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AGRICULTURE

AGRICULTURE. In 1500, between twothirds and three-quarters of European adults worked primarily in agriculture. The number who lived in the countryside and worked occasionally on farms was even higher—over 90 percent of the population in parts of eastern Europe. The numbers were still large in 1750, when agriculture employed half or two-thirds of the working population in many European countries.

Most Europeans had to labor on farms because agricultural technology was, by modern standards, rudimentary and agriculture itself unproductive. The majority of the population therefore toiled in fields and pastures to feed the minority who lived in manors and cities. Food shortages were common, at least for the poor, and bad harvests triggered food riots and sent the hungry roaming across the land in search of something to eat. In times of dearth, government officials diverted food to cities to prevent urban disturbances and sometimes even barred hungry paupers at city gates.

Agriculture was important for other reasons as well. Military leaders worried about feeding armies and providing them with horses, and with reason; otherwise soldiers would ransack homes. Farms were also a major source of income for the rich and powerful, who lived on the income from agricultural properties. The revenue might take the form of rent, of seignorial dues, or, in regions where serfdom still existed, of obligatory labor on noble estates. On top of all this, peasants paid the tithe to the church and taxes to fund the wars waged by early modern states.

Increasing the meager productivity of European agriculture became a great concern in the eighteenth century, when government officials and agricultural reformers argued about what would make farms produce more. Although there was no extraordinary technological revolution in farming until the nineteenth century, certain regions (such as Catalonia and the German North Sea Coast in the sixteenth century, or the Paris Basin and the wine-growing province of Beaujolais in the eighteenth) did experience increases in agricultural productivity in the early modern period. Two countries—England and the Netherlands—managed to forge ahead of the rest. Why farming advanced in England and the Netherlands, while most other European countries lagged behind, has been debated for over two hundred years, but new answers to this age-old question have begun to emerge from recent scholarship.

WHO OWNED THE LAND, WHO FARMED IT, AND WHO HAD RIGHTS TO IT

In most of early modern Europe, farmland was subject to a variety of rights and claims that made ownership complex. Technically, the land often belonged to aristocratic landlords (nobles, ecclesiastical institutions, or even merchants or officials), but, particularly in western Europe (eastern Europe was quite different), their rights were frequently limited to collecting insignificant fixed rents and relatively small dues and fees due them as seignorial lords. There were certainly exceptions to this rule, and most aristocratic landlords did have some plots—the demesne on their seignorial estates—that they could rent out for their full value. But it was the farmers themselves who exercised effective ownership of much of the agricultural land in western Europe, and what they did not own they usually rented. They had to pay the seignorial lord his dues and fees, use his mill, oven, or court; and perhaps provide him with a small amount of underpaid or forced labor. Typically, however, they could sell the land they possessed, bequeath it to their heirs, or sublease it. If they were tenants (rather than de facto owners), they would, of course, be unable to dispose of the property, and they would have to pay significant rent, perhaps to the seignorial lord (if, say, he were leasing out part of the demesne), or perhaps to some other landowner. Whatever the situation, how to farm the land was still their decision.

Most often these farmers were peasants. The most substantial ones had to amass large amounts of capital even if they were tenant farmers. They owned sheep, oxen or horses, plows and other implements, seed grain for planting, and money to hire workers or pay rent, and they saved so that their sons and daughters could be prosperous farmers, too. Other farmers had much less and could not even afford to pay cash rent. With no land of their own, they might enter into a sharecropping contract with a landlord, who would provide livestock, implements, and seed for farming in return for a large share of the crop (typically one-half) as rent. Nearly all the farmers (except for the most prosperous ones, who assumed the role of farm managers) worked on their own farms. They employed family labor, too—women milked cows, tended gardens, and cared for poultry, while even children helped bring in the grain harvest—and often hired long-term servants and temporary workers as well.

In eastern Europe, in contrast, the situation was almost reversed: there landlords managed to impose what is sometimes called a "second serfdom" on peasants during the early modern period. Peasants in much of the region (this is true in particular for what is now Poland, eastern Germany, western Hungary, and the Czech Republic) had exercised effective landownership and enjoyed considerable independence well into the fifteenth century. Thereafter, however, they lost their land to seignorial lords who incorporated it into their demesne, and much of their independence vanished, too. The landlords imposed heavy seignorial dues, forced the peasants to spend much of their time working for little or no pay on seignorial demesnes, and used their political and legal powers to keep them from fleeing or moving away. By the early seventeenth century, peasants in parts of eastern Germany had to work three days a week for their seignorial lords, while an average Polish peasant family might have to furnish two workers and oxen for the same amount of time every week.

Throughout Europe, peasant villages also exercised rights over the land. Villages often controlled access to pastures, waste, or unplowed fields that could be used for grazing. They could bar farmers from entering fields and vineyards to protect ripening crops from damage or theft, and they often determined when harvesting began. In eastern Europe, landlords weakened the villages when they imposed the second serfdom, but in western Europe the communities were strong enough to defend peasants' communal grazing rights against encroaching landlords. In doing so, the western villages often asserted that they were defending poorer villagers, who relied on the communal grazing rights because they had little or no land. Their claims were sometimes hollow, for in some instances the communal grazing land was the preserve of the community's richest peasants, who masked their monopoly in the language of concern for the poor.

AGRICULTURAL PRACTICES AND TECHNOLOGY

Bread was a staple of the European diet, grain was a major crop, and much European farmland was therefore devoted to growing wheat and rye, alongside oats for horses and barley for beer or soup. Even in major grain-producing areas, though, as much as a third of what farmers produced (after they fed the livestock) came from animals—in particular, wool and lamb from the herds of sheep that were sent to graze on fallow fields to fertilize them. In pastoral regions (such as Scandinavia, western parts of France and of Great Britain, and nearly any place where there were mountains), animals were even more important for the value of the products they provided: not only sheep, but herds of cattle, which were a source of beef, hides, and cheese. Nearly all farms, even small ones, had poultry in courtyards and pigs rooting for acorns in forests. Olives and fruit trees were important near the Mediterranean, and vineyards grew on hillsides and rocky soil even in northern climates. Even in areas that moved toward specialization in crops other than grain—parts of Normandy, for instance, which had shifted toward producing livestock—land was still often reserved for growing some wheat, rye, or oats. High transportation costs (particularly when there were no navigable waterways nearby) made it cheaper for most peasants to grow grain for their own consumption rather than specialize completely in stock raising or viticulture and then buying their food.

In much of Europe grains were grown in a three-year crop cycle known as the three-field system. Cultivation began with a year of fallow, when the land was fertilized with the manure of pasturing sheep and then plowed to rid it of weeds and incorporate organic matter into the soil. In the second year, wheat or rye was sowed, followed, in the third year, by barley, oats, or a fodder crop such as vetch or peas. The land thus produced crops two years out of three. If land was abundant, or if the topsoil was thin or infertile, then the fallow, with its fertilizing and plowing, might repeat every second year, yielding crops one year out of two—what was called the two-field system. In some instances, the fallow might last even longer, and weeds and brush that choked the field would be burned before cultivation resumed.

Where the three-field system predominated—as in much of northwestern Europe—fields were often unfenced and open in order to allow animals to pasture. Fencing would have, in any case, been extremely costly because many peasants farmed narrow strips of land scattered through the various fields: several strips in the field sown in wheat, for instance, several more in the oat field, and still others in the fallow. Open fields were common in some regions of two-field agriculture, too, though not in all. On average (there were exceptions to this rule when soil was fertile or agriculture relatively advanced) the fields ended up producing perhaps only four or five times the seed sown, a tenth of the yield today. The meager yields were one reason so many early modern Europeans had to work in agriculture; another was the enormous amount of labor required to bring in the harvest in an era before mechanical reapers. Armies of men, women, and children invaded the fields to cut the grain with sickles, gather it up, and stack it for drying and storage. The demand would drive up wages in summertime and draw workers from cities. Even then the work was not over, for the grain still had to be threshed before it could be ground into flour. Once the harvest was over, many of the hands would be idle, and that was part of the appeal of rural industry, which provided work doing tasks such as spinning.

The practices of early modern farmers were condemned by eighteenth-century agricultural reformers and, more recently, by modern historians. Most of the critics believe that early modern farmers were wasteful or could have produced more. Some have argued, for instance, that early modern farmers could have replaced the two-field system with the three-field one, which would have yielded crops two years out of three instead of just one year in two, or they could have planted fodder crops (such as alfalfa, sainfoin, or clover) on the fallow fields, which were supposed to add nutrients to the soil and support larger herds of animals, thereby increasing the supply of fertilizer for the grain fields. But these criticisms often fail to take costs and technical difficulties into account. Often the fodder crops did not suit the soil or pay for the additional costs they entailed, and the two-field system was usually a reasonable response to soil conditions or a relatively lower price of land. Shifting to a three-field system would actually have been wasteful or have diminished yields. Similarly, critics might ask why peasants reaped wheat with sickles, when scythes, which had long been used to mow grass or harvest oats, could do the task in much less time. However, the scythe required considerable strength, and even in the hands of a man it tended to knock the kernels off the wheat stalks. Only skilled reapers could wield it successfully, and it was cheaper to employ women, children, and unskilled men, who sawed wheat with sickles. Early modern farmers did not have our knowledge or technology, but they were certainly not wasteful.

THE SUCCESS OF AGRICULTURE IN ENGLAND AND THE NETHERLANDS

Although early modern yields were low, agricultural productivity did jump in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in two countries—the Netherlands and England. Although the increase, particularly in England, has often been termed an agricultural revolution, it would probably be better to reserve that term for the truly revolutionary changes—such as chemical fertilizers or the mechanical reaper—that transformed farming in the nineteenth century. Still, there is no denying that agricultural productivity did surge in the Netherlands and England. Perhaps the best measure is an index of what the average farmworker produced in each country, in which all farm products, from grain to meat, are lumped together. This index, constructed by the economic historian Robert Allen, shows that in 1750 Dutch and English farmworkers were producing between 59 and 175 percent more than their counterparts in all European countries but one. The one exception was the southern Netherlands—roughly speaking modern-day Belgium—where farmworkers had reached the same high level of productivity back in 1400.

Judging the productivity of whole countries has the disadvantage of glossing over great regional variations. France as a whole had lower agricultural productivity than England or the Netherlands, but there were parts of the country, such as the Paris Basin, where farms were just as productive as those anywhere in Europe. Similar statements could be made about the German North Sea Coast, Catalonia on the Iberian Peninsula, and parts of Italy. Still, whether one focuses on regions or whole countries, why agricultural productivity was so much higher in some places than in others must still be explained. The issue has attracted the most historical attention in England, for it was the first country to industrialize. Yet, back in 1600 its agricultural productivity (the Netherlands's too) was no different from that of most other European countries.

One common explanation traces England's success back to capitalist landlords, who remade the countryside in what were called enclosures. The enclosures involved putting an end to village control of farming practices, creating large farms by consolidating scattered fields, and fencing in open fields so that new crops could be planted on the fallow or arable land converted to pasture. The enclosures, historians have argued, boosted agricultural productivity by changing property rights, enlarging the scale of farming, and putting capitalist landlords who understood agricultural technology in charge. Elsewhere in Europe, agriculture remained in the hands of peasants, whose farms were too small and who resisted new crops and enclosures, either because they were fearful or ignorant or because poorer villagers wanted to protect their communal grazing rights. For one school of historians, it is population growth that kept most European farms too small and in the hands of backward peasants. For another, it was politics and the strength of the landlord class, for population growth was the same in England as in countries such as France, where agriculture lagged behind.

Recent work, however, casts doubt on these arguments. Enclosures did not boost agricultural productivity much in England, or on the rare occasions when they were tried in France. Bigger farms did not matter much either. They may have helped economize on labor, but most of the increase in English agricultural productivity came not from capitalist landlords, but from yeomen, who were really large-scale peasants, operating farms of sixty acres or so. Peasants as a whole were quite receptive to new agricultural techniques and they adopted them when it paid to do so. Similarly, overlapping property rights and village control of agriculture were less of an obstacle than historians thought. There were problems when land had to be drained or irrigated, but drainage and irrigation cannot account for the difference between French and English agriculture.

Excessive rent, taxes, and seignorial dues depressed agricultural productivity in some parts of Europe, but the damage they did was probably not as great as some historians imagined. Particular rental contracts, such as sharecropping, were less a cause of agricultural stagnation than a way for landlords to lend capital to poverty-stricken tenants. If rent, taxes, and seignorial dues together took less than a third of what a farmer produced, then they probably did not harm agricultural productivity either. If, however, they increased above a third, or if they dulled a farmer's incentives, then they could injure farming. That was a likely cause for the dismal agricultural performance in eastern Europe, where the second serfdom discouraged peasants' initiative and effort, and in Spain, where high taxes drove peasants to sell their property to nobles, who had little reason to farm well.

Warfare also did enormous harm to early modern agriculture. Beyond seizing food and horses, troops disrupted trade, and when frightened peasants fled from advancing armies, fields grew over before it was safe to return, necessitating months or even years of plowing and land clearance before fields could be cultivated again.

England (but not the Netherlands) escaped the worst army, at least on its own soil, but both countries had the added advantage of excellent transportation. The Netherlands built a great network of canals, and England constructed both canals and roads. In other countries, a road might be built to move troops, but in England and the Netherlands the infrastructure facilitated trade. Trade, whether by land or water, encouraged great agricultural specialization in the two countries, and, in turn, specialization increased productivity as farmers adapted crops to soil and prices and worked harder to buy new consumer goods available on the market. This specialization goes a long way toward explaining why agriculture in England and the Netherlands was productive and more innovative than in the rest of early modern Europe.

See also Daily Life; Economic Crises; Enclosure; Feudalism; Food and Drink; Food Riots; Laborers; Landholding; Peasantry; Physiocrats and Physiocracy; Poverty; Serfdom; Serfdom in East Central Europe; Serfdom in Russia; Technology; Transportation; Villages; Women.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abel, Wilhelm. Geschichte der deutschen Landwirtschaft vom frühen Mittelalter bis zum 19. Jahrhundert. 3rd rev. ed. Stuttgart, 1978. Wealth of detail about central Europe for readers of German.

Allen, Robert C. "Economic Structure and Agricultural Productivity in Europe, 1300–1800." European Review of Economic History 4 (2000): 1–26.

——. Enclosure and the Yeoman: The Agricultural Development of the South Midlands, 1450–1850. Oxford and New York, 1992. Best study of England.

Aston, T. H., and C. H. E. Philpin. The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1985.

De Vries, Jan. The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age, 1500–1700. New Haven, 1974.

——. The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600–1750. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1976. Important for the role that transportation played.

Duplessis, Robert S. Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1997. Good overview of agriculture throughout Europe with excellent bibliographies.

Finberg, H. P. R., and Joan Thirsk, eds. The Agrarian History of England and Wales. 8 vols. London, 1967–2000. Volumes 4 through 6 give exhaustive but somewhat dated coverage of the early modern period.

Hoffman, Philip T. Growth in a Traditional Society: The French Countryside, 1450–1815. Princeton, 1996.

Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. The French Peasantry, 1450–1660. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Berkeley, 1987.

Meuvret, Jean. Le problème des subsistances à l'époque Louis XIV. 3 vols. Paris, 1977–1988. In French, but indispensible for understanding early modern agricultural technology.

PHILIP T. HOFFMAN