Suchergebnisse

The current controversies about production and yields of medieval agriculture may give an outsider the impression that on this subject historians are more at variance than they actually are. Some historians may still cling to the Victorian belief that things economic were perpetually on the rise; historians thus minded are inclined to take it for granted that both the aggregate product of agriculture and agricultural output per head improved all through the Middle Ages. Other students, for example, Beveridge or Bennett, derived from the imperfectly selected data of the Bishop of Winchester's manors the impression that output per acre, and probably also per unit of seed, stayed put all through the Middle Ages. More recently other historians, including myself, have argued that output per acre tended to slump in the earlier, that is, pre-Black Death period, and may have picked up somewhat in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The concert of historians may therefore strike the ear as being even more cacophonous on this theme than on most other medieval themes.

Introduction, pre-modern crop protection -- Books and authors -- Pre-modern agriculture -- Harmful agents -- Pre-modern crop protection methods -- Natural products for pre-modern crop protection -- Pre-modern crop protection lore -- Once upon a time: organic agriculture -- Final comments

How were the field boundaries created and cultivated by the farmers of prehistoric and Roman Britain transformed into the open fields of medieval England? Historians and archaeologists have posited a complete physical break between the field systems of Roman Britain and the common or open fields of medieval England.
Susan Oosthuizen's fascinating research into the landscape history of the Bourn Valley, just west of Cambridge (an area which has been intensively cultivated for at least the last 3,000 years), has uncovered preserved prehistoric field patterns in the medieval furlongs there – startling in the context of 'champion' England. If it were possible to unravel the relationships between pre-open-field and open-field boundaries in the Valley between about 600 and 1100 AD, then a significant step forward might be taken in our understanding of the origins of medieval open-field systems in general. We might begin to understand the processes by which the fields, woods and pastures that developed over the prehistoric millennia and during the Roman centuries were organised into the completely new landscape of the medieval open fields.
The unexpected discovery of what appears to be an 8th- or 9th-century proto-open-field pattern seems to indicate a fossilising of the process of development from prehistoric to medieval fields, which Susan Oosthuizen seeks to explain by examining the social, administrative and political contexts within which these changes took place. The newly uncovered evidence allows Oosthuizen to propose a new model for the introduction of common fields in England. -