AGRICULTURE IN MEDIEVAL FRANCE

 

Throughout the Middle Ages, a huge majority of France’s population was engaged in agriculture; land with the laborers on it remained the primary source of wealth even after towns, commerce, and industry revived later in the period. From late antiquity to the 9th century, although there were some independent peasant holdings, agriculture was generally practiced on great estates or villas that were the successors of Roman villas. These estates, organized and worked under a system called manorialism, tended to be self-sufficient, having little recourse to trade and producing for all their own needs. A small surplus went to support the warrior or clerical owner, but few of the villas were large enough to have supported a great man and his retinue through a twelve-month period; to live off their estates, early-medieval lords had to move from one to the next during the year.

Ownership of such estates and rights to the tenancies within them became more fragmented as the centuries passed; by the 12th century, inefficiencies of scale and the numerous middlemen who had inserted themselves between peasants and owners often meant that what remained of the old Carolingian villa produced little for its owners. In the 10th and 11th centuries, however, this situation began to be alleviated by an expansion of cultivation into nearby forest and waste, where new fields, called by such names as appendariae or bordariae, were both more fertile and more profitable. Lords attempted to reap benefits from the expanded tillage by instituting new types of taxation (based on the bannum), by building new mills, ovens, and winepresses, and by encouraging the settlement of forested areas. It was frequently the lords who instigated the foundation of new villages in forest and waste, which would yield them considerable revenues, or who encouraged settlement in reclaimed coastal and riverine marshes.

The main crop produced by medieval agriculture was cereal, but cereal production was practiced within a mixed system of pastoralism and animal husbandry, gardening, viticulture, and, along the Mediterranean coastline, olioculture. Relative dependence on cereals and pastoralism as well as the details of agricultural organization varied with local conditions in each of the numerous pays, or regions, but two major zones of agriculture can be distinguished: the flat wheat-producing plain of the north and the more rugged, often mountainous sheep- and rye-producing regions of the south. Several varieties of wheat, sometimes mixed together, along with rye, oats, barley, and pulses (peas, beans), were produced. The Romans and Christianity had encouraged the spread of viticulture throughout France, even into regions today considered wholly unsuited to wine production. Particularly in the early Middle Ages, when yields from the fields were low, there was considerable dependence by all areas on hunting and fishing, and on the forest surrounding cultivated areas for pasture for pigs and products like nuts, berries, and honey. Later, although the clearing of forest and increased limitations on its use came at a time in the central Middle Ages that is associated with increased agricultural yields, the growing difficulty of access to forest resources must have made the famines of the early 14th century even more devastating.

In the early Middle Ages, the major tool for cultivation was the Roman, or scratch, plow (araire), which was usually pulled by two oxen over fields made roughly square, since they were plowed across and then again at right angles to the original plowing. Even in later centuries, the scratch plow and the accompanying two-year rotation course would be favored particularly in the Midi, where soils were light and dry, and wherever rural populations were too poor to adopt the heavier, more expensive wheeled plow, which needed more animal power for traction than the scratch plow. During the early period, the organization of tillage was generally on a two-year, two-course rotation in which winter wheat was sown in one of two fields each fall, while the other lay fallow for the entire year. Small bits of outfield or garden plots around homesteads may have been planted with pulses or oats in the spring. Yields were poor—generally no more than 2.5- or 3-to-l yield to seed.

Probably even in the late Roman period, wherever there was sufficient spring and summer rain, some spring sowing was done along with the more usual fall planting, or if winter crops failed. Later, in heavily populated areas of the north (as documented in the 9th-century ecclesiastical surveys of great estates called polyptychs), the spring planting was gradually incorporated into some variation of a three-course, three-field rotation. In this rotation scheme, one field was planted to winter wheat, one to a spring crop like oats, and only a third of the field was left fallow each year. In many areas, this three-field system was probably introduced after clearance of additional land from forest and waste to make a third field. Even where it was introduced without an associated expansion of arable land, such a three-course rotation effectively increased the total arable land under cultivation in any year. Unless other improvements in agricultural practice were also introduced, the new rotation methods would not have improved production for long, for yields should have dropped on fields expected to produce in two out of three instead of one out of two years. Instead, in this period, not only did older fields produce slightly more often, but yield/seed ratios actually appear to have increased to about 4 to 1 by the 14th century. 

These higher yields are significant, since they produced a doubling of net yields or consumable produce from earlier gross yields of 2.5 to 1. Yields were maintained partly due to more frequent plowing of the fallow lands and the introduction of spring crops, such as oats and pulses, which had nitrogen-fixing capability. More important were better iron tools, which allowed clearance of new lands, and the introduction of the heavy, wheeled plow, or charrue. In addition to wheels, this plow had an iron cutting knife, or coulter, which went ahead of the share to cut open the soil, an iron share, and an iron or wooden moldboard, which turned over the sod completely in one direction or the other. This meant that it dug deeper into the soil to turn over the sod sufficiently to increase the fertility of existing tillage, and it could be used for tilling the heavier soils of river valleys previously inaccessible to agriculture. The disadvantage of the new plow was that it required eight oxen or a pair of horses to pull it, an expense that often must have been shared among villagers. It was also considerably harder to turn this plow. The shape of holdings in fields needed to be changed to the long, slightly S-shaped strips familiar from aerial photographs; except where it was introduced in entirely noval lands, this must have meant a considerable redistribution of village lands when the new plow was adopted. The new wheeled plow was frequently pulled by horses, an innovation that was possible only after the introduction of the horse collar, better hitching methods, and iron horseshoes. The use of horses thus, like the plow itself, required increased availability of iron and is linked to increased iron production and the burgeoning of forges throughout the countryside during this period. The horses used to pull these plows, like the mounts of the warriors who owned the estates, were fed oats, a spring crop, so that the introduction of horse power in the fields also probably encouraged the spread of the new three-course rotation.

These interrelated innovations in agricultural practice and technology appeared in France between the years 950 and 1150, particularly in the region north of the Loire, and would be distributed fairly widely in north and central France (although much less so in the Midi, where soil and climate were not appropriate) by the 12th and 13th centuries. They marked what has rightfully been called the “Agricultural Revolution of the Middle Ages.” This revolution was accompanied by considerable demographic growth, by a widespread expansion of the total area under cultivation in France, by the building of castles by territorial lords, by increased agricultural yields, and by a revival of towns and specialized artisanship in those towns. Much of this revolution, which took place in the 10th and 11th centuries, is undocumented, for there is a dearth of records for the period during and after the 9th-century invasions. Until recently, historians gave credit for the agricultural revolution to monks, particularly the new monks of the 12th century. More recent studies instead show that anonymous peasants needing more land for their families, hermits going out to live alone in the forest, and lords intent on getting a share of the profits of expansion by encouraging settlement advance and technological innovation were all more important than the religious orders.

By the 12th century, for which documents are much more abundant, the major parts of this transformation had taken place. Secondary improvements continued into the 13th century and were often promoted by the new monastic groups. They included the consolidation of fragments of old estates, the elimination of middlemen from claims to the produce of estates, the building and improvement of mills, an improved ratio of animals to arable land through the introduction of transhumance, and the beginnings of selective breeding of animals. Efficiencies were also created when monastic owners of the new consolidated estates of the central Middle Ages cultivated their great demesnes or granges with hired laborers or domestic servitors or lay brothers. However, this last was a short-lived phenomenon, for by the 14th century such demesnes had been rented out to farmers at a fixed rent or in sharecropping contracts.

By the 13th century, the rural world was considerably different from that of the early Middle Ages. The old villa and the social structure associated with it had broken down, as manorialism was replaced by seigneurialism. Peasants were no longer on the verge of starvation but were able to support a growing population of townspeople. Remaining forest was less dense and was threatened more from demand for building materials and fuel for the towns than by clearance; contention over forest rights increased. Pigs grazing in forest, the major protein source for the earlier period, were replaced by transhumant sheep moved seasonally from region to region. There was a shift in diet, not just from pork to lamb, but general improvement—from a diet often based entirely on cereals to one including much more meat, cheese, and other animal products, as well as increasingly good and abundant wines. Other demand, particularly for industrial materials, such as wool, hides and leather, dyes, hemp, flax, and parchment for book and document making, was also beginning to influence rural production.

By the late 12th century, there were indications of problems to come. For instance, peasant cultivators were already finding that not all the newly cleared and drained lands were fertile or reliable enough to provide a livelihood and were abandoning some of them. Grants of frequently flooded but extremely fertile river-valley fields were often made to monks and other religious groups who could keep up the dikes and absorb the risks of crop failure. Near the great cities, some owners and peasants ceased cereal production altogether in favor of commercial production for market, particularly of wines, dyestuffs, and garden produce, making themselves wholly dependent on grain shipments, which in times of dearth would not be forthcoming. Population continued to grow, although by 1300 the pace of that growth was falling off. From that date on, there are indications of feeble attempts to again breach what remained of the great medieval forests or to reclaim land on the coasts. A series of poor harvests, warfare, famine, and increasing malnutrition left the population particularly susceptible to the Black Death in 1348. Afterward, despite population losses, rural prosperity only gradually declined. With a smaller labor force was seen the abandonment of the least productive lands, the renting out of demesnes, and increasing interest in animal husbandry.

In the late 14th and the 15th century, agriculture came more under the control of the wealthiest peasants, who farmed or sharecropped the demesnes. Lords abandoning the countryside for the towns, depended increasingly on seigneurial rights and dues, or on fixed rents. With the exception of the importation into the Midi of new crops and irrigation practices from Arab-controlled parts of Spain in this later period, and except in the vicinity of the great cities whose markets encouraged new forms of cropping, medieval agricultural practice remained more or less unchanged from the 13th through the early-modern centuries.

Written by Constance H.Berman in "Medieval France, An Encyclopedia", William W Kibler editor, Taylor & Francis/Routledge, UK, 1995, excerpts pp.20-24. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.