Agricultural Production and the Rural Economy

Sources

Food Production. The overall structure of the European economy was shaped by food production; other economic activities ceased if there was too little food to go around. The absolute importance of food production in the late medieval economy can be demonstrated in many ways, but the most obvious one is that between 75 percent to 90 per-cent of the total population lived in the countryside and between 75 percent to 95 percent of those people would consider agricultural production to be their primary occupation. In most of Europe, the main activity in agricultural production was growing a grain crop such as wheat or rye, which was the staple of the diet of nearly everyone.

Patterns. Most food was perishable and bulky. It had to be consumed close to where it was produced because the costs of transporting it were too high. As a result large cities developed in areas that produced lots of surplus food or had easy access to supplies on major trade routes. Though almost every city was surrounded by fields tended by city residents, the vast majority of grain came from the country-side, grown by peasants living in villages. Even small towns depended on nearby villages to sustain them. The supply pattern was interconnected: one small town was supported by several villages; one larger town was supported by several small towns and their local villages; the largest towns were supported by a network of large towns. This pattern meant that there were at least three distinct economic units in Europe: the countryside, the small town, and the large city. In the countryside, the village was more prominent than the freestanding farmstead for organizing grain production. At least three-quarters of the European workforce had to grow food to make it possible for the remaining quarter to do anything else.

Basic Agricultural Practices. The basic conditions of agricultural production did not change much in the Renaissance and Reformation eras. In the Mediterranean area, the triad of wheat, olive oil, and wine dominated the rural economy, just as it had since ancient times. Soils were light and could be worked by a scratch plow and planted in grains in alternating years. North of the Alps, heavier soils favored cereal crops such as wheat, rye, oats, and barley, as well as livestock. The basic production technique was three-course crop rotation, in which one of three fields remained fallow to replenish the lost nutrients every year.

Three-course Crop Rotation. The three-course crop rotation system had been perfected early in the Middle Ages and was little changed in 1350. Its demands and rhythms influenced rural life in many ways. It favored production in small- to medium-sized villages rather than in isolated family farms, because different people’s lands could be worked simultaneously side by side in a village. Livestock raising was closely connected with three-course crop rotation because draft animals had to pull the heavier plows better suited to the richer soils, and the manure from the

animals was vital to the replenishment of the fallow land. In fact, work and manure, not meat and dairy products, were the main contributions that cattle and horses made to the economy. However, raising livestock complicated the land-use pattern of the village. The fallows did not produce enough by themselves to feed the livestock, so some area around the village had to be turned into pasture for grazing or meadow for hay production. Often meadows and pastures were not owned by individual villagers but were communal property of the entire village, with complex regulations about whose animals would be allowed to graze them and when.

Scattered, Small Plots. Not everyone in a village could afford to keep draft animals or a heavy plow with yoke and harness. The nature of three-course crop rotation made it less necessary for each individual villager to be completely independent and self-sufficient in that manner. The division of the fields into three rotations was done on a village-wide basis, not on the basis of individual landowners. Individual owners did not have one big chunk of land in one of the three fields; instead, they had lots of smaller pieces scattered among all three of the fields.

Insurance against Risk. Ownership of scattered property provided a kind of insurance against the tricks of nature. If all of one’s lands were planted in wheat the year a wheat blight came through, it would be two more years before one would have a chance to recoup that loss; but if only a third of one’s land was in wheat that year, one could start recouping one’s losses the next year, and maybe one’s oats crop would thrive. The scattering of small parcels of land made it more efficient to organize work in the fields in teams covering several different people’s plots, instead of one individual’s plots. Those villagers without cattle or plows could “trade” their services in weeding or harvesting for the plowing of their plots.

Seasonally of Work and Profits. The fact that the fields of the village were organized around the key crops also imposed seasonal rhythms on production. Labor was particularly intense at sowing and harvesting time. At other times of the year, less had to be done and peasant labor was idle. This situation affected wage rates for agricultural laborers, which would be high in peak season, but low in the off season.

Price Fluctuations. The fact that nearly all the grain from a village went to market at the same time meant that prices were depressed at harvest time and then rose as sup-plies diminished. The poor usually had to sell as soon as the crops were harvested, when the price was lowest, because they needed money to pay debts. Only those villagers who produced a significant surplus could hope to profit from price fluctuations. Yields from the leading crops were fairly small, often just four or five times the seed sown. With a yield of five times the seed sown, peasants had to save 20 percent of their crop every year for next year’s seed. After paying rents and taxes, villagers might only store one-half or less of their harvest to tide them over to the next year.

Influence of the Towns. From the perspective of the economy as a whole, there was a problem with the village-based production of grain used to support the rest of society. Most villagers, if they had been given the choice, might have organized themselves in completely self-sufficient units, providing enough food to feed themselves, along with clothing and other products to satisfy their needs. How, then, were townspeople to get any of the food? A couple of factors contributed to “loosening up” some of the grain in the village and making it available to towns. First was the system of actual landownership. That system forced villagers to give up a portion of their produce as rent for the land. Second was the rights that towns were able to exert over the making of products other than grain and livestock. Some villagers might have been eager to spend their spare time in the slack agricultural seasons producing the other necessities of life such as clothing, implements, and furniture. However, towns generally insisted on, and could enforce, regulations preventing villagers from doing anything but the most routine manufacturing. Towns had a market right over the surrounding countryside, forcing villagers to sell agricultural products in the town and spend that money on crafts produced in the town.

Ownership of the Land. The land tenure system had a profound effect on the rural economy. A system that evolved in the Middle Ages, it had developed an enormous number of variations by the Renaissance and Reformation. Its theoretical basis was encapsulated in the French expression nulle terre sans seigneur, “no lands without a lord.” All land in a territory belonged ultimately to the king. However, over time, the king had supposedly given some of that land to other nobles in exchange for their support in defending the kingdom. Those nobles, in turn, kept some of the land as their personal domain, to be farmed according to their own rules, but turned over the rest of the land to farmers, who could farm it according to their own needs, in cooperation with the rest of the village. For all practical purposes, the farmers “owned” that land: they could sell bits of it to other farmers or pass it down to their children. Yet, what they actually owned was the usufruct, or right to use the land. The farmer-owners had to recognize the over-lordship of the landowner by paying clearly defined rents and acknowledging various other prerogatives of lordship. These payments were set by local custom and, while they could not be adjusted at the whim of the lord, they could be burdensome.

Crop Payments. Village grain thus came on the market in the local towns because it was siphoned off as rents by local lords. In some areas those rents might be a fixed percentage of a year’s harvest, but most of the time they were a fixed amount that was due no matter how good or bad the harvest had been. The obligations could be paid in a wide variety of crops. It was common for peasants to have to provide their lords with a goose at Christmastime, a chicken at Michaelmas, a carton of eggs at Easter, and a bucket of tallow, along with a few bushels of wheat or rye. In some areas these various obligations were converted into a cash equivalent sometime during the Middle Ages. Over time, the value of that cash equivalent diverged in relation to the underlying product. Peasants either benefited or suffered because of the conversion to cash, depending on the inflation rate.

Innovations in Land Management. In the course of the sixteenth century, some of the underlying assumptions of village-based three-field crop rotation began to be challenged. A split developed between Western and Eastern Europe. In Eastern Europe, farming became organized in large noble-run farms. Unlike the more subsistence-oriented village economy, these large farms produced grain primarily for export. Grain would be shipped downriver to Baltic seaports, where it would be transported through the Danish sound to Antwerp. (Later in the seventeenth century Amsterdam became the main destination instead of Antwerp.) Though owned by nobles, these farms were more “capitalist” in character than feudal because they relied on the international export market.

Enclosure. A similar capitalist spirit became apparent in the Western European countryside as well. Some villagers broke free from traditional communal agriculture and focused on intensifying production for the grain market. The most conspicuous way that innovative land management happened was through the phenomenon of enclosure. Prosperous villagers used their preferred position in local administration to acquire the scattered bits of land of different peasant owners and draw them together into larger units. These larger farms operated more efficiently by using paid labor from landless villagers than through the cooperative labor of small landholders. Enclosure became a major concern in England, where it even became a target of criticism from the humanist writer Sir Thomas More in his novel Utopia (1516). In France, by contrast, village institutions and customs remained stronger and inhibited the building of unified farms. Some attribute the growing prosperity of England in relation to France to this difference in the organization of agricultural production, which made it possible for England to become more open to entrepreneurial ideas.

Low Countries. By the end of the sixteenth century, the new pattern of Baltic trade meant that Dutch cities no longer had to rely on the surrounding countryside to support their basic needs. The Low Countries (present-day Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg) thus became the first area to develop extensive specialization in nongrain crops to supplement the main dietary needs. Various kinds of vegetable farming, called garden farming, provided the main new crop. However, another notable innovation was in nonconsumable products like flowers. In the seventeenth century, Holland got caught up in a speculative frenzy over rare varieties of tulip. That excitement was made possible not only because of the differences in Holland’s markets but also because land was no longer needed to raise wheat and rye and could be put to other uses.

Sources

Marc Bloc, French Rural History: An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics,translated by Janet Sondheimer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).

Carlo M. Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000-1700, third edition (New York: Norton, 1993).

Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500-1850 (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).