Note: The "Medieval World" pages were originally written for a friend of mine who was (and still is) writing a fantasy novel, to provide some background information on how pre-industrial societies actually work. The text remains unchanged from the original document.
In our generic pre-industrial society, agriculture is vital. The vast majority of the population are subsistence farmers, who spend all their time growing food for themselves and their dependents to eat. Their activities, however, support everyone else.
No-one has anything to eat unless they grow it themselves, or can take it from those who do. While there may be artisans and merchants in the towns who sell their goods and buy food with the proceeds, they are a very small minority. Most people eat what they grow, and those who do not farm directly, such as clerics and nobles, can only survive because they have control over peasants who do it for them. This is why the medieval church actually needed to own so much land. Its clerics couldn't perform their religious duties if they had to spend their time farming, so it needed to own land and have people to work it in order to support them.
A peasant farmer would usually owe labour service to a local lord, and spend a few days a week working on their land, and might also have to pay rent, either in money or in kind. Thus, land is the basis of wealth, and because land ownership brings control over the people who work it, it is also the basis of political power. Who owns what - indeed, what individuals and social classes are allowed to own - is a key political issue.
Since land was the basis of the wealth and power of the ruling classes, it was also a status symbol. Therefore the upwardly mobile, such as rich merchants or talented clerics rising through the church hierarchy, would seek to buy land to enhance their social standing. A successful merchant might make less from the land than he could from trading, but those who aspired to social improvement aspired to landed wealth.
This is fundamentally different from the way we live now. In the industralised world, virtually everyone needs to work, to earn money by carrying out some more or less abstract task for someone else. It is access to a source of money that decides whether or not you can keep yourself alive. In the medieval world, very few people were "employed" in the modern sense of the word.
Peasant farmers (i.e. most people) grew things in order to eat them: it was subsistence agriculture, not commercial. Their social superiors did not "work" in the modern sense either, because the activities on which knights, nobles, etc. spent their time were social, political and military duties to a monarch or other lord, rather than a job.
The exact nature of agriculture will obviously vary greatly in different times and places, but it is likely to include the following features:
- Firstly, the peasant family must grow a sufficiently wide range of produce to provide a balanced diet.
- Secondly, growing a wide range of crops is also a way of reducing your vulnerability to the weather, by having some plants that will still grow if it is too hot or wet for your main crop to flourish.
- Thirdly, different crops are often mixed together, as far as is possible, in order to get as much as possible out of the available land.
- Fourthly, instead of having all their crops concentrated in a single block of fields, the peasant may have them spread over several different sites. This reduces vulnerability to localised bad weather (e.g. a hailstorm that flattens your wheat) and allows the good and bad land to be distributed more evenly. For example, some parts of England used a strip field system in which the land around a village was divided up into strips, with each villager having several strips in different fields.
- Fifthly, peasants store as much as possible. If your life depends on being able to grow enough food, it is only prudent to try and put some of this year's crop in storage, so that there is something to keep you going if next year's crop is bad. Without refrigeration, food preservation methods like pickling vegetables and smoking fish are vital survival techniques.
- Sixthly, peasants like to lend but hate to borrow. To owe your neighbour anything, particularly something vital like food or an agricultural tool, is a liability that a subsistence farmer can ill afford, but to have someone else owe you something provides an extra resource to call on when times are hard.
Finally, what peasants grow is always supplemented by what they can find. Fishing rights are of great value, and most English villages used to have a fish pond, into which water and fish were diverted from any nearby river to maximise the value of this resource. Although hunting rights would often be restricted by the local lord, peasants would supplement their diets with wild plants wherever possible.
It should also not be forgotten that peasant life is very hard. You get up at dawn and you work until it's dark, every day of the week (except any set aside for religious purposes). There is little or no machinery and everything depends on hard human labour, so the whole family is involved. It is exhausting and time consuming.
Therefore although pre-industrial peasant agriculture is very different from modern commercial farming, it was by no means primitive or unsophisticated. The medieval peasant was a subsistence farmer, whose fundamental goal was to grow enough food to stay alive, so the particular forms of agriculture that they pursued were based on rational and well-tried strategies for maximising their chances of survival.
URL: http://www.randomnotes.co.uk/Bits/Agricprint.htm