If a family is fortunate enough to hold a full yardland (~30 acres, or enough acres to feed and support one family based on local yields), then it generates about 11 quarters of grains and vegetables surplus to its own needs. The surplus, which could sell for somewhere between 40 and 50s in a typical year, can help with paying rents, taxes, and fees or to provide a small amount of money for the family to improve its situation.

One person needs about 25 bushels (~3 quarters) of mixed produce per year, or about the yield from 2.5 acres (1 hectare) of produce. So a family will typically need somewhere around 10 to 20 acres of arable per year under plow.

In most settled areas, only about one-quarter of the farming households held a yardland or more; about one-third of them held half a yardland (~15 acres), and about 42 percent held a quarter yardland (7.5 acres) or less. In other words, the majority of the population was extremely vulnerable to low yields or failed crops. Well over half of the farming population would need to work additional hours for wages or at a trade to bring in more money or food.

When available, marl, a soil of clay and limestone, would be plowed into the fields to help replenish their soils. After harvest, livestock put into the fields for grazing (gleaning) and manure fertilizing.

Winter sowing=wheat, barley, mixtill (both mixed), rye.

Spring sowing=oats, peas, beans, dredge (oats+barley), vetches; leeks, cabbages, and onions in toft garden.

Crop Rotations

On large manors, with more than one village, several dozen main fields might exist, as opposed to the more typical four to six fields for one village. A large amount of acres would be preserved as meadows, and a smaller number for enclosed pastures. The amount of woodlands and wastelands depends a lot on location and local history.

The two-field rotation system–crops planted on half the available acres (typically split equally between a winter and spring crop), while the other half of the acres sits fallow. [On a manor with 2,400 acres of arable, this system places 1,200 acres into fallow, 600 acres planted with winter crops (wheat, barley, rye) and 600 acres planted in summer cereals (oats, vetches, peas, beans, other vegetables).]

The three-field rotation system–Field one=winter crop (like wheat), field two=spring crop (like oats), field three=fallow; in year two, the fallow field gets the winter crop, the previous winter crop field gets the spring crop, and the spring crop field sits fallow. If plowmen or manure is short, longer periods of fallow or fields leaving cultivation were common. (The house gardens consumed a lot of the available manure.) This system offers better sustained yields than the two-field system, but serious persuasion or time is often necessary to get farmers to adopt it. (The low margins past context understandably makes most people extremely cautious about change–i.e., if you lose a crop or suffer drastically reduced yields, people will die.)[The yield advantage for our 2,400 acre example is 400 more acres of produce (200 of each planting season’s crops).]

Small “parcel” farms, grants of 20 acres of wasteland for a new starter farm, are common. One man normally can clear about a third to a half of an acre per season, possibly slightly over an acre if the land was mostly cleared. The task involving cutting trees, scything wild grasses, burning undergrowth, and removing stumps or rocks. So transforming wasteland usually was a large project that unfolded over several years, often as the founding of a new village or town. Oats grow well on on newly reclaimed land.

Plowing

Plowland or Ploughland; Hide–~120 acres, or amount plowed by a team during one season.

Plow/Plough (traditional)–pulled by two oxen, usually with one or two farmers (a father and a young son would be one typical pairing)

Plow/Plough (heavy)–pulled by four to eight oxen

The Usage of Horses–with the proper harness, which took people a long time to figure out (you ideally shouldn’t use the same harness as you use for oxen), a team of horses can pull faster and longer (~two more hours per day). But oxen are cheaper to feed. Both oxen and horses need oats or other feed to survive the winter and spring (~twenty-eight weeks). Both need roughly the same amount of grass or fodder during the summer. But the winter feed for a horse (about half a penny per day for oats), according to some sources, costs about three times as much (e.g., over 8s for a horse versus under 3s for an ox).

Seeds/acre (bushels per acre for sowing)

Barley 4 bushels

Oats 3 bushels

Peas 3 bushels

Wheat 2 bushels

Typical Yield Ratios [Yield averages over time are about 1:3.8]

Barley=1:3.8 to 1:8 [Near optimal=1:8; rarely, higher]

Oats=1:2.4 to 1:4 [Near optimal=1:4]

Rye=1:4 to 1:7 [Near optimal=1:7]

Wheat=1:3.8 to 1:5 [Near optimal=1:5]

Maslin (wheat/rye)=1:4 to 1:6

Beans=1:4 to 1:6 [Near optimal=1:6]

Peas=1.3 to 1:6 [Near optimal=1:6]

Harvest

The hay harvest dominated the end of month six and the month seven. The grain harvest dominated month eight and nine. The picking of fruit occurred during months nine and ten. So after a low-yield harvest year, the sixth through the nineth months would be tough.

Annual Work Cycle

Atia=month one–repairing buildings/barriers, inside work, weaving

Clodia=month two–ploughing starts, harrowing, fertilizing

Drusilla=month three–ploughing, sowing, sheep back in pastures, collection of quarterly rent installments; warfare starts again

Fabia=month four–pruning, milking, plowing fallow fields

Galla=month five–weeding, summer festival

Julia=month six–shearing sheep, harvesting hay begins, collecting of rent installments

Livia=month seven–harvesting hay, ploughing, gathering

Magia=month eight–harvesting grain, binding, storing

Porcia=month nine–harvesting grain, gathering fruit, threshing, winnowing, milling, collecting of rent installments; warfare winding down

Sabina=month ten–gathering fruit, sowing winter crops, milling, weaving; armies and fighters into winter encampments or quarters

Severa=month eleven–butchering, salting/smoking, housing animals, weaving

Vesta=month twelve–winter festivals and holidays, collecting of dues and rent installments, weaving

Farm (a yardland, or ~30 acres, of arable; only somewhere near a quarter or less of farmers had a yardland or more)

20 acres under plow annually (10 in winter crops (maybe 7 in wheat and 3 in rye); 10 in spring crops (maybe 5 in barley, 3 in oats, and 2 in peas or beans))[~2.5 acres of produce per person for consumption]

Toft Garden (onions, leeks, herbs; bee-hives; flock of poultry)

Gathering (wild berries, mushrooms, wild onions, roots, honey)

Orchards (apple, pear, peach, pecan, and orange trees)

Vineyards (grapes, olives)

Brewing (ale, beer, mead)

Dairy (making butter and cheese)

Animals on a Typical Small Farm

1-2 oxen (sometimes horses) [Horses consume a lot more oats than oxen, but both also needed access to pastures or ample fodder each day. A plough horse needs about 2 quarters of oats per year, a cart horse needs about 6 to 7 quarters per year, and a warhorse needs about 10 to 11 quarters per year.]

1 pig (usually slaughtered in month eleven)

2-3 cows [good for maybe 160 pounds of cheese per year; half for consumption, half for sale]

5-20 chickens (or a mixture, with ducks and geese)

[maybe: 10-15 sheep (depending on location); monasteries and large estates often maintained herds of thousands of sheep, sometimes approaching 20,000.]

Beehives

Winter pasturing of sheep=from ~11 Severa to 25 Drusilla

Product Yields

Sheep (x1)=~5 to 15 pounds of wool (one fleece); maybe 2 to 30 lbs.; shorn once per year

Sheep (x20)=manure+1 stone of cheese+half a gallon of butter/week+raw wool[+skin, for parchment]

Sheep (x~18,000)=75 sacks of surplus wool/year exported

Sheep (x~12,000)=50 sacks of wool/year exported

Fertilizers

Manure and urine are useful as fertilizers. Consider the quantity of waste products generated by a town or army of 25,000 people and 2,500 horses. Animals could graze in fallow fields to reduce the need to collect or transport the waste.

One person generates about 128g of feces and 1.42 liters of urine per day, possibly a bit less if food and drink are in short supply. That number of grams is a bit over one-quarter of a pound, or about 102 pounds per year. The urine production is somewhere around 1,000 pounds per person during a year. The point is that human waste can fertilize a lot of cereal production, but you need livestock waste to scale up.

Land Utilization

Arable in the 40 percent of available acreage range (as a percentage of all land) would be low to normal. A percentage between 60 and 85 percent is in the high range.

Weighs and Measures

1 quarter=8 dry bushels

1 bushel of grain=4 pecks; 1 peck=8 dry quarts=~64 lbs. (of troy 12-oz. pounds) or 48 lbs. (of avoirdupois 16-oz. pounds). The peck is a volume measure, so depending on the commodity, its weight can vary about anywhere from 8 to 14 pounds (somewhere about 8-10 pounds).

1 woolsack=26 stones, or 364 pounds. [~240 fleeces from adult animals]

Mills

The mills are tremendously important for flour production. But many other important industries rely on mills (crushing olives, fulling cloth, making paper, and so on).

Mills often were partnership businesses. Two to six partners was common; a lord and one prosperous villager (i.e., the local with the most capital).

Terms

Farming Out–some landowners would rent entire manors to someone else to farm them.

Marl–soil with clay and lime; good for restoring and fertilizing fields

The Four-Year Field Rotation System [This method was not discovered until many years after the timeframe of our story. Unlike earlier field rotation systems (two-field, three-field), it does not require a fallow year for a field. The various crops work to restore the soil, and since the rotation provide turnips and grazing over multiple years, more livestock could be maintained through winters. Therefore, much more manure became available for fertilizing fields. After the method was discovered, close to two centuries elapsed before it was adopted into widespread or popular usage.]

Year One: Wheat

Year Two: Turnips

Year Three: Barley

Year Four: Clover and/or ryegrass

Market Towns

Some villages grew into market towns, the trade hub for a network of five or six villages (typically). The smallest market towns had about 100 to 200 families, while most had between 200 and 500 hundred families.