Economic History

Agriculture

Introduction

Despite all the attention in this course on towns and princely courts, most people in Europe lived in small communities of under a thousand people, and most of those were farmers. Some who farmed were peasants, some were serfs, some were free. Some were landless, hiring out by the day; in the United States in later centuries these were known as hired hands. Conversely, there were peasants who were not farmers; for example, village artisans such as the blacksmith or miller.

Moreover, farming was not an exclusive occupation even for the full-time farmer. A typical family not only raised crops; the wife might do cloth work for a merchant, the men would also hunt and fish, and sheep or geese or pigs often gave employment to children. In short, farming was not the only economic activity in the countryside, though it was the dominant.

Subsistence farming—the idea that a family had to grow or make everything it needed—is a modern myth. There was always a need for cash, at least from the late Middle Ages onward and much earlier in some parts of Europe. Certain items always needed to be purchased, and most families in most years would have a few items they could sell or barter. There were tiny rural markets all across Europe—no more than a designated day in a designated place at a crossroads or on a green—where people from the district would come with a cart or just a blanket. There they would sell some eggs, butter, cheese, a live animal or two, dried or cured meat; the best stuff always went to the market. The family got what was left, if anything. In addition to local markets, itinerant merchants brought dry goods from the cities: cloth, buttons, needles and pins, other small metalware, simple jewelry, medicines, and anything else they could hawk. These same men were agents of communication, bringing news of the wide world, sometimes badly garbled. News could have economic implications when it was news of war, or famine, or of some wonder crop from the New World.

Trends

To a casual observer, the countryside might seem to have changed little over the centuries. The same techniques were being used, for the most part, the same small villages dotted the landscape. Look more carefully, however, and the countryside appears to be in constant flux. There was always expansion and contraction of arable land, in direct response to demographic pressures. The period immediately before ours saw a major retreat all across Europe in the wake of the Black Death and especially in the wake of its repeated visitations. Literally hundreds and even thousands of villages were abandoned.

Beginning in the later 1400s, agricultural cultivation expanded. It grew for about a century, held steady into the Thirty Years War, then contracted again until around 1750.

Serfdom

East and West Europe had been slowly diverging in their patterns of landholding for a century or more, with the peasants of the west coming to hold their farms through payment of cash rents, while those of the east became more and more servile. This trend was about to accelerate, largely due to political factors. As the great lords of the east grew in power, they tended to specialize, growing wheat on vast estates, raising livestock on sprawling ranches, or exploiting the raw resources of their forests and mines, all intended for the hungry markets of the west.

A third trend was only just beginning to be in evidence. This period sees the first decisive steps in making agriculture a capitalistic enterprise. We see more and more members outside the nobility acquiring land, and we see them doing so with the specific and conscious purpose of trying to maximize the income from it. Land was becoming an investment.

Finally, the New World was being opened up, as were the markets of India, Africa, and the Far East. These were about to have an enormous impact on the overall wealth of Europe, and on the fortunes of individual families and states. But they would also have a profound impact on ordinary farmers in certain parts of Europe, who found that they could plant new crops that were either more profitable, more reliable, or both.

In short, then, there were indeed major changes afoot in the countryside. These changes brought new possibilities to some and brought wrenching dislocation to others. We will here restrict our considerations to economic consequences, but it should not be forgotten that many of these shifts had social and even political consequences as well.

Crops

The types of crops grown were dictated mainly by the climate and the nature of the soil. Europe divides very generally into the region where the olive is grown and the region where it cannot grow, with an intermediary region characterized by cultivation of grapes, which extend further north than does the growing of olives. The distinction is fundamental and ancient. One sort of diet relies on olive oil for cooking, while another sort of diet relies on butter. This extends beyond cooked foods, for there is a cluster of other foods that go with the one or the other, so that a European from the butter region might actually get sick eating a strictly southern diet. Pilgrims, for example, from the north were advised in handbooks to bring some of their native foods when going to Jerusalem, so as to mitigate the effects of the Mediterranean food.

Regardless of region, wheat was the staple crop of Europe. Bread was made from wheat, and the entire rest of the European diet was based around it. In addition to wheat, farmers grew rye, barley and buckwheat, which tended to do better on poorer soils. They made their bread from these grains only when wheat was too expensive.

Crops from the New World

A marvelous cornucopia of new plants came from the New World. Although gold and silver made a more spectacular entrance, it was the crops of the New World that had the longer-term impact on the economy of Europe. I will here only make enough of a sketch to give some idea of the range of that impact.

Let's start with beer. Hops were first planted in the 16th century. Beer can be made without hops, but with it not only does the beer have a new flavor, it also keeps better and is more of a commercial product that can be shipped.

The discovery of a whole world of new plants produced a boom in herbology and pharmacology. In fact, almost every new plant brought back to Europe was marketed initially for medical purposes.

Tobacco caught on very quickly, initially as a medicinal herb. Sir Walter Raleigh made smoking fashionable, though the practice probably goes back to Hawkins and Drake. It was smoked in a pipe and spread to Germany and Holland in that form. The Spanish imported directly from South America the practice of smoking cigars.

It didn't take long for people to decide that smoking was bad for you. In 1603 King James I of England wrote "Counterblaste to Tobacco." In 1635 France tried to make tobacco a prescription drug. In 17th century Russia, smoking was punishable by having the nose cut off. The legislation, as well as the moralizing, was largely ineffective.

In England, farmers found tobacco was a great cash crop and grew it in the west counties. In 1620 this was outlawed, but the practice continued. Charles II tried to enforce the law, and there were riots in Winchcomb and Cheltenham in 1666 when army troops were used to destroy crops. Cultivation in England didn't end until around 1690.

Columbus brought back maize (=corn in America) and the sweet potato in 1494. Other New World crops included artichokes and string beans, tomatoes and chili peppers. All of these were mainly luxury crops at first, gaining general acceptance only slowly.

One exception was the potato. It was in Spain by 1573 and was in Ireland by 1606. Because it was more resistant to disease, and because it will grow in almost any soil, it became a favorite crop of the poor.

New crops had economic consequences. The Irish had traditionally grown barley for bread, but the potato replaced that over the course of the 17th century. Their barley they now didn't eat because they were selling it to distilleries, itself a recently-booming market. The poor originally grew barley because it was more resistant to weather, but potatoes were too. Farmers now had their reliable food source (potatoes) as well as a cash crop (barley).

Hot chocolate was invented in the early 17th century in America, then Spain. The first chocolate house (much like a coffee house) opened in London in 1657, and in Amsterdam in 1660.

The Arabs invented coffee as a drink, and it became widely popular in the Middle East in the 16th century. Coffee houses opened at Oxford in 1650, London in 1652, Marseilles in 1671, and Leipzig in 1684. A major source for coffee beans was Yemen, with its port of Mocha.

Tea was first imported in 1610 by the Dutch. First direct imports to England were in 1669. The price for tea in England was £6 to £10 in 1650, dropping to only 16 shillings in 1703. In 1690 England was importing 20,000 pounds of tea annually; in 1703 it was 100,000 pounds. In 1717 Thomas Twining opened the first teashop in London; prior to that, tea had been sold only in coffee houses, which were for men only.

Working Conditions

Average farm size varied widely. A "normal" family farm in 17th century Brunswick was 47 acres, but a small farm for a poor family was only seven acres. Yield ratios also varied widely, so what was adequate acreage in one area or for one crop might be inadequate in another place or for another crop.

Depending on soil, number and type of draft animals, a farmer could plow 0.9 to 1.5 acres per day. Reaping ran from 0.5 acres per day (using a hand sickle) to 1.25 acres per day (using a scythe). A family with three men could harvest thirty acres in two weeks. Threshing produced 3.5 to 10.5 bushels per day. With three horses it went as high as 23 to 30 bushels a day, though the loss of grain was higher.

There was an excess of labor in the countryside, especially on the smaller and poorer farms. Unemployment was hidden because it was more under-employment than actual joblessness.

There was no point in getting too abundant a harvest because the grain couldn't be threshed in time and the excess would be lost anyway. Likewise, too much milk and it couldn't be churned fast enough. So there was a natural limit to how "productive" a farm could be.

Urban-rural connections

Medieval cities had walls around them, but these were for military defense and were not especially significant as economic boundaries. It's true that the gates of the city could be closed—at night, for example, but also during times of crisis—thereby shutting out the rest of the world, but normally the walls did little more than define a space within which certain taxes were paid.

To a surprising extent, the countryside penetrated the town. There were gardens and orchards within even very large cities, and a modest amount of livestock.

The chief effect of towns on the countryside, beyond being their primary markets, was in commercializing agriculture. In highly urban areas like the Netherlands, we find specialized craftsmen settling in rural areas, serving local demand made possible because so many farmers were selling to the cities. We also find rich urban families everywhere buying up rural properties and exploiting them for profit. In some places (e.g., Venice and her terraferma) the flag followed commerce and the city exercised political controls as well.

Legal status of farmers

Serfdom was already on its way out in western Europe by 1500, but it was still around. Francis I abolished serfdom on the royal estates in 1544, probably merely formalizing what had happened in practice anyway. By contrast, serfdom increased sharply in eastern Europe.

The main variation was in the way a peasant paid his rent--in kind or in cash. If in cash, the amount was usually fixed, though it might be renegotiated from time to time. With a fixed payment, as demand went up, the peasant generally did better, especially if he could produce a surplus for sale. Conversely, a lord who depended mainly on fixed rents (and there were many), tended to be worse off as prices rose. And prices in our period rose sharply, especially in the 16th century. By the same logic, if the lord's expenses increased (again, as they did in our period), his position worsened because his income did not also rise.

Where the peasant paid in kind (decreasingly common in western Europe, increasingly so in eastern), it was the lord who prospered from price increases and the peasant who suffered.

The size of the farm mattered; or rather, the amount of saleable surplus mattered. Then as now, small farms were more vulnerable than large ones to price fluctuations, and small farms were more likely to fall into permanent debt.

The duration of the rental agreement was also a major variable. Peasants always pressed for hereditary rights (outright ownership was still relatively rare), for this tended to protect rent levels (and other fees). That arrangement was not common. Some held their farms for life. Upon the death of the peasant the farm reverted to the lord, who theoretically could dispense with it as he pleased. In practice, the farm went to the peasant's heir upon payment of a one-time fee, possibly under a new rental agreement. The opportunities for abuse and exploitation here are obvious. Worse off were peasants who held their farms by more short-term arrangements: a six-year lease, or a twelve, or a three. In Bavaria, peasants on ecclesiastical estates had to renew annually, the worst burden of all, for a revolt or any kind of resistance could put the family farm in almost immediate jeopardy.

Even worse off were sharecroppers: peasants who merely worked the land without any rights except a share in the harvest. This arrangement was becoming increasingly common near cities, as merchants bought up lands and sought to work them to maximum profit. The practice was also common on ecclesiastical estates, for the same reason. Moreover, this arrangement left the landowner free to sell or sublease an estate as he saw fit, without having to take into account the peasants' "ancient privileges". The practice was known as métayage in France and mezzandria in Italy.

An important element in rural society was the agricultural servant, also called a day laborer or, in more modern American terms, a "hired hand". Some of these might be hired (especially by wealthier peasants) during labor-intensive periods such as planting and harvest. Others might work year-round.

Akin to the day laborer was the cottager. These were people without a farm of their own, having only the cottage they lived in (but did not own), who worked for hire on the farms of others. The chief difference was that they tended to be sedentary, some families living as cottagers generation after generation.

Agricultural Expansion

There was an agricultural boom in the 16th century. The steadily increasing demand led directly to a renewed exploitation of marginal lands: the polders of the Netherlands were the most famous examples, but poorly-drained land was recovered also from the lower Vistula River in Poland to the low-lying lands in Valencia (Spain). Some of the land recovery was simply a matter of clearing trees or once again planting in uplands, but draining swamps was technically demanding and expensive. These projects were undertaken with urban capital and the new farmers were often leaseholders. A number of the pioneers were Dutch, who demanded religious toleration in exchange for their services. This is how Dutch Mennonites, for example, wound up in Poland.

Even lands already under cultivation were re-worked in order to improve yields. In the Po River valley, for example, massive irrigation projects were undertaken, especially after 1530, that in some places could yield six or seven hay crops a year. This improved cattle and dairy herds. The town of Parma, for example, produced a notable cheese (Parmesan) for export. Irrigation was so advanced, even rice became a cash crop in Lombardy, as well as a new staple (risotto) in the Italian diet.

Livestock

The Mesta in Spain managed three to four million sheep a year.

Long-distance cattle trade began in the 15thc. Suppliers were Denmark, Poland, Hungary, Transylvania, and Ruthenia. Consumers were the large cities of the west, and the greater princely courts. Cattle were a source not only of meat but also of leather and they were in great demand.

Cattle were driven to market and fattened in places nearby, then were brought in for sale and slaughter. Among the leading centers were Hamburg, for the Danish and Baltic trade, and Frankfurt for the Hungarian and Polish trade.

Farmers were usually forced to sell their cattle to their lords and were not allowed to sell directly to merchants. The merchants gathered the cattle into herds ranging from twenty or thirty up to several hundred. They were then given over to medieval cowboys who drove them to market.

Drove roads were special tracks where the livestock was allowed to pass. Progress was very slow: two or three miles a day, with rest every third day. The slow pace was so the cattle didn't lose too much weight on the drive. There were customs posts where cattle were registered and fees paid. A drive typically had one drover for every twenty head of cattle, plus a forager who arranged for pasturage and inns.

The size of this business can be understood by reference to a few figures. For example, in the 17th century over 2,000 head of cattle were slaughtered annually for the Dutch East India fleet alone. Cattle trade could be huge. In Jutland in the early 17th century, the ox trade was worth 30,000 kg of silver annually. By comparison, the value of wheat shipped through the Danish Sound annually was 55,000 kg of silver.

Cattle in Holstein

Livestock in Denmark was very big business. For example, from 1601 to 1620 grain exports from the Baltic amounted to about 55,000 kg of silver in value. Livestock from Denmark in that same period came to around 30,000 kg of silver. (source: CEH)

Cattle might be driven long distances, but this caused them to lose weight, so they were fattened up in special fields near markets prior to sale. An example is the town of Wedel, which is near Hamburg. There, Danish exporters met buyers from Germany and the Netherlands at a fair that lasted from mid-March to mid-April.

Stock raising was biggets in Denmark, Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary. Destinations included the Netherlands, Hamburg, Lübeck, and Köln (Cologne). Other destinations included Nuremberg and Frankfurt, and Venice.

There were cattle plagues in 1518, and 1549 - 1559.

There were cattle trails, special roads just for the cattle drives. The animals normally travelled only two to four miles in a day and were rested every third day. There were customs posts along the roads, where the droves were registered and fees were paid. Cattle from Denmark passed through five customs ports.

A cattle drive typically had one cowboy for every twenty head of cattle, plus a forager who arranged for inns, and food for cowboys and cattle.

Most cattle for export were raised by nobles, as a right. Peasants could sell only locally. Merchants bought from the nobles and arranged the actual drive with herds ranging from thirty to three hundred. These were bought by slaughterers, who sold the pieces and parts to a variety of consumers.

In general, the 16thc up into the early 1600s was a boom time for meat. Lots of evidence points to meat playing a larger role in diet than either before or after. For example, customs records for Denmark show about 13,000 head in 1483, rising to a peak of 40,000 in 1560. The numbers dipped in the later 16thc, then averaged around 30,000 annually from 1593 to 1625. The peak year in that period was 52,350 head of cattle. In the second half of the 17thc then average was back down to about 20,000.

Sheep

Sheep were different in that they were always a moving population. They typically were kept in one area over the winter and then were brought into another area for the summer months. This annual movement is known as transhumance. It could create friction between local farmers and the shepherds, as the passing sheep flocks could inflict a fair amount of damage on local crops.

The two great centers of sheep raising were England and Spain, and the business had a significant impact in both places. In Spain, the shepherd during the Middle Ages had formed a sort of union, an association that received formal recognition in 1273. It was known as the Mesta. Members had the right to drive their herds across fields and through villages, along a designated corridor. The Mesta continued to be unassailable all through our period, though farmers and others complained bitterly that the flocks destroyed their crops.

In England, too, the sheep were a mixed blessing. As other cloth centers grew in importance, England increasingly specialized in raising sheep and less in weaving. Landowners found that raising sheep was more lucrative than growing wheat.

Sheep, of course, do tend to wander, and so these landowners found whatever legal excuse was handy to give them the right to put up fences around previously open land. The farmers were forced off, sometimes with a payment and sometimes not. The proces was known as "enclosure" and was the source of a good deal of discussion and conflict in England.

Fishing

Fish was a staple food almost everywhere in Europe. The food was plentiful and by being salted, dried, or pickled could be preserved through the long winter months. While the Mediterranean provided fish mainly for local markets, the North Sea and the Baltic yielded enormous annual catches of herring and cod.

Fishing was done everywhere, of course, in fresh water as well as at sea, but only in the north can there be something large enough to be called an industry. In the later Middle Ages a league of cities known as the Hanseatic League dominated fishing in the Baltic Sea. In the late 16th century, however, for reasons not well understood, the herring shoals moved from the Baltic to the North Sea. Between herring and cod, there was a huge market and the Hansa fairly rapidly lost out to the Dutch.

Dutch fishing was more efficient than Hansa fishing. They used fishing boats called buizen that not only caught the fish but also gutted, salted and barreled the fish [172]. By the mid-16th century, the Dutch had other ships, called Ventjagern (sale-hunters) that picked up the fish and took them to market, allowing the buizen to stay at sea as long as they wanted.

Crop Rotation Schemes

If you grow the same crop in the same plot of ground year after year, and don't use fertilizers, then the nutrients in the ground are gradually, within the space of just a few years, depleted. The crop grows thinner, more susceptible to disease, and eventually fails altogether. The earliest way to deal with this problem was to plant a crop for a few years, then simply move on to new land. This is what semi-nomadic farmers do. If you want to live permanently in one place, however, you have to find another solution.

That solution is to rotate crops. At its simplest, you divide your land in half. You plant your crop in one half for a few years running and the other half you leave fallow (that is, you don't plant anything). The key to increased productivity was to find ways to shorten the time of fallow, or to bring more land under cultivation.

Time under fallow could be shortened in a variety of ways, none of them spectacularly effective but better than nothing. You could burn your field after harvest; the ashes went into the soil. You could switch up crops in the cultivated portion, so that the impact of any one crop on the soil would be lessened.

The really big innovation, though, was to divide the land into thirds rather than halves. This was done in the early Middle Ages as is known as three-field, as distinct from two-field, rotation. It works best on the richer soils of northern Europe and never caught on much in the Mediterranean countries. In a three-field rotation, only one-third lay fallow, while the other two carried different crops. This represented a huge increase in productivity, and three-field rotation was widespread in Europe by 1500.

There was a wide variety of other schemes, though, which again should indicate the flexibility of the medieval farmer. Here are some examples.

temporary cultivation in Scotland, Ireland, Sweden and elsewhere on highly marginal land
Infield-outfield: Scotland, Namur
Continuous rye: eastern Netherlands, western Germany
Two-field rotation: southern France, England, etc.
Three-field rotation with a two-year fallow: Andalusia
Three-field rotation with a one-year fallow with the farmer free to choose his own crops: wide use
Same, but with restrictions as to choice of crop: wide use
Rotation of 4 or more courses: England, Netherlands, Alsace
Convertible husbandry: Flanders, Groningen, England, Alsace, Schleswig-Holstein
Rotate crops with fodder crops: Netherlands around den Bosch
Rotation in which fodder crops were grown in the fallow year: Flanders, Norfolk

The places listed are indicative but are not intended to be a complete list of where such a rotation scheme might be found. #11 represents the most intensive use of land and #1 is the least intensive.

Nowhere was the pattern fixed. Grain prices, depopulation due to war or plague, could affect what one raised. Also, where feasible, farmers might switch to livestock, olives, or grapes.

Conclusion

There's a great deal more that can be said about agriculture. We haven't talked about technological innovations (e.g., the butter-churn, or new milling techniques), nor about how the type of farming affected the size and physical layout of villages. Nor have we talked about the many ways in which villagers sought to regulate their economic activity, nor about the relationship between land-holding patterns and family patterns.

We can talk in such detail because only in the early modern period are our sources abundant and varied enough to permit the researcher to do so. There are entire books written on a single village or a single crop, so there's plenty of room for the interested student to dig deeper. You should pardon the pun.