Agriculture in the Middle Ages

Agriculture in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Martin Bakers
Publisher: Cambridge Stanford Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 101

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the Middle Ages agriculture underwent many changes. The nobles and the clergy were considered the most important members of the feudal society. However, they were never the majority: in the Middle Ages, almost all people were peasants. Not all farmers had the same category and social status. Many of them were free men. Among these, some were small landowners who lived on their own land, while others, the settlers, leased the feudal lord a small plot of land.

Agriculture in the Middle Ages

Agriculture in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Del Sweeney
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 151280777X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Get Book Here

Book Description
Explores the cultural framework within which changes in agricultural technology and economic organization occur and the ways in which changes in the social fabric influence attitudes toward rural work and the peasantry.

Crop Protection in Medieval Agriculture

Crop Protection in Medieval Agriculture PDF Author: Jan C. Zadoks
Publisher: Sidestone Press
ISBN: 9088901872
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
Mediterranean and West European pre-modern agriculture (agriculture before 1600) was by necessity ‘organic agriculture’. Crop protection is part and parcel of this agriculture, with weed control in the forefront. Crop protection is embedded in the medieval agronomy text books but specialised sections do occur. Weeds, insects and diseases are described but identification in modern terms is not easy. The pre-modern ‘Crop Portfolio’ is well filled, certainly in the Mediterranean area. The medieval ‘Pest Portfolio’ differs from the modern one because agriculture then was a Low External Input Agriculture, and because the proportion of cultivated to non-cultivated land was drastically lower than today. The pre-modern ‘Control Portfolio’ is surprisingly rich, both in preventive and interventive measures. Prevention was by risk management, intensive tillage, and careful storage. Intervention was mechanical and chemical. Chemical intervention used natural substances such as sulphur, pitch, and ‘botanicals’. Some fifty plant species are mentioned in a crop protection context. Though application methods look rather modern they are typically low-tech. Among them are seed disinfection, spraying, dusting, fumigation, grease banding, wound care, and hand-picking but also scarification, now outdated. The reality of pest outbreaks and other damages is explored as to frequency, intensity, and extent. Information on the practical use of the recommended treatments is scanty. If applied, their effectiveness remains enigmatic. Three medieval agronomists are at the heart of this book, but historical developments in crop protection from early Punic, Greek, and Roman authors to the first modern author are outlined. The readership of these writers was the privileged class of landowners but hints pointing to the exchange of ideas between them and the common peasant were found. Consideration is given to the pre-modern reasoning in matters of crop protection. Comparison of pre-modern crop protection and its counterpart in modern organic agriculture is difficult because of drastic changes in the relation between crop areas and non-crop areas, and because of the great difference in yield levels then and now, with several associated differences.

Decision-Making in Medieval Agriculture

Decision-Making in Medieval Agriculture PDF Author: David Stone
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199247765
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book Here

Book Description
David Stone uses contemporary sources to reconstruct the world of the medieval farmer, and argues against the traditional interpretation of the Middle Ages as economically backward.

Medieval Farming and Technology

Medieval Farming and Technology PDF Author: Grenville G. Astill
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004105829
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the first of three planned volumes which deal with the techniques and technology of agriculture in Europe in the period from 600 A.D. down to the 17th century. The focus of this first volume is Scandinavia, the British Isles, Northern Germany, the Low Countries and Northern France. The volume discusses methodological approaches and their limitations, the development of medieval agriculture in terms of the transmission of technological ideas, improvements in productivity, regional variations, social responses to agricultural technology, and those common trends that unite the Northwest European region.The volume integrates material derived from the great advances made in medieval archaeology and the historical study of landscapes during the past 30 years and has a supranational character. It will be of interest to all those working on the social, economic and political history of Northwest Europe in the medieval and early modern periods as well as to those undertaking research in the specific field of the history of technology.Technology and Change in HistoryThis new series of scholarly surveys is intended to offer an updating of the discussion of questions regarding the nature of technology and technological change first broached in the nine-volume survey by R. Forbes: Studies in Ancient Technology. The series will however take in not only the original scope of Forbes' work, namely the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world, but will extend beyond this to cover the medieval and early modern periods.7The volumes in the series will be in English, of 300-800 pp., divided into 10-15 topical chapters and aim to present to scholars, graduate students and to non-specialist scholars the current state of knowledge in the various fields in the history of technology. They collect, assimilate and present facts, opinion, sources, and literature in the accessible way that Forbes did, but will also identify issues that have not been plainly addressed and will in doing so indicate where the field might profitably be going.Including notes and numerous illustrations, the volumes address questions of a primarily historical nature, such as: 1. what technological options were open to peoples at different times and different places? 2. what options did they choose and why? 3. what impact did this have on their contemporaries and successors (and on their technological choices)?Questions and problems more proper to political, social and economic history will also be touched upon, but the starting point and focus of this new series is the history of technology.Volumes planned in the series include:R.J. Curtis: Food Technology in Antiquity (1999)M.-C. Deprez-Masson and N.J. Mayhew (eds.): Metal Technology: 600-1800 A.D. (2001)P. Squatriti (ed.): Medieval Hydrotechnology (2001)O. Wikander (ed.): Ancient Water Technology (1998)G.R.H. Wright: Ancient Building Technology (1999)J. Langdon and G. Astill (eds.): Agrarian Technology in the Middle Ages: Northwest Europe (1996)

Field Systems and Farming Systems in Late Medieval England

Field Systems and Farming Systems in Late Medieval England PDF Author: Bruce M.S. Campbell
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000944433
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Get Book Here

Book Description
The later Middle Ages was an overwhelmingly rural world, with probably three out of four households reliant upon farming for a living. Yet conventional accounts of the period rarely do justice to the variety of ways in which the land was managed and worked. The thirteen essays collected in this volume draw upon the abundant documentary evidence of the period to explore that diversity. In the process they engage with the issue of classification - without which effective generalisation is impossible - and offer a series of solutions to that particularly thorny methodological challenge. Only through systematic and objective classification is it possible to differentiate between and map different field systems, husbandry types, and land-use categories. That, in turn, makes it possible to consider and evaluate the relative roles of soils and topography, institutional structures, and commercialised market demand in shaping farm enterprise both during the period of mounting population before the Black Death and the long era of demographic decline that followed it. What emerges is an agrarian world more commercialised, differentiated, and complex than is usually appreciated, whose institutional and agronomic contours shaped the course of agricultural development for centuries to come.

Farming, Famine and Plague

Farming, Famine and Plague PDF Author: Kathleen Pribyl
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319559532
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is situated at the cross-roads of environmental, agricultural and economic history and climate science. It investigates the climatic background for the two most significant risk factors for life in the crisis-prone England of the Later Middle Ages: subsistence crisis and plague. Based on documentary data from eastern England, the late medieval growing season temperature is reconstructed and the late summer precipitation of that period indexed. Using these data, and drawing together various other regional (proxy) data and a wide variety of contemporary documentary sources, the impact of climatic variability and extremes on agriculture, society and health are assessed. Vulnerability and resilience changed over time: before the population loss in the Great Pestilence in the mid-fourteenth century meteorological factors contributing to subsistence crises were the main threat to the English people, after the arrival of Yersinia pestis it was the weather conditions that faciliated the formation of recurrent major plague outbreaks. Agriculture and harvest success in late medieval England were inextricably linked to both short term weather extremes and longer term climatic fluctuations. In this respect the climatic transition period in the Late Middle Ages (c. 1250-1450) is particularly important since the broadly favourable conditions for grain cultivation during the Medieval Climate Optimum gave way to the Little Ice Age, when agriculture was faced with many more challenges; the fourteenth century in particular was marked by high levels of climatic variability.

Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy

Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy PDF Author: M. M. Postan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521088466
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book Here

Book Description
Includes The economic foundations of medieval society, The rise of a money economy, The chronology of labour services and The charters of the villeins.

Agriculture in the Middle Ages

Agriculture in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Martin Bakers
Publisher: Cambridge Stanford Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 101

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the Middle Ages agriculture underwent many changes. The nobles and the clergy were considered the most important members of the feudal society. However, they were never the majority: in the Middle Ages, almost all people were peasants. Not all farmers had the same category and social status. Many of them were free men. Among these, some were small landowners who lived on their own land, while others, the settlers, leased the feudal lord a small plot of land.

Agriculture in the Middle Ages

Agriculture in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Del Sweeney
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the two conferences, People of the Plough at Pennsylvania State University and The Image of the Rusticus at the University of British Columbia (no dates noted), 15 essays examine agricultural development and diffusion, rural society, and literary and artistic representations of farming in Europe from the Carolingian period through the late Middle Ages. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Agriculture in the Middle Ages

Agriculture in the Middle Ages PDF Author: William Francis Allen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Middle Ages
Languages : en
Pages : 20

Get Book Here

Book Description