Forest Primeval

 Europe and North America don't have a lot of old growth forest anymore, for the simple reason that humans have cut it down.  It is said that at the time of the American Revolution, a squirrel could travel from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic without once getting down from the trees.  That squirrel would be in trouble now.

In Ohio, when the settlers arrived one of their first acts was to start cutting down the forests. Oaks hundreds of years old were chopped down and burned in big bonfires, not even saved for building materials or household cooking and heating, because the amount of wood appeared unlimited (spoiler alert, it wasn't).  It was said the bonfire flames could be seen for miles.

There are a few patches of primeval forest left in North America, but the biggest stretch is the boreal forest at the northern edge of Canada, now suffering from wildfires.  Western Europe has very little real forest, outside of some in northern Sweden and Norway, which is why it was considered miraculous when enough big oaks were found (mostly in eastern Europe) to rebuild the roof beams in Notre Dame the way they had been built in the twelfth century.

The early Middle Ages had had some fairly major forests, due in part to the reforestation of what had been cropland under the late Roman Empire, during the major population decline of the sixth and seventh centuries. "Second growth" forest can become "old growth" forest, given a few centuries undisturbed.  Forests were considered scary places, the land of bandits and wolves.  But as Europe's population grew, so did land clearance.

Already in the first half of the twelfth century, Abbot Suger of St.-Denis considered it miraculous when he found enough big timbers for his own church rebuilding in his immediate region (not having to send off to eastern Europe, as was the case with Notre Dame nine centuries later).

The Europeans in medieval times were a bit more cautious about clearing forests than were their descendants in. eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ohio.  In spite of the forest advances of the early Middle Ages, there were still a lot more people needing open land for their crops and their flocks than there were in North America before the arrival of white people.  Trees were too valuable just to burn in bonfires.

Trees were used for building and for firewood in the home, and it was recognized that wild animals (like deer and rabbits) and some wild foods (like mushrooms or wild fruits and nuts) needed forested land if they were going to produce human food without human labor.  From the late twelfth century on, there were a constant stream of negotiated agreements about who could and couldn't cut down trees or carry fallen wood away.  Forests needed to be managed.  (Though not raked.)

England and Iceland especially were deforested during the Middle Ages.  In both places there was a lot of raising of sheep, who will eat almost any plant down to the ground, making it hard for woodlands to spread.  Especially since both of these are on islands, the ocean itself slowed down the spread of seeds.  Interestingly, there are probably more trees in western Europe (including England) now than there were in the late Middle Ages.  Modern agricultural methods (and fertilizer) have reduced the amount of open land per person required to raise food, and heating and building are primarily done with materials other than wood.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval social history and how it still affects us today, see my new ebook, Still Medieval After All These Years, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms. Also available in paperback. 

 

Roman Villas

 Roman civilization was city-based.  Outside of Rome itself the cities were small, at most ten thousand people and maybe only a few thousand, but they were still the centers for religion, government, communication, and economic exchange, and these cities persisted into the Middle Ages.  The big Roman provinces were divided into smaller units, called pagi, and each was comprised of a central city and its surrounding countryside.

But how about the countryside beyond the city, the pagus that the city governed?  There were small groupings of people in what we might consider a village, a vicus as it was called, an administrative sub-unit.  But the rural population was scattered thinly, most involved in agriculture.  The countryside was dotted with villas, homes of wealthy Romans who oversaw the big plantation-style agriculture of the time.

 

The term villa could mean either an elegant home or the property attached to it, usually both.  Villas were the country estates of wealthy aristocrats, places they went when they wanted to relax, though they also maintained city dwellings, where the excitement and action took place.  Villas were high-status homes, large, full of atriums, flowering shrubs, mosaics, and bath houses.  They were not a single structure but a collection of structures.  A great many people lived there, under the kindly or not so kindly direction of the head of the household.  Villas also functioned as the centers of the plantation agriculture that marked the Roman Empire.  The slow disappearance of these villas between the third and sixth centuries (it happened at different times in different places) was an indication that the civilization was changing.

A big part of it was the end of plantation-based agriculture.  The Romans had used slaves, not worrying if they were worked to death because new ones were always being captured as the Empire expanded.  But once the Empire stopped conquering new territories and bringing home new slaves, this became a much less viable way to raise crops.  The new Germanic peoples setting in the Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries (Goths around the Mediterranean, Angles and Saxons in Britain, Franks in Gaul) had never used plantation agriculture.  The climate disasters and Black Death of the sixth century, leading to rapid population loss and shrinking of cities (where the produce of the plantations had been bought and sold), meant that people turned to small-scale agriculture.

But what about the villas?  With their economic purpose gone, they became much less viable.  Some of the wealthy Romans instead moved to much smaller, semi-fortified structures on hilltops, feeling the times were much too dangerous for the open villa layout.  But most of the aristocrats who survived moved to the cities with their walls, which were rebuilt around a much smaller population center.

The elegant villa structures themselves fell into disuse.  Because they had been founded in places that were chosen because they were quiet, bucolic, and good for large scale agriculture, rather than at strategically important spots as the cities had been, there was no incentive to maintain them.  Fields once worked by slaves became overgrown with first shrubs, then trees.  

The land attached to villas increasingly became the property of the bishops.  Early medieval bishops in Gaul were mostly from the old aristocracy (and centered in cities), and if they inherited or acquired villas, that land now belonged to the church.  Wealthy families who had moved permanently to the cities considered it an act of piety to give bishops land they no longer wanted, and for which there was no buyer.

In some cases rural monasteries, which really first appeared in Gaul in the seventh century (earlier monasteries had been primarily built in or near the cities), took up the lands and sometimes even the remains of the buildings of the old villas.

 

From the sixth-century population collapse to the first signs of population growth in the late eighth century stretches a little-documented period in which the pattern of rural settlement thoroughly changed.  The cities were still there, but the little rural hamlets of the Empire, the vici, disappeared.  Archaeology suggests that much of the reduced rural population lived in isolated farms.

New villages began appearing in the late eighth century, but they were usually not in the same locations as the old villas, even though the villages (farming communities) were called by the same name in Latin (villa).  The old Gallo-Roman aristocracy had mostly died out, and the new aristocrats established new manor houses for a new form of agricultural organization.  A few old villa structures became repurposed as palaces for the wealthy, but for the most part their mosaics (as seen above) and their pillars were something discovered by accident.

Alexandra Chavarría Arnau discusses the evidence for the decline of late Roman villas in in the volume The Oxford Handbook of the Roman World (ed. Effros and Moreira, 2020).

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on the Roman-medieval transition, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Villages

 We tend to think of medieval villages as small and compact, stone houses close together, with a castle and a church at the center.

Now in fact plenty of medieval villages were built with all the houses close together, along narrow streets, and preferentially built in stone from the late Middle Ages on.  A compact village made sense if one didn't want to waste good agricultural land with buildings and yards, and it provided at least some measure of protection against potential attackers, especially if it had a wall.

Most villages had twisty streets, such as seen above, because the streets just were the openings between the houses, but starting in the twelfth century there were also planned villages, where the streets were laid out in a gridwork pattern (and were still very narrow, forget getting a car down most of them).

But how about the church and the castle?  The church was much more likely to be there than the castle.  Starting in the twelfth century, bishops made a conscious effort to establish parish churches outside of the cities, so that the rural population would have readier access to the sacraments.  A village would get a church and a parish priest, who was usually of peasant stock himself.

 

But castles were a lot more expensive to build than a little parish church, so the idea of a castle in every village would not make sense.  Even more importantly, a castellan lord would normally have multiple villages in his territory, and it really was not worth having multiple castles close together.  (There are plenty of places, especially in southwest France, where multiple castles face each other, but these would have been built on the borders of the territories of rival lords.)  A village located in a strategic place (like a mountain pass) would probably have a castle, but in such a case the castle probably came first, and the village grew up around it.  (See more here on the problem of trying to see every village as coming with a standard castle or manor house.)

Villages were by definition devoted to agriculture.  For a compact village, the surrounding fields were usually divided up among the inhabitants, and they went out every morning to tend their fields.  This worked well in areas of rich soil, where the villagers shared in purchasing and (from the twelfth century on) in using a heavy mould-board plow.

But how about areas with poorer soil, where the lighter-weight aratum plow continued to be used? Here a "village" might not be compact but rather spread out.  It would still function as a village, often having a mayor and certainly having a social sense of identity, but each house and barn would be separated from the next, each being surrounded by its own fields.

Historians used to wonder why some parts of France (especially the southern parts) had the spread-out form of village structure, rather than the compact form, and there was a great deal of speculation about whether the difference marked areas where the original Celtic population remained in the majority versus those areas dominated by the (Germanic) Franks.  But village structure had nothing to do with ethnic identity.  It was based instead on agricultural techniques (and the mould-board plow became common only centuries after the Franks had settled in France).

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

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

Summer in the Middle Ages

We think of summer as long, lazy days, time to relax and have fun.  That's because we're not farmers.  (And in fact the reason there's summer vacation from school is because, through the early twentieth century, it was assumed that kids would be needed in the summer to work on the farm.)

Medieval people did not think of summer as a time to relax.  It was time to get things done.  Since probably 90% of the population was engaged in agriculture, this was the time to plow and plant and weed and chase away critters and harvest.  It was assumed that during, for example, harvest time (winter wheat, planted at the end of autumn, would be harvested in July) everyone would set to work as soon as it was light enough to see and continue working until it was too dark to see.  This is why initially eighteenth-century factories believed in the 18 hour work day ("They work that long in the fields, they can work that long on the factory floor").

Below is a picture of a plowed field.  Even with a tractor, it's going to take you a while to work it.

Travel was far, far easier in the summer, in spite of the heat and muddy roads, than it was during the winter, when one was battling cold and snow and ice (and short days).  So the kings and great lords who traveled around to different parts of their realms did so primarily in the summer.  So did popes--and for the popes, getting out of Rome, which was then prone to malaria, made excellent sense in the summer.

Wars were also fought primarily in the summer.  This had always been true--the Bible talks about "May, when kings go to war."  An army needs forage for the horses and mules, which means waiting until the grass is growing, and it also prefers that the people they are going to raid have enough food on hand to make raiding worthwhile.

Even though winter was the time for story telling--there were a lot of long cold dark hours to fill--the stories were almost always set in the summer.  King Arthur stories typically started with the king at his mid-summer feast, hoping that something marvelous would show up.

Because the most common fabric for clothing was wool, one could get very warm in the summer without the lightweight cottons we take for granted (cotton only reached western Europe in the twelfth century and was expensive--the alternative was linen, also expensive).  Men could wear short sleeved tunics that were about knee length, and nothing underneath, but women were expected to wear long skirts, not shorts or mini-skirts.  They did tuck their skirts up when working in the field, but they were still more heavily dressed than the men.

Without electricity, no one before the late nineteenth century could have any kind of fan (other than one a human waved), much less air conditioning.  Northern Europe was still cool enough for most of the summer that it wouldn't become unbearable, but around the Mediterranean things definitely got toasty.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval life, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Trackless wilderness

There was not much trackless wilderness in western Europe in the high or late Middle Ages.  Pretty much all of the land that is now being cultivated was already cultivated in the twelfth century.  In England, the census of property and revenues called the Domesday Book (1086) listed most of the villages that are there now.  Indeed, there may have been a higher rural population in the fourteenth century in much of western Europe than there is now.

The early Middle Ages, however, had had wilderness.  Western Europe had suffered serious population loss at the end of the Roman Empire, due to the onset of the mini-ice age (making it harder to get in crops), the Black Death, and war.  With no one cultivating the fields, they were taken over by brush and trees.  But by the eleventh century, wilderness was being pushed back.

A common term in charters of the eleventh and twelfth centuries was assart, meaning newly cleared and cultivated land.  In the twelfth century a lot of landlords established what were called "new towns," new villages laid out in areas that had not been producing crops, with appealingly low rents.

From our perspective, even a cleared and cultivated medieval European landscape would have seemed fairly wild.  There were no highways, just some fairly well worn trade routes (many Roman roads in origin) and a complex tangle of tracks, joining farms and villages with each other.  Finding one's way without road signs, maps, or GPS would have been, shall we say, a challenge.  And there were certainly still plenty of uninhabited areas, and the cities were very small by our standards.

Once the wilderness started to disappear, people began to miss it—the same change of heart happened later in North America.  Wilderness especially was considered (potentially) holy in the twelfth century, a place where one went to break away from ordinary life and worldly distractions.  The new monastic order of the Cistercians was especially interested in siting their monasteries in areas that they could describe as the realms of thorns and wild beasts.  They became very good at clearing land and draining marshy areas, so in spite of their attraction to wilderness their immediate reaction was to try to make it less wild.

Hermits continued to seek out wilderness areas, but like the first hermits in Roman Egypt, they couldn't be too far away from civilization, or no one would be able to come out from town and make them little offerings; after all, nuts and berries will get you only so far.

By the early modern period, western Europe was thoroughly tamed, with wild areas quite limited.  Thus it must have been quite a shock when Europeans reached the Americas and realized, for example, that it was solid trees from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.

Their immediate reaction was the same as that of their twelfth-century ancestors:  Wilderness bad!  Cropland good!  Chop those trees down!  In Ohio people recorded that enormous oaks were cut down and burned in pyres that could be seen for miles.  By the twentieth century, however, there was a Whoops! moment that led to the establishment of national parks, to preserve the remaining trackless wilderness.

Now in fact it wasn't solid trees when the white man arrived, even though it has been said accurately that a squirrel could have traveled hundreds and hundreds of miles without coming down from the trees.  The Native Americans had practiced low-level agriculture, and they had cleared promising areas (fairly flat, fertile land, well-watered without being water-logged).  For example, in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains white men who were moving west, looking for a place to settle, found open meadows and decided this would be a good place to stop.

The Cherokees who had been cultivating the area had suffered serious population loss, due in large part to European diseases like smallpox to which they had no immunity.  (Some have managed to remain, however.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on monasticism and medieval agriculture, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

Rain

It's a cold, rainy February day.  A good time to blog about rain in the Middle Ages.

As any farmer will tell you (and there are fewer active farmers all the time in the US), growing food is dependent on a foot or so of topsoil and the fact that it rains.  Without water falling out of the sky, agriculture is just not going to work.  The vast majority of people in the Middle Ages lived on a working farm, and they knew this very well.

But how about irrigation? you say.  Certainly medieval people knew about irrigation ditches, even if they didn't have the elaborate machine-driven irrigation systems used today in, for example, California's central valley.  In the ancient world, the "fertile crescent" between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in what is now Iraq, got much of its water via irrigation ditches from the rivers.  It didn't rain very much in ancient Egypt either, but the barley fields were irrigated by the Nile.  But in these places, as in medieval Europe, where do you think the river water came from?  That's right, rain.

Rain also provided drinking water in many places.  A castle up on an inaccessible mountain, for example, would not have a decent well and thus would collect rainwater, both for drinking and cooking and for everything else water was used for.

Now in the Middle Ages, as now, too much rain could be as much of a problem as it is now.  Floods in a city (and all cities were built on rivers) caused all sorts of problems.  Flooded fields meant that crops couldn't be planted, or couldn't be harvested, or rotted without ripening.  But overall rain was considered good.

On the other hand, it was just as uncomfortable then as it is now to be out in the rain, and they had far fewer things to keep the rain off.  We reach for our umbrellas.  Well, umbrellas only became available in the West in the seventeenth century.  China and Japan had long had parasols (Japan's mostly made of paper, thus better to keep off the sun than the rain), and Europe probably got umbrellas from the East.

The image is a van Dyke painting of a seventeenth-century lady with an umbrella.  It was a new, fashionable invention.  The word umbrella comes the Latin umbra, meaning shade.  The Brits often call them brolleys (derived from umbrella).  Americans, for reasons obscure, may call them bumbershoots.

Medieval people also didn't have raincoats.  Look at the tag in your raincoat.  It is probably made at least partially from nylon or polyester or else has a plastic-based finish.  Medieval people had very tightly woven boiled wool.  Wrap your cloak around you and put up the hood.  At least wool will continue to keep you warm even when it's wet, but it would soak through fairly soon.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017

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.