page_title: Open-field system
section_title: Crops and production
hierarchical_section_title: Open-field system / Crops and production
caption_attribution_description: English: Medieval plowing with oxen (from a 14th century manuscript)
context_page_description: The open-field system was the prevalent agricultural system in much of Europe during the Middle Ages and lasted into the 20th century in parts of western Europe, Russia, Iran, and Turkey. Under the open-field system, each manor or village had two or three large fields, usually several hundred acres each, which were divided into many narrow strips of land. The strips or selions were cultivated by individuals or peasant families, often called tenants or serfs. The holdings of a manor also included woodland and pasture areas for common usage and fields belonging to the lord of the manor and the church. The farmers customarily lived in individual houses in a nucleated village with a much larger manor house and church nearby. The open-field system necessitated co-operation among the inhabitants of the manor.
  The Lord of the Manor, his officials, and a Manorial court administered the manor and exercised jurisdiction over the peasantry. The Lord levied rents and required the peasantry to work on his personal lands, called a demesne.
  In medieval times, little land was owned outright. Instead, generally the lord had rights given to him by the king, and the tenant rented land from the lord.
context_section_description: The typical planting scheme in a three-field system was that barley, oats, or legumes would be planted in one field in spring, wheat or rye in the second field in the fall and the third field would be left fallow. The following year, the planting in the fields would be rotated. Pasturage was held in common. The tenants pastured their livestock on the fallow field and on the planted fields after harvest. An elaborate set of laws and controls, partly set by the Lord of the Manor and partly by the tenants themselves regulated planting, harvest, and pasturing.
  Wheat and barley were the most important crops with roughly equal amounts planted on the average in England. Annual wheat production at Battle Abbey in Sussex in the late 14th century ranged from 2.26 to 5.22 seeds harvested for every seed planted, averaging 4.34 seeds harvested for every seed planted. Barley production averaged 4.01 and oats 2.87 seeds harvested for seeds planted. This translates into yields of 7 to 17 bushels per acre harvested. Battle Abbey, however, may have been atypical, with better management and soils than typical of demesnes in open-field areas. Barley was used in making beer – consumed in large quantities – and mixed with other grains to produce bread that was a dietary staple for the poorer farmers. Wheat was often sold as a cash crop. Richer people ate bread made of wheat. At Elton in 1286, perhaps typical of that time in England, the tenants harvested about twice as much barley as wheat with lesser amounts of oats, peas, beans, rye, flax, apples, and vegetables.
  The land-holding tenants also had livestock, including sheep, pigs, cattle, horses, oxen, and poultry. Pork was the principal meat eaten; sheep were primarily raised for their wool, a cash crop. Only a few rich landholders had enough horses and oxen to make up a ploughing-team of six to eight oxen or horses, so sharing among neighbours was essential.
caption: A four-ox-team plough, circa 1330. The ploughman is using a mouldboard plough to cut through the heavy soils. A team could plough about one acre (0.4 ha) per day.
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "1200", "Image YResolution": "1200", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "GIMP 2.6.7", "Image DateTime": "2010:02:07 09:32:38", "Image ExifOffset": "146", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "282", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "3586", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "4327", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1311"}