Mould-board plow

I've talked before about growing crops in the Middle Ages.  But today I want to discuss one particular medieval invention that made it all possible, the mould-board plow.  (American farmers today call it the moldboard plow.  Historians stick with mould-board.  Our students get confused enough as it is without thinking this has something to do with that funny orange stuff you find when you forgot the cottage cheese in the back of the refrigerator.)

Let's start with plowing.  If you've driven through the countryside much you've doubtless seen farmers plowing and wondered vaguely what they were doing.  They were preparing the soil to grow crops, loosening it up, creating crevices in which seeds could lodge and sprout, turning it over so that whatever had been growing there before (say, weeds or grass) would be killed and turned under to rot and fertilize the soil.

Plows have been around as long as agriculture.  For millennia the plow was a basic pointed stick with handles.  The pointy part, the plow-share as it is called, was if possible made of metal.  (Think of the Old Testament hope for a better time, when people will "beat their swords into plow-shares.")  It could be pulled by an ox, a donkey, or even a person in a pinch, with another person walking behind to guide it.

This plow (the Romans called it an aratum, and it's the root of our word "arable," meaning land that can be cultivated) was not very efficient, because fields had to be cross-plowed.  That is, the plow-share would slice the soil, but you had to plow both end-to-end of a field and side-to-side to get the soil properly turned over.  It was however lightweight and cheap.

Medieval people (eleventh-twelfth century) came up with something much better, the mould-board plow, pictured below.

It was called this because it had a mould-board, a curved piece of wood or metal right behind the sharp plow-share.  This would turn the soil over as it was sliced into.  (The word is "mould," meaning soil or earth, not "mold.")  In the medieval image above, it's the dark, curved part of the plow, seen edge-on and hence somewhat cryptic looking (keep reading).

A mould-board plow was called a carruca in medieval Latin, related to "cart," because it was heavy enough that it normally needed wheels.  It also could be pulled a lot easier by a strong animal like an ox or two than by a donkey.

It was also more expensive (because of all the metal), so a lot of peasant families ended up having to club together.  But it was much more efficient, because you didn't have to cross-plow, meaning you could plow twice as many fields (more or less) in the same amount of time, leading to more food being grown.  The heavy, moist soils that could be plowed with the carruca were also generally richer, better for growing crops.  On the other hand, it was so effective at digging up heavy, moist soil that it was never adopted for thin, light soils, such as much of the land around the Mediterranean or on hilltops, where it would be unnecessarily cumbersome and the danger was drying out the soil.

The basic medieval design for a mould-board plow lives on.  Today they are pulled by tractors, not oxen, and often they will have multiple sets of cutter (plow-share) and mould-board side by side.  But if you look at the modern plow pictured below, you will see that the basic design is the same as the twelfth-century plow, even though there's a cutting wheel instead of a pointy plow-share.  There is still a plow-share, but it's now attached to the bottom of the mould-board (you can see it in the left-most of the three mould-boards pictured below), which is mounted horizontally rather than vertically (as in the medieval plow pictured above).  And of course there are three sets of cutters and mould-boards next to each other in this modern plow.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on medieval agriculture, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Peasants and labor dues

One often hears that medieval peasants had to pay a certain percentage of their harvest and an unlimited amount of their labor to their landlords.  This (along with so many other myths about the Middle Ages) is not true.  They certainly owed produce and labor, but it wasn't unlimited.

This is because medieval peasants were not slaves, as I have discussed earlier.  Indeed, in the early twelfth century even serfdom, being legally bound to one's "lord of the body," disappeared in France (see more here).  But both serfs and free peasants owed rent, just like anybody who rents an apartment today owes rent.

The rents were generally a combination of money, of produce (like two bushels of wheat and a chicken each year), and labor (like having to work on the lord's land two days a week).  Rents were fixed and were not supposed to be raised.  You will note that they weren't a percentage of the crop; the only "percentage of the crop" in sight was tithes to the church, which many peasants did not pay at all because most villages out in the country did not have a church.

The labor dues were often the most valuable part of the rent to the landlord.  Unless he planned to be out there with the plow and the ox himself, he needed to have people working his fields to grow the food for his household--and to grow food that he could sell at market (thus generating cash to buy horses, silk, spices, jewelry, and all the other things aristocrats felt they needed).  If every tenant household had to provide someone to come work on the lord's land (his demesne) at least one day a week, the necessary work got done.

This labor in fact could be beneficial to the peasants, although they probably didn't appreciate this fact.  The chief way it benefited them was to acquaint them with new, expensive technologies, like heavy mould-board plows, which they would have been (understandably) reluctant to try themselves, knowing that if they didn't work as promised then their families would starve.  The landlords, however, could afford such experiments (as well as affording the equipment).  Once peasants had seen that something worked, then they could adopt it themselves.

In addition, peasants could ride along with a lord when he took produce to market.  They might only each have a small amount to sell, but by going with him, and his larger amount, they found it worth it.

But peasants hated labor dues.  They would much rather be putting the effort into their own fields than their lord's.  By the twelfth century, a lot of lords were finding it a total pain to enforce labor dues.  The workers would show up late--with expanding cultivated land, the peasants might live miles away, and you couldn't expect them to leave home before dawn--leave early, and expect lunch.  Many landlords "commuted" (as it was called) labor dues into an extra monetary payment.  Then they could use the money to hire day laborers, who would not get paid if they didn't show up on time and work hard.  Young men could start saving up money by working as paid laborers.

Many a lord who owned unused, woodsy or swampy land would establish "new towns" (actually new villages), hoping to attract peasants (that is, other lords' peasants) to come work on land that hadn't been producing anything before, peasants who would pay rent.  In these new towns, the peasants would not owe labor dues, generally just money rents and maybe a little produce.

In the expanding economy of the High Middle Ages, the cost of hiring labor kept rising, and it became harder and harder to hire good workers on the cheap.  Rents, however, were fixed as they had always been.  What had once been a good deal for landlords no longer was.  As a result, in the thirteenth century landlords stopped commuting labor dues and tried, generally with minimal success, to reinstate them.

© C. Dale Brittain 2016

Raising Food in the Middle Ages

Let's face it, even though we all like to imagine that we would have been lords and ladies (if not indeed kings and queens) in the Middle Ages, any of us with European ancestors are descended from peasants.

This means that our ancestors were out there raising food, a complicated and very hard and unpredictable enterprise.  Even today, farmers will tell you that raising food is possible only due to a few inches of topsoil (where most of the nutrients are) and the fact that it rains.

Most food raised was grain, wheat, oats, barley, which could be stored for a year or more without refrigeration (assuming the rats didn't get it) and ground into flour for bread.  Without modern hybrid seed and modern fertilizers, peasants just had to hope that the ratio of grain planted to grain harvested was better than 2:1.  At a 2:1 ratio, they would have to save half the harvest to plant next year and hope that the other half, the half they were eating, lasted the year.  (With modern farming, the ratio of harvest to seeds planted is dozens to one.)

Of course one could always eat, rather than plant, the saved grain.  Then you'd starve next year instead of this year.  Great choice!  There were constant decisions to be made, with no assurance of the right answer.  Plant too early, and the wet ground might cause the seeds to rot rather than sprout.  Plant too late, and there may not be a long enough growing season.  Harvest too early, and the grain won't be ripe.  Harvest too late, and chances of destruction (hail storm, locusts, birds) increase.

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, European peasants made some bold decisions.  Especially they started using a heavier plow (called a carruca), which would dig deeper and was fitted with a mould-board, to turn over the soil as one plowed.  The carruca was only possible with improved metallurgy, such as led at the same time to the spread of horseshoes.  It replaced the old, light-weight plow, the aratum, which while cheaper and easier to make would only dig a little way into the earth.

The carruca allowed farmers to plow only once, turning over the soil as they went in long strips, rather than having to cross-plow to get the soil properly turned over.  This allowed farmers to cultivate rich, damp soils that would have been too wet to use with the old aratum.  The image above is of a field plowed using modern farming techniques, but you can see the deep furrows and ridges made by a heavy plow.

It was bold to switch to an expensive new-fangled kind of plow.  Also bold was to switch from so-called two-field farming, where one planted grain in half of one's land each year and left the other half to lie fallow, to regenerate itself and grow grass and weeds to be plowed under as "green manure."  But also in the eleventh and twelfth centuries peasants started using three-field rotation, one third of one's land to grow grain, one third to lie fallow, and one third planted in legumes like peas and beans, which can increase nitrogen in the soil.  Such decisions, however risky they seemed at the time, increased peasants' food production, making possible the economic growth of the central Middle Ages.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014
For more on medieval agriculture and food, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.