprive commoners of their livelihood, that encouraged a population drift southwards to provide labor during the Industrial Revolution from 1775 onwards, and emigration to the New World.
It's centuries later, and vastly overrated as a contributor to aggregate growth: the first wave was in the 16th-17th centuries, largely for sheep-raising, the second 200 years later, this time involving conversion of arable fields to individual ownership, sometimes within a mixed farming model, sometimes not even for agricultural use, so that the overall net gain was less than suggested by just comparing yields in acres under a given crop.
A wonderful presentation. I wonder how deforestation played into this. Was land deforested to gain more farmland, or was wood more important as building material or as an energy source? (or all of the above) How much forest, was still left at what time? (Asking from the Black Forest region in Germany, which was completely deforested in the 18th century. Wood was used for glass production and logs where traded as down the rhine as far as the Netherlands as building material.) England has the image of a forest-free island in Germany.
interesting to see how social and technological advances have similarities with genetical/biological evolution. individual mutation seldom results in a single leap of changes but accumulation of small isolated changes can click on together under an environmental pressure (selection) on a large view : different disciplines can evolve under the same scheme or methodology.
There's more to it than this. These practices had been in use at various times in various places in Europe over the course of several medieval centuries before the period being referred to as an "agricultural revolution."
What do you mean *exactly* ? The "agricultural revolution" of the MA had almost no effect in Mediterranean Europe (soils too thin) but massive ones in Atlantic Europe (deep soils that were underexploited with Roman techniques), shifting the center of Europe's economy and politics from Italy to Belgium (and nearby areas). Do you really think Charlemagne could conquer half of Europe from Nordrhineland without such an agricultural revolution already ongoing?
There are isolated examples of mould board ploughs, mills and drying kilns in late Roman Britain, but they did not displace more traditional approaches. It seems to take sustained use of these innovations over centuries for them to become embedded and widespread in society.
Technically, probably not great: Scandinavia in those days was no agricultural front-runner. But in terms of social organisation it's been suggested that they left a legacy of greater relative peasant freedom than characterised the rest of England - and that may have paid off later when these counties were exceptionally populous, suggesting a thriving agriculture underpinned by an enterprising peasantry.
While I was watching I thought of some other things too, like food storage, since about 800ad glass became popular, maybe people started to store their food in jars or pickle them, also salt mining was very popular at that same period too which was also used for storage . Oh and we started to eat more foreign foods like carp, maybe at that period fishing methods might of changed too, I dunno just some things I thought of
But did they need glass to store pickles etc.? Would pottery not suffice? I know that if one goes into Tesco today to buy pickled walnuts or Branston Pickle they are likely to be in glass jars, but is there any reason why they would have had to be so in the past, when people also had ceramics?
Yes they did have pottery long before glass , also wooden barrels . But then you also need masses of vinegar for pickling stuff . The beauty of grain is that once it is dry it will keep for a whole year or more as long as the rats don’t get to it
Not glass. That was still too expensive to stockpile food in. Canning is a late 19th century invention. Salt, now, that probably did have significant influence.
Mediaeval documents do refer to 'vetches' being grown in rotation, which are leguminous and can serve as feed for the sheep etc being folded on the fields.
By the 13th century peas & beans were grown for human consumption alongside the vetches mentioned by Paul (the last for fodder and a fairly late arrival): their combined acreage seems not to have reached as much as a tenth of the area under crops, so though increasingly important, their contribution was still modest.
Here in Germany they (peas) were certainly grown. Especially during lent, leguminoses (pulses) played a vital role in human nutrion, since they offer vegetarin protein.If you want to find out of what was grown in Europe in early medieval times, read the "CAPITULARE DE VILLIS" by Charlemagne. There are translations available.
was it the social formation? I thought that almost all sheep manure went to the demesne. Maybe it was wasted in the process so there was enough manure but not enough distribution?
Don't think these are the first medieval water mills. This has been closely examined. I write about it as well as the only increase in the number of water mills was consistent with population increase in Britain.
Increased ploughing and decreasing fertility despite increasing manuring. Does ploughing damage fertility? Have we been getting it wrong because it was always done this way?
Well one thing a crop surplus does give you, on the back of population expansion, is the ability to take surplus males off the land and into armies and militias, the better to oppress and control the people doing the production. That solidifies the inequality model when you have a radical political change such as happened in 1066, when one small "elite" took ownership of the entire country.
When you speak of “bread wheat”, are you using this term to distinguish between grades of lower-protein wheat, or between other grains? If so, how are you judging different wheats, are what’s the surviving evidence for your judgements?
Bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) is being differentiated from rivet wheat (T turgidum), the latter sometimes being used for stodgy flatbread but also for gruels, porridge or (in its durum variant) our familiar modern pasta: there's also club wheat (T compactum) which is closer to bread wheat and I think isn't distinguished from it here. My impression is that in this the researchers were following earlier studies of local cultivars rather than undertaking a new analysis of bread/other.
Greater or lesser protein is not the issue. Bread wheat is a hexaploid and pasta wheat is a tetraploid. Of course diploid wheat like einkorn or petit epautre (in France) is used to make bread but it is an supplementary ingredient because of the lack of sufficient gluten.
Starts with mistake : It is not : population growth leads to more food production, but more food production leads to population growth. It is the same as in all species on earth, multiply as long as the food allows it.
The comparison to other species does not quite hold, since human agricultural societies produce their own food, instead of having to rely on what their natural environment provides. While, for example, other animals (also nomadic humans) are forced to make do with what is available to them or move somewhere else, a group of human farmers are able to transform forests into arable land. Agricultural technologies have had a huge impact on human history and fundamentally changed the dynamic of population growth (arguably, only modern medicine had a greater impact on the human population).
Interesting that we have the same problems today as we did back then; decreasing fertility. But it is helpful to know that we might not have to work so hard to control weeds if we did not grow crops that demand so much nutrition. We can grow less demanding crops and live with lower fertility and smaller weeds. Very useful. Thanks!
@@here_we_go_again2571 Can't be very old. Medieval cultivators certainly didn't set aside a third of the crop for livestock, oats and barley being predominantly for human food or brewing while dedicated fodder crops only arrive on the scene fairly late. Animals fed on the grass, with a grain top-up in the work season.
Wouldn't the Medieval warm period (950 to 1300), and the resulting effect on growing seasons, yield, acreage under plough, etc be the most significant factor in the expansion of agricultural output and population expansion? What effect would these innovations have in a period without significant drop in temperature or catastrophic population collapses due to the Great Famine (1310's to 1320') and Black Death (1330s- 1360's)...
If cereal planting is more profitable than livestock grazing how do you account for the fact that many land owners evicted their grain growing tenants and replaced them with sheep in the 18th and 19th centuries?
@@doncarlodivargas5497 There was a shortage of grain in Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries because Britain was cut off from American grain imports by the American Revolution, and from European imports by the Napoleonic wars. This was the reason for the "corn laws" meant to encourage grain growing in Britain that were only repealed in 1832.
@@chriswalford4161 Wool was one of the most important exports in the period, so much so that King Edward made a wool sack a focal point in the House of Lords in the 1300s. He didn't want them ever to forget the importance of wool to the economy and especially the export of wool to France and the money it brought in.
Only the very best arable land is used for grain. The less favorable is used for grazing and the really bad land (post 1700's) for potatoes and goats/sheep
I thought the population estimates a bit high too - I don't think anyone believes there were 3 million people in Roman Britain in the 3rd and 4th century - more like 2 million. However there was a big dip in pop before 1700 Black death killed off third to half the population in the century following 1348 Black Death.
Perhaps, and never addressed by any scholars in my experience, surpluses of crops create income inequality because the very poor would have died without these surpluses...their very survival being the reason for a larger disparity. Perhaps, disparities in income are not necessarily a bad thing, if indeed it is because of the ability to keep more people alive.
it is untrue that crops feed more than animals, the land requirements, given the tech at the time, were almost identical and pasture land is not the same as crop land in terrain or maintenece/water needs
I would expect the full scientific reports to have contained suitable regression or discriminant analysis with error terms and probability values for the various coefficients. This would have satisfied the more statistically minded but for most it would have been to the detriment of the flow and scope of the talk. We can't have everything.
Very interesting and enjoyable. I was going to mention the dramatic climate change but saw that someone else mentioned it. We were producing wine in the North of England during the warmer 13th century but when it became cooler and more wet during the 14th century at the beginning of the little ice age, the crops failed and caused widespread famine. So I hope that you do take that into consideration going forward. I know the mad climate change scientists tried to delete the warmer period but it did actually happen!
Climate change scientists know it happened. It is well documented in dendro-chronological data and in the analyzed data of ice cores from glaciers. That is why they can predict a major global warming crisis.
"The Medieval Agricultural Revolution:" Old Evidence - deforestation for fuel... Today, to extract 8 billion tonnes of coal annually, 100 million barrel of crude oil and atmospheres of natural gas daily from deep in the underground to the surface - how many people are required for the task? The answer is - 8 billion population, flat out, 24/7 - strong. Fossil fuels don't come to the point of use on the flying carpet. Our outgoing Western Civilisation has been no more than a deforestation and then fossil fuels extraction operation - all along... "In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most. No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores. No system of energy can deliver sum useful energy in excess of the total energy put into constructing it. This universal truth applies to all systems. Energy, like time, flows from past to future".
There were great re-forestation programs started in the 19th century, In Germany, and also in the south of France (e.g. in Auqitaine), former pastures were turned into forrests.
Britain didn't really exist, at least as a political entity, at this time in history, so I strongly doubt the terms are used interchangeably. They discuss Roman Britain, which is correct, but discuss England when discussing the medieval period.
Hadrian's Wall that divides England from Scotland was built by the Romans in 122 AD. England derives its name from the Angles, a Germanic tribe from the Jutland peninsula, now known as Denmark.
2:05 I've seen this figure before of 2.5 to 3 million people in Britain in late Roman times 5th Century AD, (400 to 410) and frankly it is baloney, more probably topping at 1.5 million to 1.75 million. It relies on the Population in Roman Britain, far exceeding the rest of the Islands, but then dropping, while the rest of the Archipelago, remained fairly static, why? The Domesday figure is highly disputed, the great Anglo Saxon expert Michael Wood, estimates 1.2 million, and my money is with him. There is no evidence that the number of Villages dropped dramatically in the Anglo Saxon period. 41:21 King Alfred the Great late 9th Century, introduced the ~Burhs~ Defensive Villages against attack from the Vikings. Which were in effect Nucleated villages, mainly based around a market, his daughter Aethelflaed extended them into Mercia, so most of Wessex and Western Middle England had them from early 10th century onwards. The Great Famine which covered most of Northern Europe, was 1307 to 1322? No mention of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), when temperatures rose to levels above todays, from levels way below those of the 17th to 19th Centuries. Greenland acquired its name because there were farming areas there. The MWP ended around 1250, going by the Dendrochronogical evidence, you can look it up online to check. No mention in England of the 10th Century onwards, Tax break, that allowed the richer farmer to pay lower taxes, if he had a Religious community on his land. These is turn usually were run on a Co-operative basis, ploughing (pun intended) back any profits into the land. The Lord of the Manor was wealthier by having no poor to look after, this was done by the Monks or Nuns, who in turn educated the other farmers in the best use of the land. Decent presentation, but much left out in this study, most strikingly the obvious rise in Temperatures between 950 and 1250. Any bets the team think Global warming is new and Man made🤣😂😂😂🤣😂 There was NO Revolution, just steady development.
As a geologist, I'm well aware that climate change (global warming etc.) is not new.....but this current one is clearly, and at the very least, largely man made. Which is not to say I'm in a panic about it. It's just another blip in the paleoclimatic record.
@@saxoncodex9736ere is an entire field which is of the belief that climate change of the last two centuries is on the whole, man-made (but not new). Have you spoken to any geologists who agree with you? I'm not aware of anyone in any of the Earth Sciences who has released an academic paper in the last 10 years that places current climate change as a non-human phenomena, regardless of how overblown it has been. Edit: this is only concerns your reply. Comment is very informative.
@@ohlordy2042 The last ice age ended around 15,000 years ago in northern Europe due to the Milankovitch cycle changes to the precession of earth's slightly eccentric orbit around the sun, and changes in the earth's axis tilt from 22.1 to 24.5 degrees to the vertical in a 40,000 year cycle that determine the seasons Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. it is absurd to claim that a mere 0.04% of CO2 in the gas atmosphere is the cause. Check out the video by Professor William Happer of Princeton University if you wish to learn more. Warming precedes CO2 increases, since CO2 is less soluble in warmer water and outgases from the oceans.
@@frankwolstencroft8731 Thanks Frank. I'm well versed in the literature on Milankovitch cycles and the historic data demonstrating rising temperatures preceding upticks in atmospheric CO2. I'm also aware of the long, downward trend in atmospheric CO2 over the last 500 million years, consistently in the Cretaceous/Tertiary, with the associated decline in global temperatures and CO2 to the slow plant growth, ice house world we live in today. However, none of that nullifies the sudden, substantial and accelerating increase in atmospheric CO2 over the last 150 years or the associated uptick in temperatures directly correlated with it. We're undoubtedly living in a human induced period of global warming. But for all the reasons stated above, I'm not in a panic about it. Across the history of multicellular life on earth, and particularly during the Tertiary (Cenozoic) Era, the current uptick in both atmospheric CO2 and temperature is, historically speaking, trivial. Complex life on earth has thrived in far higher temperatures and CO2 levels than exist on earth today, and will continue to do so into the future. Humans have just set the atmospheric clock back a few million years.
No mention of climate change. The medieval warm period!!!!!!.......... If you want to obsess about climate change in the present why not say something about it in the past.
"We'll talk about England tonight, but much would apply to Europe". I bet most changes came from Europe and were applied in England too. England is not the center of the universe. When will they finally start to realize that on their tiny little island over there?
@@kreek22 Fractional Reserve Banking arose in Venice during the Renaissance around 1,400 AD, when the gold merchants issued more paper gold warrants than they had physical gold ingots in their vaults. We should differentiate financial capitalism from industrial capitalism that actually mass produces consumer goods for sale, and conjuring money out of thin air, then charging interest on it that acts as a parasite on the real economy.
@@adamlodoen2662 There were not, the poster's prejudices were probably triggered by the phrase "wealth disparities" which relates to an objective truth and nothing to do with "capitalism" or "communism" which are, at best, 19th century ideas about social development. During the Feudal period the system, if there was one, consisted of the rights over a manor being granted to one of the King's mates, who then proceeded to milk the peasants for any profit without any need to contribute to the development of his manor. (The undeserving rich 🙂) The real drive in social development (possibly originating as early as the 500s) was a tendency to move from incestuous and essentially familial transfer of resources to a more meritocratic arrangement to be found in the mediaeval guilds. This was an agglomeration of "tribes" with resulting efficiency and innovation. It could be argued that modern extreme capitalism, as exemplified by the de-regulation nutjobs, is a reversion to self-patronage by an incestuous elite. It can be seen in modern England, for example, with the "VIP" lanes for dishing out taxpayers' funds to incompetents during the COVID crisis combined with the use of tribal memes (racism) to divert the masses. Just saying 🙂!
That awkward moment when decades of historiography has to relinquish the liberal myth of technological driven change and acknowledge class and surplus value differences with regard to cerealisation.
How did the royalty and the league of lords, dukes, peerage and the church impact medieval agriculture in England? Given constant war, pillage, land-grab, shifting partisans must have affected agriculture in a major way also. No account of that? Yes all the short lived growth for sure. No mention of the massive hunger caused by the black plagues of Spain, Italy, France and Switzerland.
Probably not hugely: war was far from routine, and armies were limited in size (most who might otherwise serve having their own holdings to attend to). Devastating land and butchering the inhabitants tended to be a specific punishment for perceived egregious misbehaviour rather than a common military tactic, at least until the Hundred Years War: who wants to take over a desolate territory?
After the Norman Conquest of 1066, the Anglo Saxon villeins became the labour force and were required to devote several days per week working for their Norman Overlords of the Manor. Droit de seigneur and all that.
@@frankwolstencroft8731 The collection of people into villages is similar to the creation of bastides in France and probably had a similar role of facilitating tax gathering and making the "illicit" storing of grain etc. out of the sight of the authorities more difficult.
The black death actually improved the living conditions, because it led to a scarcety of labour. Suddenly the landlords started to compete for the workforce, offering better conditions. But even new laws that tried to keep the peasants bound to their old masters proved ineffective.
Regarding the trend towards declining fertility, this could also be from expanding the acreage under the plow. Assuming farmers first farm the most fertile land, then any increase of acreage under the plow, has to contend with lower fertility soil. Hence, the average fertility drops.
Classical explanation. This could well be tested in population decrease phases like the Black Death, when the worst plots would be abandoned to eternal fallowness.
@@LuisAldamiz : In areas like Britain there was an alternative. Those who inherited marginally arable landholdings might convert them to pasture in the wake of losing half the agricultural workforce. In particular the black death meant grazing sheep - whose wool was a cash crop - became more efficient; and the resulting animal fertilizer was even better for long-term fertility than fields lying fallow.
Except, that is, in dryer climates like Spain where transhumance of the mestas interfered with a return to crop-farming. This caused an endless to-and-fro between cultivators and pastoralists, which the cultivators won partly because of growing international competition from other wool growers.
@@terrycole472 - Hmmm... I understand that La Mesta won the conflict (and that was part of the reason why Castile never developed well, too vested into being a colony of Flanders, unlike England, which broke away from such dependency).
Anyhow, sure: fallow plots and lands are for herding, that's part of how they recover some of their fertility.
@@LuisAldamiz : Sort of depends on what you mean by "won". La Mesta won and lost legal battles many times over the ages, as detailed in many reference works, but yes, the received wisdom is that the Mesta and particularly transhumance throttled Spanish economic development.
I guess in English there's the famous study by Klein a century ago but I'd give the last word to works in Spanish by eg. Barriguete, to the effect that Hidalgos co-opted the best pastures, never mind the law. Others struggled with a diminishing commons, and by the 1700s ovine profitability diminished owing to overseas competition in the wool market.
Cf. Barriguete's envoi in his 1992 'Mesta y vida pastoril': "Mientras que los grandes señores acaparaban las mejores dehesas, el resto luchaba por zonas que hacian poco tiempo eran de libre aprovechamiento, fenómeno agudizado en el siglo XVIII por la rentabilidad de las explotaciones pecuarias, consecuencia de la especial coyuntura del mercado lanero."
And the plow made it easier to farm heavier clay rich more fertile soils. So as always it's complex. I think the fertility of the meadows could have been a bigger problem. The meadows was needed for hay used to feed the animals that was needed to fertilize the crop fields.
In Poland, which Christianized only from 966CE , an agricultural revolution took place from the 9th century to 1300: two field rotation with manuring and spring+autumn sowing was introduced from about 900CE, 3 field rotation a bit later. The Church and its monasteries between 966 and 1300 CE took control of about 40% of agricultural lands, introduced new crops, technological advances such as land drainage and fish farming, education , record keeping and State administration and tax collection. Also health services. Population growth was only possible due to the increased food production.
the same thing happened all over Europe, the monastaries were the big innovators in gardening and farming, they taught the peasants how to do it. For example after the end of the threat from the Avars, Austria started to expand eastwards (Vienna only got part of Austria around that time) and the largest land grants were given to monastaries, mostly Bavarian monasteries. Actually the first mentioning of the word "Austria/ostarrichi" is from such a land grand document to a monastery. Later they expanded this successful system to Hungary and also Transilvania, first using Benedictine monks, later Cistercians. The monks cleared forests, drained swamps, planted orchards and vinyards, brought new crops etc. From about 1300 the peasants had internalized these methods so much, that they didn't need the monks anymore and the local aristocrats started wanting to get rid of the monasteries and sieze the land (and the tax income) for themselves.
... and most importantly (as in England and across Europe), more land was brought into cultivation, as indicated by deforestation from the 8th century onward: it was the combination of this doubling or tripling (or more) of arable acreage and increased yields through technical improvement that sustained population growth, urbanisation and the rise of a commercial economy.
@@ekesandras1481 I think peasants knew how to farm without monks telling them. It's evident that the improvement of techniques and equipment pre-dates the rise of the monasteries, which were in any case understandably more interested in higher-value products for trade than in the bulkier and ubiquitous staples that underpinned population growth. Their big contribution was in organising reclamation and developing trade networks that were later taken over by the merchants themselves.
Down with the church.
@@ekesandras1481 No mention of the binding of serfs to their village, town or farms. Why is that? And. "About 1300" did the peasants take over the hospitals, the alms houses, the retirement homes, the pension homes for those crippled, and the feeding of the very poor. I doubt you have ever been in a medieval church and seen that EVERY single one of them had bread cupboards or shelving, for storing the bread that would be shared out to the very poor in the local parish.
This was a fascinating talk- I am interested in general as a botanist, but my era is Cretaceous... so anything agricultural is new information.
That comment made me laugh, thank you for your perspective.
Grin. The only thing I know is that there was no grass in the Cretaceus. Probably there wasn't angiosperma too. But yes, I think your specimens are harder to get in order to be accounted for research. LoL
Brasil
I look forward to Cretaceous Agricultural Revolution: new evidence
No medieval without the Cretaceous. :)
These whippersnappers and their new fangled three field rotation.
This talk was fascinating in ways I didn't anticipate. Cereal grains and taxation? Extensification? Nucleated villages? My mind is blown.
I understood that the horse harness reached Europe about 1000 AD from China. This allowed a horse to pull a greater load due to distribution of the pressure around the chest , rather than pulling solely on the neck.
Great presentation.
Yes, exactly what I heard for many years ago, should be interesting to know how correct and important such changes where
@@doncarlodivargas5497 Nobody used horses for such a purpose
@@alexandermalinowski4277Forgive me if I misunderstood, but are you claiming that draft horses don't exist?
@@alexandermalinowski4277 There are plenty of medieval paintings showing horses being used as draft animals in farming, as a ten-second google search will amply illustrate.
Another interesting fact, the horse collar effectively ended certain forms of slavery in Europe......ie. a horse harnessed by a rope around its neck can do the work of 5 people but it eats the same as 5 people so no advantage......put a horse collar on and it can do the work of 10 but still only eats 5X as much......bingo, use hirses, get more done and save on precious food.
Very informative.
But Very little mention of the climate change during this period.
Medieval Warm Period from 900 to 1300 granted Warm summers with plenty of precipitation, short mild winters, thus perfect growing conditions. Hence agriculture boom, population boom, with people realising almost modern day heights by the end of 1200. This is surely offering the pressure for more production, not 'greedy Lords'. The weather went into freefall from 1300, at the start of The Mini Ice Age. From 1313 to 1316 was three years of endless rain and devastating destruction of crops. Stores fended off starvation to begin with but eventually succumbing in 1315 to 1317 to The Great Famine.
Exactly. In North-Eastern Europe mouldboard plough was never introduced during Mediaeval period, but the tendencies are the same.
Excellent point. And you reminded me of what I read about how the storms in 13th century may in fact have caused the rise of the English wool industry: Salt water made coastal fields non-arable, so they had to be turned into pastures. And at the same time demand for warm cloth rose because of the cooler climate.
Climate conditions surely played a role, but I wouldn't single them out. There were other factors at play, otherwise in the "little ice age" population wouldn't have grown again after the black plague. Improved agriculture surely played a role in these times.
I don't know about England, but in todays Germany the land covered by forests was at an all-time low before the St Mary Magdalene's flood in 1342 and the black plague which followed. Also there were more villages than even today before these events.
@@lumikkihusu7259 English wool was prized in Rome as winter underwear, a thousand years earlier. I guess we're not talking about Tweed!
And don't forget the great plague, which decimated European population in the 1300s, leaving lands unworked until the population rose again.
The correlation between intensification on cereal use precedes agriculture. In fact, agriculture may be a consequence of cereal intensification, leading to efforts to enhance yields. For example, irrigation seems to have been emerging among hunter-gatherers in the American southwest in the late prehistoric. Canals were constructed that watered otherwise natural stands of grasses, whose seeds were key resources. The grasses were neither planted nor cultivated.
Nettle must have been critical, because it can be boiled into soup and it can be made into fabric. Thank you for making a place for this in your lecture.
I think animal size is an important indicator and determine things like plow size. The pony and small cattle breeds that still exist are indicative of what most people were using. Pound for pound more efficient the large ones we think of today and if you need more power, just make larger hitches with you neighbors teams. This also fits well with keeping them in one end of the house. Even the milk cows and large dogs were worked, even into modern times. I think, with the rise of the Grange we start to see larger dedicated animals.
Not just animals: you can find actual photographs from barely a century ago showing European peasants - sometimes women - dragging a plough in the absence of draught stock.
But even in England, livestock sizes remained for the most part barely improved into early modern times: those ancient breeds you mention were closer to the norm rather than exceptional. Monastic records indicate attention to feed rather than breeding, and in that respect they did make a contribution to improving draught capacity, though its effects are generally felt later than the period in question or at least in its later stages.
An excellent scholarly presentation both very informative & very interesting. Very many thanks.
Wonderful presentation thank you
Superb talk! Thank you!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Excellent scholarship.
I'm cerealizing this now...
Cereals have another, perhaps even more important property! They can be stored for long periods of time before going bad. This means that surpluses can be accumulated and traded for other products; like salt. This also means that the landowners start to control all trade with the peasants on their land. This type of monopoly makes select people very rich as the peasants are beholden to their lords for everything. On the other hand a lord has to expend an effort to protect the land and the peasants from possible usupers.
Correct, grains can be a moderate term store of wealth, while silver & gold are longer-term stores of wealth. Turnips, beets, carrots,etc work very well for feeding people & farm animals, but really don't have a store of wealth function due to their high moisture & propensity to rot.
Pulses can also be stored for long periods of time. Peas and fava or broadbeans would have been grown at the time as well but she doesn't mention this.
Everything just needs to be kept dry and unavailable to rodents.
... and not just the lords: grain's ability to be stored and traded allows the state too to take a cut in kind or (if there's adequate coin and a functioning market) in cash. And towns are another beneficiary: indeed its no coincidence that they appear just as cereals are established as the staple foodstuff.
Lords didn't control peasant trade, though, least of all in labour, a feature that made the model tolerable but also later allowed tenants to buy out customary labour obligations and convert them to a source of wage income. Wage labour had indeed never been absent, but over time demesnes came increasingly to rely on it, even before the 14th-century calamity.
The reversible mouldboard plough was another game changer...
Crop rotation between wheat, barley, rye, oat, is wrong. These plants belong to the same genus (Cereals) and so, generally, draw the same nutrients from the soil. Tru crop rotation, in order to reserve soil fertility, must include plants of different families. (Leguminosae like peas, Brassicaceae, like cabbage, Apiaceae like carrots, Alliums, like onions…) This explains the reduction of fertility.
I like her rather austere delivery . No feeble jokes. She is clearly here to provide us with knowledge - NOT give us a
a " laugh"..!
Fascinating topic, thanks!
The presenter mentioned monasteries a few times, but never adressed their role in promoting new technlogies or even literature written in monasteries about thes topics. It is only a guess on my part. But maybe the monasteries were quite influential.
I agree. Not only the monks who lived and worked at the monasteries;
but also their influence on their tenants whose choice of crops and
livestock the monks would have encouraged or discouraged.
And was it not priests that promoted the use of potatoes some hundreds of years later? It could very well be the church and monasteries promoting changes in agriculture
@@doncarlodivargas5497 In Germany at least the state promoted potatoes, not (afaik) the church
@@DagarCoH - yes, same here in norway, it was the priests that promoted use of potatoes, it could have been the same here
The talk left me well aware that royal estates and monasteries had the capital to adopt new technologies and methods very early on. That there was a shift from smallholders concerned to increase the fertility of their plots to large scale estate management seeking to improve output by increasing acreage, following the model set by the royal estates.
Reflecting the transition to feudalism.
Wonderful research
Brasil
Interestin exposition but I'm a bit concerned about the two original control sites, especially the one in Provence, which is of Mediterranean climate and would thus not apply well to Atlantic Europe.
I assume that's partly why they were chosen, one relatively intensive and "Atlantic", the other low-input and presumably retaining more of Roman practice while the north went off in a different direction. It may be relevant that it's Haute-Provence rather than the more parched Mediterranean fringe.
In the event, "the disturbance contrast between the Haute Provence and Asturias regimes was not sufficiently strong to construct a model on the basis of disturbance traits alone", hence the use of Laxton & Highgrove which seeks to address the issue.
I enjoyed the lecture even though there were many aspects which I disagreed with. If I tried to put them here it would just seem negative and I don't want to do that. Is the college doing other similar lectures on the relationship between agricultural production and the feudal system and the new monasticism ?
List your disagreements. That is how education / scientific progress works. Discussion and disagreement are both important.
I have for some time had the impression that record keeping and letter writing preserving and sharing ideas in agricultural mgt. Was the big new thing that made this 500 years more productive than previous times. The written word especially in code eventually played a big part in the peasant revolt. And that came out of decreased population due to black death where people where eating the immune compromising diet of high grains peas beans and the cloudy weather for some years before reduces vit D reducing immunity more. Most plague victims have signs of rickets.
Not really, because most of this is happening without such organisation, still less scientific management of production. Estates may have kept records on a larger scale than has come down to us, but those records pertain to the output of the lord's own portion of the land (a minority of the whole) and to just that part of tenant produce or labour due to the manor.
The greater part of the agrarian economy (perhaps accounting for less of the emerging commercial sector but producing most of life's necessities) is down to unlettered peasants individually or within the village community acting without direction from above. 14th-century peasant literacy is a fairly recent development, still often seen as a route out of rural subjection rather than as an asset in management of the holding.
The culmination of the Medieval Agricultural Revolution coincided with the medieval warming or optimum. That period had relatively few crop failures and could support a rapidly growing and developing population. I, as a climatologist was surprised that it was not mentioned at all in the fascinating talk.
Love the answer at the end about all of these organized villages popping up. Not unlike company towns.
The question of differentiating between declining soil fertility or maximizing output may be answered by examination of the local populations' corpses for health and stress markers on the bones (this should be examined across classes)
Very interesting, but I was not convinced by the clouds of points with a trendline. Is there no selection bias in the samples?
Fascinatng, thanks! ❤😃
How do you fold sheep? They're rather thick and not very flexible. :-)*
Two questions... if I plant some cold tolerant plants , that I started indoors, (foe example , Pumpkins ) will a cloche , ( instead of a cold frame) protect them from a possible overnight frost ? AND , you mentioned putting xmas lights in a cold frame to raise the inside temperature a bit , did you mean LED's ??? or regular...
Thanks
🤣🤣🤣
The Modern Gardener by Troll Smith.
Use the little lights that come 25 or so on a string. LED’s don’t produce enough heat. One string ought to do a 3x6 frame ~
use manure, it will keep the plant beds warm without electricity.
The political development of the nation state would seem to be an important stimulus for a number of these changes. Strange how the design of the plough was targetted as a reason for change, rather than a symptom.
The Anglo Saxon and Brythanic kingdoms were first centrally organised by Æthelstan in 927 creating a larger and more stable market and a recognised hierarchy of authority that laws could be endorsed by.
In 1066 the large Norman war horse replaced the Cob pony increasing ploughing by horse and the general value of the horse generally.
The Doomsday book also increased accountability and challenged serfs to meet taxation targets. Grains can be stored for a number of years unlike other crops, and they are easily transported and measured. Furthermore, straw and grain can be used to sustain livestock through winter months allowing increases in fertilization and livestock.
The Cistercian and Benedictine orders arrived shortly after the Norman conquest which dramatically stimulated economic growth by providing disciplined governance and a formalised alliance with the military government which the older British church had not achieved - it being characterised as a hermetic faith redolent of the pre-Ronan priestly classes.
Many modern units of measurement are based upon wheat grains indicating grain's role as money before the introduction of currency endorsed by a central monarch.
By rotating and growing field beans there would be nitrogen-fixing plants, and friable soil ..so that could well improve matters.Field beans were really crucial for healthy survival over winter. Just a thought. What is rotated matters more than just rotating.
I understand thr premise but wonder how the samples were obtained can anyone hhelp ?
Totally off topic but I was very confused by her hybrid British-American accent but she's from America and lives in the UK so it makes perfect sense
Great stuff. So, intensification and small-scale came first. This argues that as society collapses, we will return to intensification as we scale down. This also means the ability to increase soil fertility under a smaller scale.
What role does the enclosure movement play and when?
In this none - that is a different era
I think the enclosure movement came much later, when common land was privatized deprive commoners of their livelihood, that encouraged a population drift southwards to provide labor during the Industrial Revolution from 1775 onwards, and emigration to the New World.
It's centuries later, and vastly overrated as a contributor to aggregate growth: the first wave was in the 16th-17th centuries, largely for sheep-raising, the second 200 years later, this time involving conversion of arable fields to individual ownership, sometimes within a mixed farming model, sometimes not even for agricultural use, so that the overall net gain was less than suggested by just comparing yields in acres under a given crop.
A wonderful presentation. I wonder how deforestation played into this. Was land deforested to gain more farmland, or was wood more important as building material or as an energy source? (or all of the above) How much forest, was still left at what time? (Asking from the Black Forest region in Germany, which was completely deforested in the 18th century. Wood was used for glass production and logs where traded as down the rhine as far as the Netherlands as building material.) England has the image of a forest-free island in Germany.
The medieval warming period would have contributed enormously to any agricultural “revolution”.
interesting to see how social and technological advances have similarities with genetical/biological evolution. individual mutation seldom results in a single leap of changes but accumulation of small isolated changes can click on together under an environmental pressure (selection)
on a large view : different disciplines can evolve under the same scheme or methodology.
Well, I'm convinced.
There's more to it than this. These practices had been in use at various times in various places in Europe over the course of several medieval centuries before the period being referred to as an "agricultural revolution."
What do you mean *exactly* ?
The "agricultural revolution" of the MA had almost no effect in Mediterranean Europe (soils too thin) but massive ones in Atlantic Europe (deep soils that were underexploited with Roman techniques), shifting the center of Europe's economy and politics from Italy to Belgium (and nearby areas). Do you really think Charlemagne could conquer half of Europe from Nordrhineland without such an agricultural revolution already ongoing?
There are isolated examples of mould board ploughs, mills and drying kilns in late Roman Britain, but they did not displace more traditional approaches. It seems to take sustained use of these innovations over centuries for them to become embedded and widespread in society.
Farming of grain began in Mesopotamia about 10,000 years ago and then gradually spread westward to Europe.
What was the influence of the arrival of Viking farmers?
The Vikings ruled northern England and the Saxons southern England before 1066. A line drawn on a map from Chester to London shows the dividing line
Technically, probably not great: Scandinavia in those days was no agricultural front-runner. But in terms of social organisation it's been suggested that they left a legacy of greater relative peasant freedom than characterised the rest of England - and that may have paid off later when these counties were exceptionally populous, suggesting a thriving agriculture underpinned by an enterprising peasantry.
While I was watching I thought of some other things too, like food storage, since about 800ad glass became popular, maybe people started to store their food in jars or pickle them, also salt mining was very popular at that same period too which was also used for storage . Oh and we started to eat more foreign foods like carp, maybe at that period fishing methods might of changed too, I dunno just some things I thought of
All quite worthwhile points Jim.
But did they need glass to store pickles etc.? Would pottery not suffice?
I know that if one goes into Tesco today to buy pickled walnuts or Branston Pickle they are likely to be in glass jars, but is there any reason why they would have had to be so in the past, when people also had ceramics?
Yes they did have pottery long before glass , also wooden barrels . But then you also need masses of vinegar for pickling stuff . The beauty of grain is that once it is dry it will keep for a whole year or more as long as the rats don’t get to it
@@barkershill ships took along barrels of sauerkraut against vitamin deficiency.
Not glass. That was still too expensive to stockpile food in. Canning is a late 19th century invention. Salt, now, that probably did have significant influence.
I need to educate myself on plants which fix Nitrogen like Clover and Peas.
Did they exist?
Mediaeval documents do refer to 'vetches' being grown in rotation, which are leguminous and can serve as feed for the sheep etc being folded on the fields.
@@paulbivand9210 Thank you.
By the 13th century peas & beans were grown for human consumption alongside the vetches mentioned by Paul (the last for fodder and a fairly late arrival): their combined acreage seems not to have reached as much as a tenth of the area under crops, so though increasingly important, their contribution was still modest.
Here in Germany they (peas) were certainly grown. Especially during lent, leguminoses (pulses) played a vital role in human nutrion, since they offer vegetarin protein.If you want to find out of what was grown in Europe in early medieval times, read the "CAPITULARE DE VILLIS" by Charlemagne. There are translations available.
@@evelinharmannfan7191
Thank you.
Excellent presentation. The Star Trek-looking presentation remote distracted me every time, though ;-)
was it the social formation? I thought that almost all sheep manure went to the demesne. Maybe it was wasted in the process so there was enough manure but not enough distribution?
Don't think these are the first medieval water mills. This has been closely examined. I write about it as well as the only increase in the number of water mills was consistent with population increase in Britain.
Increased ploughing and decreasing fertility despite increasing manuring. Does ploughing damage fertility? Have we been getting it wrong because it was always done this way?
Well one thing a crop surplus does give you, on the back of population expansion, is the ability to take surplus males off the land and into armies and militias, the better to oppress and control the people doing the production. That solidifies the inequality model when you have a radical political change such as happened in 1066, when one small "elite" took ownership of the entire country.
When you speak of “bread wheat”, are you using this term to distinguish between grades of lower-protein wheat, or between other grains?
If so, how are you judging different wheats, are what’s the surviving evidence for your judgements?
Bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) is being differentiated from rivet wheat (T turgidum), the latter sometimes being used for stodgy flatbread but also for gruels, porridge or (in its durum variant) our familiar modern pasta: there's also club wheat (T compactum) which is closer to bread wheat and I think isn't distinguished from it here. My impression is that in this the researchers were following earlier studies of local cultivars rather than undertaking a new analysis of bread/other.
Greater or lesser protein is not the issue. Bread wheat is a hexaploid and pasta wheat is a tetraploid. Of course diploid wheat like einkorn or petit epautre (in France) is used to make bread but it is an supplementary ingredient because of the lack of sufficient gluten.
@@wvhaugen I didn't say anything about protein.
they should have build dovecotes - maybe they did (?) - to turn those weedseeds into potent fertlizer
Starts with mistake : It is not : population growth leads to more food production, but more food production leads to population growth. It is the same as in all species on earth, multiply as long as the food allows it.
It’s like who came first the chicken or the egg
@@jimferry6539 that is, the egg won a billion years ago
The comparison to other species does not quite hold, since human agricultural societies produce their own food, instead of having to rely on what their natural environment provides. While, for example, other animals (also nomadic humans) are forced to make do with what is available to them or move somewhere else, a group of human farmers are able to transform forests into arable land. Agricultural technologies have had a huge impact on human history and fundamentally changed the dynamic of population growth (arguably, only modern medicine had a greater impact on the human population).
@@jimferry6539 If a chicken is an eggs way of creating more eggs, might a human be grains way of creating more grains?
@@fitasadolphin that’s mutualism, completely different that the chicken and the egg 😂
Ancient ireland has a 7 feild system. Involving cattle. Before the english. Before the normans even.
I always thought it was because of the turnip
It was the potato, it was imported from Ireland by the Romans
@@wstevenson4913 the potato is from North America
@@jimferry6539 It was just a wee joke Jim
@Lucius Annaeus close enough 😅
Turnip rotations came in C18.
Interesting that we have the same problems today as we did back then; decreasing fertility. But it is helpful to know that we might not have to work so hard to control weeds if we did not grow crops that demand so much nutrition. We can grow less demanding crops and live with lower fertility and smaller weeds. Very useful. Thanks!
Controlling weeds is the wrong approach altogether. Roundup kills everything, incl. beneficial insects. Let's descontrol weeds, OK?
The old "rule of thumb"
was 1/3 of the crop sown
for the animals, 1/3 crop
sown for disease/bad
weather 1/3 crop for
harvest.
@@here_we_go_again2571 Can't be very old. Medieval cultivators certainly didn't set aside a third of the crop for livestock, oats and barley being predominantly for human food or brewing while dedicated fodder crops only arrive on the scene fairly late. Animals fed on the grass, with a grain top-up in the work season.
20:11 No, it's not clear *at all.* There's tons of variation; a straight line would have been just as reasonable.
Wouldn't the Medieval warm period (950 to 1300), and the resulting effect on growing seasons, yield, acreage under plough, etc be the most significant factor in the expansion of agricultural output and population expansion? What effect would these innovations have in a period without significant drop in temperature or catastrophic population collapses due to the Great Famine (1310's to 1320') and Black Death (1330s- 1360's)...
If cereal planting is more profitable than livestock grazing how do you account for the fact that many land owners evicted their grain growing tenants and replaced them with sheep in the 18th and 19th centuries?
A different period with different economics?
Production and export of grain fromUSA?
@@doncarlodivargas5497 There was a shortage of grain in Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries because Britain was cut off from American grain imports by the American Revolution, and from European imports by the Napoleonic wars. This was the reason for the "corn laws" meant to encourage grain growing in Britain that were only repealed in 1832.
@@chriswalford4161 Wool was one of the most important exports in the period, so much so that King Edward made a wool sack a focal point in the House of Lords in the 1300s. He didn't want them ever to forget the importance of wool to the economy and especially the export of wool to France and the money it brought in.
Only the very best arable
land is used for grain. The
less favorable is used for
grazing and the really bad
land (post 1700's) for
potatoes and goats/sheep
Agriculture initiated in Mesopotamia over 10000 years ago and Southern Europe over 5000 years ago! Britten, instead, initiated over a 1000 years ago!
1300 figure for population seems high - England pop in 1700 was 4 mill.
The Black Death caused a massive population reduction which took 300 years to recover.
I thought the population estimates a bit high too - I don't think anyone believes there were 3 million people in Roman Britain in the 3rd and 4th century - more like 2 million. However there was a big dip in pop before 1700 Black death killed off third to half the population in the century following 1348 Black Death.
Black death (Plague)
Famine (a regular occurance
in Europe until after WW2)
Smallpox, War .....
A bit over five million in 1700. But you're right about about 1300 - about 4m if that.
@@simonclarke2939 Agreed - the Roman, Domesday and 1300 numbers are too high.
Made a video about feudalism ERA
Perhaps, and never addressed by any scholars in my experience, surpluses of crops create income inequality because the very poor would have died without these surpluses...their very survival being the reason for a larger disparity. Perhaps, disparities in income are not necessarily a bad thing, if indeed it is because of the ability to keep more people alive.
it is untrue that crops feed more than animals, the land requirements, given the tech at the time, were almost identical and pasture land is not the same as crop land in terrain or maintenece/water needs
Oops. Somehow I landed in the wrong commentary 😂
That trend line looks awfully biased by the data on the very left.
I would expect the full scientific reports to have contained suitable regression or discriminant analysis with error terms and probability values for the various coefficients. This would have satisfied the more statistically minded but for most it would have been to the detriment of the flow and scope of the talk. We can't have everything.
Very interesting and enjoyable.
I was going to mention the dramatic climate change but saw that someone else mentioned it.
We were producing wine in the North of England during the warmer 13th century but when it became cooler and more wet during the 14th century at the beginning of the little ice age, the crops failed and caused widespread famine.
So I hope that you do take that into consideration going forward.
I know the mad climate change scientists tried to delete the warmer period but it did actually happen!
Climate change scientists know it happened. It is well documented in dendro-chronological data and in the analyzed data of ice cores from glaciers. That is why they can predict a major global warming crisis.
That coughing person was so rude and inconsiderate. They should have coughed into their elbow to stifle the sound, or left the room.
I'm about to stop watching this lecture if the coughing doesn't stop🤣
@@canaanval - it stops eventually. they must have had a moment of self-awareness and left.
Came to the comment section just to complain about this because it was annoying me so much hahah! They leave thank goodness!
I can't even pay attention. When this happens in person it's hard, I paid to attend but I can't focus on the conversation!
"The Medieval Agricultural Revolution:" Old Evidence - deforestation for fuel...
Today, to extract 8 billion tonnes of coal annually, 100 million barrel of crude oil and atmospheres of natural gas daily from deep in the underground to the surface - how many people are required for the task?
The answer is - 8 billion population, flat out, 24/7 - strong.
Fossil fuels don't come to the point of use on the flying carpet.
Our outgoing Western Civilisation has been no more than a deforestation and then fossil fuels extraction operation - all along...
"In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most.
No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores.
No system of energy can deliver sum useful energy in excess of the total energy put into constructing it.
This universal truth applies to all systems.
Energy, like time, flows from past to future".
There were great re-forestation programs started in the 19th century, In Germany, and also in the south of France (e.g. in Auqitaine), former pastures were turned into forrests.
@@evelinharmannfan7191 19th century has been coal and shortly after that oil-powered.
Interesting, not had time to watch all of it yet, but got the sense that 'England' and 'Britain' were used interchangeably though.
Britain didn't really exist, at least as a political entity, at this time in history, so I strongly doubt the terms are used interchangeably. They discuss Roman Britain, which is correct, but discuss England when discussing the medieval period.
Hadrian's Wall that divides England from Scotland was built by the Romans in 122 AD. England derives its name from the Angles, a Germanic tribe from the Jutland peninsula, now known as Denmark.
@@frankwolstencroft8731 Hadrian's Wall wasn't the English/Scottish border.
@@iapetusmccool You are just nitpicking
2:05 I've seen this figure before of 2.5 to 3 million people in Britain in late Roman times 5th Century AD, (400 to 410) and frankly it is baloney, more probably topping at 1.5 million to 1.75 million.
It relies on the Population in Roman Britain, far exceeding the rest of the Islands, but then dropping, while the rest of the Archipelago, remained fairly static, why?
The Domesday figure is highly disputed, the great Anglo Saxon expert Michael Wood, estimates 1.2 million, and my money is with him.
There is no evidence that the number of Villages dropped dramatically in the Anglo Saxon period.
41:21 King Alfred the Great late 9th Century, introduced the ~Burhs~ Defensive Villages against attack from the Vikings. Which were in effect Nucleated villages, mainly based around a market, his daughter Aethelflaed extended them into Mercia, so most of Wessex and Western Middle England had them from early 10th century onwards.
The Great Famine which covered most of Northern Europe, was 1307 to 1322?
No mention of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), when temperatures rose to levels above todays, from levels way below those of the 17th to 19th Centuries. Greenland acquired its name because there were farming areas there. The MWP ended around 1250, going by the Dendrochronogical evidence, you can look it up online to check.
No mention in England of the 10th Century onwards, Tax break, that allowed the richer farmer to pay lower taxes, if he had a Religious community on his land. These is turn usually were run on a Co-operative basis, ploughing (pun intended) back any profits into the land. The Lord of the Manor was wealthier by having no poor to look after, this was done by the Monks or Nuns, who in turn educated the other farmers in the best use of the land.
Decent presentation, but much left out in this study, most strikingly the obvious rise in Temperatures between 950 and 1250.
Any bets the team think Global warming is new and Man made🤣😂😂😂🤣😂
There was NO Revolution, just steady development.
As a geologist, I'm well aware that climate change (global warming etc.) is not new.....but this current one is clearly, and at the very least, largely man made.
Which is not to say I'm in a panic about it. It's just another blip in the paleoclimatic record.
@@ohlordy2042 That is an opinion, with no Geological backing.
@@saxoncodex9736ere is an entire field which is of the belief that climate change of the last two centuries is on the whole, man-made (but not new). Have you spoken to any geologists who agree with you? I'm not aware of anyone in any of the Earth Sciences who has released an academic paper in the last 10 years that places current climate change as a non-human phenomena, regardless of how overblown it has been.
Edit: this is only concerns your reply. Comment is very informative.
@@ohlordy2042 The last ice age ended around 15,000 years ago in northern Europe due to the Milankovitch cycle changes to the precession of earth's slightly eccentric orbit around the sun, and changes in the earth's axis tilt from 22.1 to 24.5 degrees to the vertical in a 40,000 year cycle that determine the seasons Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. it is absurd to claim that a mere 0.04% of CO2 in the gas atmosphere is the cause. Check out the video by Professor William Happer of Princeton University if you wish to learn more. Warming precedes CO2 increases, since CO2 is less soluble in warmer water and outgases from the oceans.
@@frankwolstencroft8731 Thanks Frank.
I'm well versed in the literature on Milankovitch cycles and the historic data demonstrating rising temperatures preceding upticks in atmospheric CO2.
I'm also aware of the long, downward trend in atmospheric CO2 over the last 500 million years, consistently in the Cretaceous/Tertiary, with the associated decline in global temperatures and CO2 to the slow plant growth, ice house world we live in today.
However, none of that nullifies the sudden, substantial and accelerating increase in atmospheric CO2 over the last 150 years or the associated uptick in temperatures directly correlated with it.
We're undoubtedly living in a human induced period of global warming.
But for all the reasons stated above, I'm not in a panic about it. Across the history of multicellular life on earth, and particularly during the Tertiary (Cenozoic) Era, the current uptick in both atmospheric CO2 and temperature is, historically speaking, trivial.
Complex life on earth has thrived in far higher temperatures and CO2 levels than exist on earth today, and will continue to do so into the future.
Humans have just set the atmospheric clock back a few million years.
I don't think it's disrespectful to point out that this speaker has a tendency to trail off toward inaudibility, making her hard to follow.
All the agriculturalists in the comments and me being very confused.
Hmmmm, plowing the same field produces a poor yield….so rotate the field you plow. I can think of other applications for this wizened reasoning. 😮
No mention of climate change. The medieval warm period!!!!!!.......... If you want to obsess about climate change in the present why not say something about it in the past.
always someone coughing
"We'll talk about England tonight, but much would apply to Europe". I bet most changes came from Europe and were applied in England too. England is not the center of the universe. When will they finally start to realize that on their tiny little island over there?
Well why not just post this as a podcast. Or minimize the presenter and maximize her images.
I think I would rather read the book.
Why in the first 4 minutes are there two references to communism?
There are some similarities between feudalism and communism. Capitalism had yet to be invented :-)
@@frankwolstencroft8731 The Venetians had been capitalists for some time.
@@kreek22 Fractional Reserve Banking arose in Venice during the Renaissance around 1,400 AD, when the gold merchants issued more paper gold warrants than they had physical gold ingots in their vaults. We should differentiate financial capitalism from industrial capitalism that actually mass produces consumer goods for sale, and conjuring money out of thin air, then charging interest on it that acts as a parasite on the real economy.
I have re-listened to the first four minutes, there are no references to communism. Not sure what you're talking about?
@@adamlodoen2662 There were not, the poster's prejudices were probably triggered by the phrase "wealth disparities" which relates to an objective truth and nothing to do with "capitalism" or "communism" which are, at best, 19th century ideas about social development.
During the Feudal period the system, if there was one, consisted of the rights over a manor being granted to one of the King's mates, who then proceeded to milk the peasants for any profit without any need to contribute to the development of his manor. (The undeserving rich 🙂)
The real drive in social development (possibly originating as early as the 500s) was a tendency to move from incestuous and essentially familial transfer of resources to a more meritocratic arrangement to be found in the mediaeval guilds. This was an agglomeration of "tribes" with resulting efficiency and innovation.
It could be argued that modern extreme capitalism, as exemplified by the de-regulation nutjobs, is a reversion to self-patronage by an incestuous elite. It can be seen in modern England, for example, with the "VIP" lanes for dishing out taxpayers' funds to incompetents during the COVID crisis combined with the use of tribal memes (racism) to divert the masses.
Just saying 🙂!
Farmers in general are not known for their innovation drive. Things will have gone in a glacial pace.
Communications
were at a glacial
pace. Even in the
1700's books were
still very expensive
(rag-paper ... pulp
paper wasn't common
unti later)
The phenomenon you refer to is really the modern outcome of a "brain-drain" from farming communities since industrialisation.
Marxist language… I thought this would be academic on farming, not academic on Marxism
That awkward moment when decades of historiography has to relinquish the liberal myth of technological driven change and acknowledge class and surplus value differences with regard to cerealisation.
Europe 1, Backward Foreigners Nil.
Don't be like Borrell...
How did the royalty and the league of lords, dukes, peerage and the church impact medieval agriculture in England? Given constant war, pillage, land-grab, shifting partisans must
have affected agriculture in a major way also. No account of that? Yes all the short lived growth for sure. No mention of the massive hunger caused by the black plagues of Spain, Italy, France and Switzerland.
Probably not hugely: war was far from routine, and armies were limited in size (most who might otherwise serve having their own holdings to attend to). Devastating land and butchering the inhabitants tended to be a specific punishment for perceived egregious misbehaviour rather than a common military tactic, at least until the Hundred Years War: who wants to take over a desolate territory?
After the Norman Conquest of 1066, the Anglo Saxon villeins became the labour force and were required to devote several days per week working for their Norman Overlords of the Manor. Droit de seigneur and all that.
There was a long period of drought and famine in the two decades just before the Black Plague hit Europe.
@@frankwolstencroft8731 The collection of people into villages is similar to the creation of bastides in France and probably had a similar role of facilitating tax gathering and making the "illicit" storing of grain etc. out of the sight of the authorities more difficult.
The black death actually improved the living conditions, because it led to a scarcety of labour. Suddenly the landlords started to compete for the workforce, offering better conditions. But even new laws that tried to keep the peasants bound to their old masters proved ineffective.
Land owning and landlordism started before the 10th century. Her statement is absolutely non-sensical.