Scientific fields? Medieval peasants, sustainable farming and elemental theory
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2016-05-28

Our current understanding of the medieval rural environment is largely based on scholarly writings focusing on the landscape policies pursued by the social elite. This study reexamines manorial sources from the perspective of local peasants to reconstruct the physical—and in some respects, metaphorical—environment of the lower orders in two contrasting English villages between 1086-1348, and to determine how this led to the development of the local economic strategies that can be pieced together from the records of the medieval manor. Maintaining soil quality was fundamentally important since peasants’ survival was closely linked to their agricultural success. Local peasants clearly understood that the land needed nourishment, but they also had to decide where and how best to deploy their limited fertiliser stocks, and this required a thorough understanding of the land they worked. Nothing emphasises this more than the wide variety of local fieldnames coined by the peasants themselves. Many field-names were selected and retained over a long period, and describe the specific qualities of individual cropping units. This paper argues that some of the most enduring field-names survived as part of a collective mnemonic system used by local farmers in conjunction with commonly held scientific ideas, from which they determined how best to treat their fields. It suggests that, although uneducated in any formal sense, some peasants nevertheless had a strong grasp of contemporary scientific thought, and there is evidence to suggest that elemental and humoral scientific theory informed their approach to the sustainability of soil quality.

Susan KILBY (University of Leicester)