Cultivating land requires routine labor, so you need to be careful regarding your assumptions about land utilization during the medieval period or in a fictional medievalist society. All the land was not farmland. Population decline caused by warfare, famine, or plagues also resulted in a decline of arable into wasteland due to labor shortages.

Start with a typical land measurement that I discussed in a previous blog entry. One square mile of land is 640 acres, or approximately 5.33 hides. A standard levy for military campaigns from 5 hides was one trained fighter, which meant a knight or man-at-arms with at least a warhorse, a remount, and a riding horse and/or a sumpter horse. Remember that every able-bodied male between fifteen and sixty was armed, so the archers, grooms, and pages (basically the longbow-wielding yeoman archers and the other light infantry and wagon drivers) lived on the smaller farms or cottages.

Here’s the most confusing part about the hide. In practice, at least in many places, it was a blended fiscal or accounting unit more than a measure of actual acres of arable. One hide was not always the standard 120 acres. Some places apparently had hides ranging from 60 to 180 acres of land, some portion of which was arable. According to multiple sources, the original measure of a hide was about the amount of land necessary to generate 1£ (pound) of income. The 120-acre number is a decent average or proxy figure. If you controlled five hides, you probably had at least 5£ income per year, so you would be able to arm well at least one fighting man and a decently armed constable for local duty.

In medieval times, any particular square mile would not consist of 100 percent arable land. In the sources I’ve studied, normal or decent farmland often was about 35 percent to 50 percent arable. With intensive and continuous work, farmers could push the percentage of arable up to 75 to 85 percent. The arable usually was arranged closely around the village or clustered buildings in communal fields (e.g., the north field, the south field, the middle field, the high field, and so on).

Each villager’s cottage also typically had a sizable attached garden plot for the growing of herbs and more vegetables. All or most farms would maintain a small flock of chickens. Most single-family farms were smaller than 20 hectares (1-2 yardlands or less).

And according to research in Judith M. Bennett’s book A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader and the World of English Peasants Before the Plague, in 1279, tenant peasants worked farms of these sizes:

Tenants of 30 acres or more: 26%   [This number of acres can support an average family.]

Tenants of 15 acres: 32% [If all goes perfectly, maybe enough to sustain 3-4/5 members.]

Tenants of 7.5 acres or less: 42% (Bennett, 148).

Some sources estimate that about a third of the people were wage laborers, but these numbers indicate that even most farming families needed to supplement their farm income with other income (brewing and selling ale, working short contracts in craft work or as a laborer).

So a “normal’ square mile of land might consist of 224 acres of active arable, 160 acres of pastures or meadows, 96 acres of woodlands, and 160 acres of wasteland. Soil fertility and quality varied the calculated number of acres in a hide or virgate up or down sometimes by significant numbers of acres. But basically any shire or region would be rated at a local constant over a long period.

Many acres of meadows and pastures were necessary to feed the animals, forests and woodlands were widespread and often dense, and wasteland was plentiful (heath or moors, swamps, fens or marshlands, large stone or rocky patches, shallow water/sea (reclaimable w/ landfill)). These lands, or acres, yielded income and useful products, but they did not yield grains. Hectares (units of about 2.5 acres) of arable land is the useful measure if you want to approximate how many people could live in a particular place.

Reclaiming land as arable, or clearing land, was common work on medieval holdings. But you should think of it as a group activity to expand an existing field, create a new shared field, a new settlement, or a new monastery. A parcel or grant of wasteland—e.g., 20 acres—might be targeted for reclamation. One farmer or farm laborer could clear the equivalent of about one-third to one-half of an acre per year in addition to their other necessary work (ploughing, planting, threshing, and so on).

The lord’s normal demesne typically included under half of the available arable, while sworn men (vassals) and tenants would be responsible for farming the rest of the arable. The per-acre yield for a landholder was about 4s6d in money or the equivalent in produce and livestock products (Singman and McLean).

Some terms—carucate, ploughland, virgate or yardland—apparently were more likely to be referring to a variable or a customary number of arable acres. According to Johnson, the Watford knight’s fee, held by Eustace de Watford IV, until his death in 1276, had about 98 virgates of local arable land, including 19 virgates (30 acres in each virgate customarily but could vary down to 15-20 and up to ~40 acres) in demesne, 35.5 virgates in villeinage (unfree tenants), and 43.5, in free service (free tenants). The Watford parish was about 3,750 acres total, so quite a bit of the available land was not under plow but the utilization percentage was high enough to indicate a long period of prosperous settlement.

Further Reading

See H. M. Dunsford and S. J. Harris, “Colonization of the Wasteland in County Durham, 1100–1400” or Daniel R. Curtis and Michele Campopiano, “Medieval Land Reclamation and the Creation of New Societies: Comparing Holland and the Po Valley, c.800–1500.

Or see any other well-researched book on medieval agriculture or rural life as well as the medieval monastery system. I was surprised by the sheer number of monasteries or priories in England and Europe, and an overlooked fact of history is that nuns and monks created a lot of farmland.

For an unusual but fascinating reading experience, try Murray Johnson’s The Watford Knight’s Fee.