EUROPEAN AGRICULTURE IN THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE

Not until the ninth century is a window into agricultural conditions opened by the polyptyques, or registers of land and tenants of certain Carolingian monasteries. The tradition of making such records derives from the cadastres of the later Roman empire and was continued in the English Domesday Book. Seven such records survive, as well as a number of fragments which are too incomplete to be of much use. Each describe a group of scattered monastic lands, but they are not strictly comparable in form and content, nor can it be said that they were typical of conditions of landholding in the Carolingian empire in the ninth century. It is likely that much of the agricultural land was held in small units by free peasants.
Indeed, one of the polyptyques, that of Saint-Pierre of Ghent, is in effect a catalogue of donations of land, most of them quite small, to the monastery. There was a strong tendency for small holdings to be absorbed into large estates, probably by the gift of their owners who deeded the land either to a monastery or to a lay landowner in return for protection.
In each survey the lands were grouped into villae or fiscs. Most, especially the larger ones, were bipartite, and the land was divided into demesne, which was cultivated on behalf of the monastery, and dependent tenures, cultivated by the peasantry in return for labor services and payments in kind. The bipartite manor was common on the lands of Saint-Germain, Saint-Remy, Lobbes, and Saint-Bertin, which lay mainly on the good soils of the Paris basin and northern France, but was rare in the Low Countries and in the Ardennes and Eifel. One can only deduce from this that the feudal process had made more headway in France than in its eastern borderlands. The size of villae cannot always be gauged with accuracy. In the Paris basin and northern France, they appear to have been large and probably centered in nucleated villages. But to the west of Paris, in Flanders, and in the Ardennes-Eiffel they were in general small. In the case of the last, this was probably a consequence of the poor soil and rough terrain.
On the matter of field systems and crops the polyptyques are tantalizingly vague. It is evident that agricultural systems were in process of development, slowly progressing from their infinitely varied origins toward a common form with demesne, tenant land, and labor dues. Only in one case, that of the very small polyptyque of Saint-Amand, is there evidence of what is commonly assumed to have been the typical medieval field and cropping system. Such equality between fall sown, spring sown, and fallow land surely denotes a simple three-course system with, in all probability, wheat or rye sown in the fall, and oats or barley in the spring. On five manors belonging to the monastery of Lobbes the amounts of grain sown were The approximate equality between crops normally sown in fall and spring is again suggestive of a three-course system.
On the other hand, the total amounts of grain sown on the demesnes of Saint-Remy and received as rent present in this respect a picture of utter confusion. The predominance of spelt — over 80 percent of the cereals cultivated — suggests strongly that there was no regular rotation, such as was assumed above for Saint-Amand. The same can be said of many of the manors of Priim, where oats was the only recorded crop; and at Aldenselen, in the Netherlands, was a tract of land which took oats "whenever" it was sown. There is no evidence of a quantitative nature for other parts of Europe, and one can only assume that elsewhere too the formation of estates and demesnes was followed by a kind of streamlining of their administration, aimed presumably at securing a regular supply of appropriate cereals.

Grain crops provided most of the food supply, but a wide range of vegetables was grown, probably in garden plots. The chief drink was beer, brewed from malt which had been made mainly from oats. Wine was produced in only a few wellfavored areas, foremost among them the Seine valley near Paris, in the vicinity of Reims and along the valleys of the Moselle and Rhine. The Reims region was, as it remains, the most northerly wine-producing region of significance in France, and some northern monasteries acquired small estates there in order to insure their supply. Some of the tenants of Lobbes, which had few vineyards of its own, were required each year to make the long journey to Reims with their carts to fetch wine for their masters. The most northerly vineyards recorded were near Lille and Ghent, where their cultivation can have been justified only by the difficulty and cost of bringing wine from better sited but more distant vineyards.
Most of the manors listed in the polyptyques possessed meadow which could be cut for hay, but amounts were generally small. Only on the damp soils of Flanders was meadow really extensive. Rough grazing land played an important role in the economy of the Carolingian villae since it alone provided animal feed throughout the year. But it was rarely mentioned in the polyptyques, perhaps because it was abundant and was taken for granted.
The record is strangely silent on the subject of farm animals. There must have been oxen for the plow and sheep to supply wool for the small cloth manufacture, but the only beast of which we have numerical record was the hog. On a single villa near Lille 1,025 grazed the woods and there were 645 baccones,, or sides of bacon, salted down. In addition, immense numbers of poultry were kept if one may judge from the chickens and eggs, which formed part of the rents. Not only did the abundant woodland support pigs, the chief source of animal protein, but it also supplied wood for a multitude of purposes, from construction timber — rafters, roofing shingles — to barrel staves and vine poles, as well as oak bark for tanning. Inroads were being made in the forests for settlement and cultivation. Their extent cannot be known, but at one villa of Saint-Germain enough land had very recently been cleared to sow sixty measures of wheat.
East of the Rhine field systems were even more rudimentary than in northwest Europe. Population was less dense and a system of shifting agriculture was probably used. The chief crops were rye, the breadgrain of the Germans, oats, barley, and garden vegetables. Animals were relatively more numerous, as is demonstrated by the numbers of bones found at excavated sites. Cattle were especially numerous in the northern plain, and sheep in the hills. The farther north one went, the more important did pastoral activities become, until in Sweden and along the coast of Norway, cattle, supplemented with fishing, provided the greater part of the food supply. The Norse sagas portray a society in which cutting and drying the hay were the chief events of the farming year.
In such a marginal environment the greatest possible use had to be made of the land, and the high fields were grazed in summer by transhumant animals. Agriculture was more precarious in southern Europe owing to its climatic regime, and was more easily interrupted. The insecurity resulting from the great invasions had led the population to concentrate in large villages. Coastal plains were in some measure abandoned. They became marshy in winter or were grazed by transhumant flocks which migrated to the hills in spring. Southern Italy was slowly slipping into the condition of backwardness and depression which was to characterize much of it until modern times. A greater prosperity marked central and northern Italy. Here the popes attempted to establish farms in the Campagna, and in the north there were monastic estates as well managed as any in northern France.
The monastery of Bobbio, in the northern Apennines, for example, controlled a vast area and received each year far more grain, hay, wine, and animal products than were necessary to support the house. It even possessed olive groves beside the distant shores of Lake Garda, since the olive would not grow in its hilly environment. Another monastery, St. Julia at Brescia, held extensive lands in the northern plain, where its tenants grew cereals, olives, and the grape vine and sent their animals up into the Alps in summer. Here cheese was made and used to pay rents due to the monastery.
Coastal parts of Italy were exposed to Moorish raids, which restricted development, but in Spain the Moors had themselves settled along the Mediterranean coast. Here they repaired and extended the irrigation works of the Romans and developed an intensive agriculture which lasted until their expulsion from the peninsula early in the seventeenth century.
Little is known of agricultural conditions within the Byzantine empire. A document known as the Farmer's Law, and probably relating to Macedonia or Thrace, shows a society of peasant farmers cultivating small parcels of land intermixed with one another, growing the grapevine, and keeping large numbers of animals. The cultivators were probably in the main descendants of the Slavs who had invaded this region some two centuries earlier. Among their products was almost certainly the grain which they shipped along the coast to provision Constantinopie. Anglo-Saxon England, like much of continental Europe, was in the early ninth century moving slowly toward a feudal mode of landholding. Estates were being formed, cultivated by dependent peasants who owed specific obligations. At the end of the next century an English document, known as the Rights and Duties of all Persons, defined with considerable care the obligations of the unfree and half free peasants.
On some estates the gebur, "boor" or villein had to work "two days at week-work at such work as is bidden him . . . and in the harvest three days . . . and from Candelmas [February 2] to Easter [the period of spring plowing and sowing] three." One is reminded of the peasants' lament in Aelfric's dialogue: "I work very hard; I go out at daybreak, drive the oxen to the field and yoke them to the plow. Never is winter weather so severe that I dare remain at home; for I fear my master. But when the oxen are yoked to the plow and the share and coulter fastened on every day I must plow a full acre or more."

 Evidently he used a heavy, moldboard plow, able to turn the sod and bury the weeds. But what he grew is far from clear. Breadgrains were without doubt the chief crop, and barley was in all probability the most cultivated. This is confirmed both by the evidence of place-names and the impressions left in the rough, hand-thrown pottery made by the Anglo-Saxons, but wheat, oats, and rye were also grown.

By N.J.G. Pounds (Indiana University) in the book 'An Historical Geography of Europe', Cambridge University Press, UK, 1990, p.102-107. Edited and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.