The Plow and the Horse in Medieval Europe

One of the most important factors driving Europe`s slow emergence from the economic stagnation of the Early Middle Ages (circa 500-1000 B.C.E.) was the improvement of agricultural technology. One innovation was a new plow, with a curved attachment (moldboard) to turn over wet, heavy soils, and a knife (or coulter) in front of the blade to allow a deeper and easier cut. This more complex plow replaced the simpler "scratch" plow that merely made a shallow, straight furrow in the ground. In the lands around the Mediterranean, with light rains and mild winters, this had been fine, but in the wetter terrain north and west of the Danube and the Alps, such a plow left much to be desired, and it is to be wondered if it was used at all. Cleared lands would more likely have been worked by hand tilling, with little direct help from animals, and the vast forests natural to Northern Europe remained either untouched, or perhaps cleared in small sections by fire, and the land probably was used only so long as the ash-enriched soil yielded good crops and then abandoned for some other similarly cleared field. Such a pattern of agriculture and settlement was no basis for sustained cultural or economic life.

With the new heavy plow, however, fields could be cleared, sowed, and maintained with little more difficulty than in the long-settled lands of Southern Europe, while the richness of the new soils, the reliability of the rains, and the variety of crops now possible made for an extremely productive agriculture. The new tool, however, imposed new demands, technical, economic, and social. The heavy plow was a substantial piece of capital, unlike a simple hand hoe, and this had the same sorts of implications that capitalization always has-it favored the concentration of wealth and control. Moreover, making full use of it required more animal power, and this had a host of implications of its own. The full importance of this was even more apparent in the centuries after 1000, when oxen began to give way in certain parts of Western Europe to horses.

The powerful, rugged farm horse was itself a product of improvement during the Middle Ages, and it was part of complex set of technical changes and capabilities. The introduction of new forms of equipment for horses transformed this animal into the single most important assist to human labor and travel. Instead of the old harness used by the ancient Greeks and Romans, there appeared from Central Asia the rigid, padded horse collar. Now, when the horse pulled against a load, no longer did the load pull back against its neck and windpipe but rather rode on the sturdy shoulders. When this innovation was combined with the iron horseshoe, the greater speed and stamina of the horse displaced oxen wherever it could be afforded. The large importance of this lay not only in more efficient farmwork, but in swifter and surer transportation between town and countryside. The farmer with horses could move products to market more frequently and at greater distances than with only oxen, and the urban development that was to transform the European economic and social landscape after the eleventh century was propelled in large part by these new horse-centered transport capabilities.

Another indicator of how compelling and important was the new horse agriculture was its sheer cost. Unlike oxen and other cattle, horses cannot be supported exclusively on hay and pasturage, they require, particularly in northern climates where pasturing seasons are short, cropped food, such as oats and alfalfa. Unlike grass and hay, these are grown with much of the same effort and resources applied to human nourishment, and thus their acquisition represents a sacrifice, in a real sense, of human food. The importance of this in a world that usually lived at the margins of sufficient diet is hard to overstate. The increased resources that went into making the horse central to both the medieval economy and in a separate but related development, medieval warfare, are the surest signs of the great utility the animal now assumed.