A farm built around the village
Medieval farming was usually the work of the whole village community rather than of isolated families. In much of northern Europe, a typical village had a cluster of houses surrounded by arable land, meadow and pasture, with woodland or waste beyond. Households held rights to land and shared the demanding jobs of plowing, harvesting and herding. Practices varied a great deal by region, soil and century, so what follows describes common patterns rather than one universal system.
Open field farming
The best-known arrangement is open field farming, found in large areas of England and parts of France, Germany and other regions of the continent. Instead of fenced farms, the village’s arable land lay in a few large fields with no permanent hedges between holdings. Each field was divided into long, narrow strips, and a household’s land was scattered as strips in different parts of the fields rather than gathered in one block.
Historians suggest several reasons for scattered strips. It spread good and poor soil fairly among households, and it shared the risk of local damage from flooding or pests. It also let neighbors pool plows and draft animals, since a full plow team was expensive and few families owned one. The pattern was not universal. Some regions had enclosed fields, small separate farms or terraced hillsides, and the origins of open fields are still debated.
After the crop was in, animals were turned onto the stubble to graze and manure the soil. Meadow was reserved for hay, and some pasture was held as common land open to villagers under rules set by the community or the manor court.
Crop rotation and fallow
Soil that grows the same crop year after year loses fertility, and medieval farmers had limited fertilizer beyond animal manure, so they rested land. In a two-field system, half the arable lay fallow each year. In the three-field system, which spread widely in parts of northern Europe during the central Middle Ages, one field was sown in fall with winter grain such as wheat or rye, another in spring with oats, barley, peas or beans, and the third left fallow. The next year the roles rotated.
Three fields had some advantages: only a third of the land idle rather than half, a more spread-out workload across the year, and legumes such as peas and beans that, though medieval farmers did not know why, tended to help the soil. Oats also supplied feed for horses. Precisely when and where the three-field system spread is uncertain, and many villages used mixed or irregular arrangements. Fallow was not wasted: it was plowed a few times to control weeds and grazed by animals.
The heavy plow and draft animals
Light scratch plows, common in Mediterranean lands and drier soils, work well on thin soil. Much of northern Europe has heavier, wetter clay, and from roughly the early Middle Ages a heavier plow with an iron share, a coulter that cut the sod and a moldboard that turned it over became important. It cut deeper and improved drainage on heavy soils, but it was hard to pull and difficult to turn, which helps explain the long, narrow strips.
Pulling it required a team. Oxen were the traditional draft animals, strong and cheap to keep. Horses, which move faster, became more common in some regions later in the period, helped by the padded horse collar and by iron horseshoes. Whether horses gave a great boost to productivity or a modest one is debated, and oxen continued to be used widely. Farm tools were otherwise simple: wooden or iron-tipped spades, hoes, rakes, sickles, scythes for hay, flails for threshing and wooden harrows to break clods and cover seed.
The yearly cycle
The farm year followed the weather and the church calendar. A rough outline for temperate northern Europe looks like this.
- Fall: Plow and sow winter grain. Gather the last fruits and nuts. Around the feast of Michaelmas at the end of September, many rents fell due and farm officials were appointed.
- Late fall and early winter: Animals that could not be fed through winter were often slaughtered and the meat salted or smoked, traditionally around Martinmas in November. Threshing and repairs filled the cold months.
- Late winter and spring: Plow and sow spring crops; plow fallow. Lambing and calving take place. Lent often coincided with the leanest food stocks.
- Early summer: Weeding, sheep shearing, and cutting hay from the meadows.
- Late summer: The harvest, the busiest and most urgent period. Grain was cut with sickles, bound in sheaves and carried to the barn or stack. Whole families, including women and children, took part, and tenants often owed extra harvest days to the lord, while a tenth of the grain traditionally went to the church as the church tithe. Poor families gleaned fallen ears from the field after the sheaves had been taken.
Within the rhythm of peasant daily life, women did dairying, poultry-keeping, brewing, spinning and much field work; children minded geese and scared birds; and men took on the heaviest plowing and carting. These roles overlapped more than a tidy list suggests.
Livestock, gardens and other resources
Farming was mixed. Sheep supplied wool and manure, cattle gave milk, meat and traction, pigs foraged in woods on acorns and beech mast, and poultry gave eggs. Many households kept a small garden plot, or croft, near the house for vegetables, herbs and sometimes fruit. Watermills and, from the later twelfth century in parts of Europe, windmills ground the grain, and under the manorial system lords often required tenants to use the manor mill, which was a source of friction. Fishponds, orchards, beehives and woodlands provided additional food and materials.
Yields and vulnerability
Medieval yields per acre were low by modern standards. A fair rule of thumb is that harvests returned only a modest multiple of the seed sown, and the seed that had to be kept back for next year took a significant share of the crop. The figures varied by region, crop and year, and the documentary evidence mostly comes from lords’ estates rather than peasant plots, so precise numbers should be treated with caution.
Because margins were thin, a wet summer or a late frost could do serious damage, a vulnerability that later brought hardship in the early fourteenth century. Over the central Middle Ages, more land was cleared and farmers gradually adopted improvements, though historians still argue about how much productivity actually rose.