Very informative. But Very little mention of the climate change during this period. Medieval Warm Period from 900 to 1300 granted Warm summers with plenty of precipitation, short mild winters, thus perfect growing conditions. Hence agriculture boom, population boom, with people realising almost modern day heights by the end of 1200. This is surely offering the pressure for more production, not 'greedy Lords'. The weather went into freefall from 1300, at the start of The Mini Ice Age. From 1313 to 1316 was three years of endless rain and devastating destruction of crops. Stores fended off starvation to begin with but eventually succumbing in 1315 to 1317 to The Great Famine.

In Poland, which Christianized only from 966CE , an agricultural revolution took place from the 9th century to 1300: two field rotation with manuring and spring+autumn sowing was introduced from about 900CE, 3 field rotation a bit later. The Church and its monasteries between 966 and 1300 CE took control of about 40% of agricultural lands, introduced new crops, technological advances such as land drainage and fish farming, education , record keeping and State administration and tax collection. Also health services. Population growth was only possible due to the increased food production.

Regarding the trend towards declining fertility, this could also be from expanding the acreage under the plow. Assuming farmers first farm the most fertile land, then any increase of acreage under the plow, has to contend with lower fertility soil. Hence, the average fertility drops.

The correlation between intensification on cereal use precedes agriculture. In fact, agriculture may be a consequence of cereal intensification, leading to efforts to enhance yields. For example, irrigation seems to have been emerging among hunter-gatherers in the American southwest in the late prehistoric. Canals were constructed that watered otherwise natural stands of grasses, whose seeds were key resources. The grasses were neither planted nor cultivated.

This talk was fascinating in ways I didn't anticipate. Cereal grains and taxation? Extensification? Nucleated villages? My mind is blown.

This was a fascinating talk- I am interested in general as a botanist, but my era is Cretaceous... so anything agricultural is new information.

I understood that the horse harness reached Europe about 1000 AD from China. This allowed a horse to pull a greater load due to distribution of the pressure around the chest , rather than pulling solely on the neck. Great presentation.

Nettle must have been critical, because it can be boiled into soup and it can be made into fabric. Thank you for making a place for this in your lecture.

Wonderful presentation thank you

I think animal size is an important indicator and determine things like plow size. The pony and small cattle breeds that still exist are indicative of what most people were using. Pound for pound more efficient the large ones we think of today and if you need more power, just make larger hitches with you neighbors teams. This also fits well with keeping them in one end of the house. Even the milk cows and large dogs were worked, even into modern times. I think, with the rise of the Grange we start to see larger dedicated animals.

Superb talk! Thank you!

Cereals have another, perhaps even more important property! They can be stored for long periods of time before going bad. This means that surpluses can be accumulated and traded for other products; like salt. This also means that the landowners start to control all trade with the peasants on their land. This type of monopoly makes select people very rich as the peasants are beholden to their lords for everything. On the other hand a lord has to expend an effort to protect the land and the peasants from possible usupers.

I'm cerealizing this now...

Excellent scholarship.

The reversible mouldboard plough was another game changer...

Fascinating topic, thanks!

Wonderful research Brasil

Fascinatng, thanks! ❤😃

I like her rather austere delivery . No feeble jokes. She is clearly here to provide us with knowledge - NOT give us a a " laugh"..!

The presenter mentioned monasteries a few times, but never adressed their role in promoting new technlogies or even literature written in monasteries about thes topics. It is only a guess on my part. But maybe the monasteries were quite influential.

Crop rotation between wheat, barley, rye, oat, is wrong. These plants belong to the same genus (Cereals) and so, generally, draw the same nutrients from the soil. Tru crop rotation, in order to reserve soil fertility, must include plants of different families. (Leguminosae like peas, Brassicaceae, like cabbage, Apiaceae like carrots, Alliums, like onions…) This explains the reduction of fertility.

Love the answer at the end about all of these organized villages popping up. Not unlike company towns.

I have for some time had the impression that record keeping and letter writing preserving and sharing ideas in agricultural mgt. Was the big new thing that made this 500 years more productive than previous times. The written word especially in code eventually played a big part in the peasant revolt. And that came out of decreased population due to black death where people where eating the immune compromising diet of high grains peas beans and the cloudy weather for some years before reduces vit D reducing immunity more. Most plague victims have signs of rickets.

Interestin exposition but I'm a bit concerned about the two original control sites, especially the one in Provence, which is of Mediterranean climate and would thus not apply well to Atlantic Europe.

The culmination of the Medieval Agricultural Revolution coincided with the medieval warming or optimum. That period had relatively few crop failures and could support a rapidly growing and developing population. I, as a climatologist was surprised that it was not mentioned at all in the fascinating talk.

The question of differentiating between declining soil fertility or maximizing output may be answered by examination of the local populations' corpses for health and stress markers on the bones (this should be examined across classes)

Two questions... if I plant some cold tolerant plants , that I started indoors, (foe example , Pumpkins ) will a cloche , ( instead of a cold frame) protect them from a possible overnight frost ? AND , you mentioned putting xmas lights in a cold frame to raise the inside temperature a bit , did you mean LED's ??? or regular... Thanks

By rotating and growing field beans there would be nitrogen-fixing plants, and friable soil ..so that could well improve matters.Field beans were really crucial for healthy survival over winter. Just a thought. What is rotated matters more than just rotating.

The political development of the nation state would seem to be an important stimulus for a number of these changes. Strange how the design of the plough was targetted as a reason for change, rather than a symptom. The Anglo Saxon and Brythanic kingdoms were first centrally organised by Æthelstan in 927 creating a larger and more stable market and a recognised hierarchy of authority that laws could be endorsed by. In 1066 the large Norman war horse replaced the Cob pony increasing ploughing by horse and the general value of the horse generally. The Doomsday book also increased accountability and challenged serfs to meet taxation targets. Grains can be stored for a number of years unlike other crops, and they are easily transported and measured. Furthermore, straw and grain can be used to sustain livestock through winter months allowing increases in fertilization and livestock. The Cistercian and Benedictine orders arrived shortly after the Norman conquest which dramatically stimulated economic growth by providing disciplined governance and a formalised alliance with the military government which the older British church had not achieved - it being characterised as a hermetic faith redolent of the pre-Ronan priestly classes. Many modern units of measurement are based upon wheat grains indicating grain's role as money before the introduction of currency endorsed by a central monarch.

I enjoyed the lecture even though there were many aspects which I disagreed with. If I tried to put them here it would just seem negative and I don't want to do that. Is the college doing other similar lectures on the relationship between agricultural production and the feudal system and the new monasticism ?

Totally off topic but I was very confused by her hybrid British-American accent but she's from America and lives in the UK so it makes perfect sense

I understand thr premise but wonder how the samples were obtained can anyone hhelp ?

Excellent presentation. The Star Trek-looking presentation remote distracted me every time, though ;-)

Great stuff. So, intensification and small-scale came first. This argues that as society collapses, we will return to intensification as we scale down. This also means the ability to increase soil fertility under a smaller scale.

Well, I'm convinced.

How do you fold sheep? They're rather thick and not very flexible. :-)*

interesting to see how social and technological advances have similarities with genetical/biological evolution. individual mutation seldom results in a single leap of changes but accumulation of small isolated changes can click on together under an environmental pressure (selection) on a large view : different disciplines can evolve under the same scheme or methodology.

A wonderful presentation. I wonder how deforestation played into this. Was land deforested to gain more farmland, or was wood more important as building material or as an energy source? (or all of the above) How much forest, was still left at what time? (Asking from the Black Forest region in Germany, which was completely deforested in the 18th century. Wood was used for glass production and logs where traded as down the rhine as far as the Netherlands as building material.) England has the image of a forest-free island in Germany.

While I was watching I thought of some other things too, like food storage, since about 800ad glass became popular, maybe people started to store their food in jars or pickle them, also salt mining was very popular at that same period too which was also used for storage . Oh and we started to eat more foreign foods like carp, maybe at that period fishing methods might of changed too, I dunno just some things I thought of

There's more to it than this. These practices had been in use at various times in various places in Europe over the course of several medieval centuries before the period being referred to as an "agricultural revolution."

What role does the enclosure movement play and when?

Ancient ireland has a 7 feild system. Involving cattle. Before the english. Before the normans even.

Don't think these are the first medieval water mills. This has been closely examined. I write about it as well as the only increase in the number of water mills was consistent with population increase in Britain.

Well one thing a crop surplus does give you, on the back of population expansion, is the ability to take surplus males off the land and into armies and militias, the better to oppress and control the people doing the production. That solidifies the inequality model when you have a radical political change such as happened in 1066, when one small "elite" took ownership of the entire country.

Very interesting and enjoyable. I was going to mention the dramatic climate change but saw that someone else mentioned it. We were producing wine in the North of England during the warmer 13th century but when it became cooler and more wet during the 14th century at the beginning of the little ice age, the crops failed and caused widespread famine. So I hope that you do take that into consideration going forward. I know the mad climate change scientists tried to delete the warmer period but it did actually happen!

was it the social formation? I thought that almost all sheep manure went to the demesne. Maybe it was wasted in the process so there was enough manure but not enough distribution?

Increased ploughing and decreasing fertility despite increasing manuring. Does ploughing damage fertility? Have we been getting it wrong because it was always done this way?

I need to educate myself on plants which fix Nitrogen like Clover and Peas. Did they exist?

20:11 No, it's not clear *at all.* There's tons of variation; a straight line would have been just as reasonable.

When you speak of “bread wheat”, are you using this term to distinguish between grades of lower-protein wheat, or between other grains? If so, how are you judging different wheats, are what’s the surviving evidence for your judgements?

What was the influence of the arrival of Viking farmers?

1300 figure for population seems high - England pop in 1700 was 4 mill.

The medieval warming period would have contributed enormously to any agricultural “revolution”.

Oops. Somehow I landed in the wrong commentary 😂

I always thought it was because of the turnip

Starts with mistake : It is not : population growth leads to more food production, but more food production leads to population growth. It is the same as in all species on earth, multiply as long as the food allows it.

That trend line looks awfully biased by the data on the very left.

Interesting that we have the same problems today as we did back then; decreasing fertility. But it is helpful to know that we might not have to work so hard to control weeds if we did not grow crops that demand so much nutrition. We can grow less demanding crops and live with lower fertility and smaller weeds. Very useful. Thanks!

Wouldn't the Medieval warm period (950 to 1300), and the resulting effect on growing seasons, yield, acreage under plough, etc be the most significant factor in the expansion of agricultural output and population expansion? What effect would these innovations have in a period without significant drop in temperature or catastrophic population collapses due to the Great Famine (1310's to 1320') and Black Death (1330s- 1360's)...

If cereal planting is more profitable than livestock grazing how do you account for the fact that many land owners evicted their grain growing tenants and replaced them with sheep in the 18th and 19th centuries?

Interesting, not had time to watch all of it yet, but got the sense that 'England' and 'Britain' were used interchangeably though.

"The Medieval Agricultural Revolution:" Old Evidence - deforestation for fuel... Today, to extract 8 billion tonnes of coal annually, 100 million barrel of crude oil and atmospheres of natural gas daily from deep in the underground to the surface - how many people are required for the task? The answer is - 8 billion population, flat out, 24/7 - strong. Fossil fuels don't come to the point of use on the flying carpet. Our outgoing Western Civilisation has been no more than a deforestation and then fossil fuels extraction operation - all along... "In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most. No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores. No system of energy can deliver sum useful energy in excess of the total energy put into constructing it. This universal truth applies to all systems. Energy, like time, flows from past to future".

That coughing person was so rude and inconsiderate. They should have coughed into their elbow to stifle the sound, or left the room.

All the agriculturalists in the comments and me being very confused.

Hmmmm, plowing the same field produces a poor yield….so rotate the field you plow. I can think of other applications for this wizened reasoning. 😮

2:05 I've seen this figure before of 2.5 to 3 million people in Britain in late Roman times 5th Century AD, (400 to 410) and frankly it is baloney, more probably topping at 1.5 million to 1.75 million. It relies on the Population in Roman Britain, far exceeding the rest of the Islands, but then dropping, while the rest of the Archipelago, remained fairly static, why? The Domesday figure is highly disputed, the great Anglo Saxon expert Michael Wood, estimates 1.2 million, and my money is with him. There is no evidence that the number of Villages dropped dramatically in the Anglo Saxon period. 41:21 King Alfred the Great late 9th Century, introduced the ~Burhs~ Defensive Villages against attack from the Vikings. Which were in effect Nucleated villages, mainly based around a market, his daughter Aethelflaed extended them into Mercia, so most of Wessex and Western Middle England had them from early 10th century onwards. The Great Famine which covered most of Northern Europe, was 1307 to 1322? No mention of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), when temperatures rose to levels above todays, from levels way below those of the 17th to 19th Centuries. Greenland acquired its name because there were farming areas there. The MWP ended around 1250, going by the Dendrochronogical evidence, you can look it up online to check. No mention in England of the 10th Century onwards, Tax break, that allowed the richer farmer to pay lower taxes, if he had a Religious community on his land. These is turn usually were run on a Co-operative basis, ploughing (pun intended) back any profits into the land. The Lord of the Manor was wealthier by having no poor to look after, this was done by the Monks or Nuns, who in turn educated the other farmers in the best use of the land. Decent presentation, but much left out in this study, most strikingly the obvious rise in Temperatures between 950 and 1250. Any bets the team think Global warming is new and Man made🤣😂😂😂🤣😂 There was NO Revolution, just steady development.

Perhaps, and never addressed by any scholars in my experience, surpluses of crops create income inequality because the very poor would have died without these surpluses...their very survival being the reason for a larger disparity. Perhaps, disparities in income are not necessarily a bad thing, if indeed it is because of the ability to keep more people alive.

I don't think it's disrespectful to point out that this speaker has a tendency to trail off toward inaudibility, making her hard to follow.

always someone coughing

Why in the first 4 minutes are there two references to communism?

No mention of climate change. The medieval warm period!!!!!!.......... If you want to obsess about climate change in the present why not say something about it in the past.

Farmers in general are not known for their innovation drive. Things will have gone in a glacial pace.

"We'll talk about England tonight, but much would apply to Europe". I bet most changes came from Europe and were applied in England too. England is not the center of the universe. When will they finally start to realize that on their tiny little island over there?

Well why not just post this as a podcast. Or minimize the presenter and maximize her images. I think I would rather read the book.

Europe 1, Backward Foreigners Nil.

Marxist language… I thought this would be academic on farming, not academic on Marxism

How did the royalty and the league of lords, dukes, peerage and the church impact medieval agriculture in England? Given constant war, pillage, land-grab, shifting partisans must have affected agriculture in a major way also. No account of that? Yes all the short lived growth for sure. No mention of the massive hunger caused by the black plagues of Spain, Italy, France and Switzerland.

Land owning and landlordism started before the 10th century. Her statement is absolutely non-sensical.