HY 106 Lecture Notes - Lecture 28: Cornelius Vermuyden, Enclosure, The Gleaners
Chapter 19: The Expansion of Europe in the Eighteenth Century
Agriculture and the Land
1. Introduction
1. With the exception of Holland, at least 80 percent of the people of all
western European countries drew their livelihoods from agriculture
(Eastern higher percent)
2. In 1700 European agriculture was much more ancient and medieval with
an average of only five or six bushels of grain for every bushel of wheat
sown
3. In crisis years, when crops were ruined by drought or flood, starvation
forced people to use substitutesāthe īfamine foodsī of a desperate
population
1. People gathered chestnuts and stripped bark in the forests, they cut
dandelions and grass, and they ate these substitutes to escape
starvation
2. Such unbalanced, inadequate food in famine years made people
weak and susceptible to epidemicsādysentery, intestinal problems,
influenza, smallpox
4. In preindustrial Europe, the harvest was the real king, which was often
cruel
2. The Open-Field System
1. The greatest accomplishment of medieval agriculture was the open-field
system of village agriculture developed by European peasants
1. Open-field system was divided the land to be cultivated by the
peasants of a given village into several large fields, which were in
turn cut up into long, narrow strips that were not enclosed into small
plots by fences or hedges
2. The land of those who owned land were nobility, clergy, and wealthy
2. The ever-present problem was exhaustion of the soil and when the
community planted wheat year after ear, the nitrogen in the soil was
soon depletedācrop failure
1. In the early Middle Ages, the only way for the land to recover its
fertility was for a field to lie fallow for a period of time (alternating
crop and idle)
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2.
3. Three-year rotations were introduced that permitted a year of wheat
or rye to be followed by a year of oats or beans and then by a year
of fallow (still plowed)
3. Traditional village rights reinforced the traditional pattern of farming and
in addition to rotating, villages maintained open meadows for hay and
natural pasture set aside for draft horses, oxen, cows, and pigs of the
village community
4. Poor women would go through the fields picking up the few single grains
that had fallen to the ground in course of harvest (The Gleaners by Jean
FranƧois Millet)
5. In the age of absolutism and nobility, state and landlord continued to levy
heavy taxes and high rents that stripped the peasants of much of their
meager earnings
6. In eastern Europe, peasants were worst off because of serfdom and
social conditions were better in the west where they could own land and
pass it on to their children
7. Peasants of a region of France had to pay heavy royal taxes, the
churchās tithe, and dues to the lord as well as set aside seed for the next
season (half of their crop left)
3. The Agricultural Revolution
1. European peasants could improve their position by taking land from
those who owned buy did not labor but powerful forces stood ready to
crush any protest
2. If peasants could replace the idle fallow with crops they could increase
their land under cultivation by 50 percent and an agricultural revolution
followed that occurred slowly throughout Europe but progressively
eliminated the use of the fallow
3. Because grain crops exhaust the soil and make fallowing necessary, the
secret to eliminating fallow lies in the alternating grain with certain
nitrogen-storing crops such as land reviving crops such as peas and
beans, root crops such as turnips and potatoes, and clovers and grasses
(turnips, potatoes, and clover were new-comers)
4. New patterns of organization allowed some farmers to develop
increasingly sophisticated patterns of rotation to suit different kinds of
soils
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