How Many Acres - Medieval Answer

Native American Indians, particularly those in the Plaines States, we use to starving during many winters.

What made the concept of the acre important it is allowed a standard unit for work scheduling. If you were plowing 20 acres you knew it would take you about 20 work days for one team, ten for two, five for four.

I could be wrong, but I thought a horse could plow an acre a day, and each horse added added by an acre each.

I have tried growing at a community garden,
and there is no point to using advanced ideas there,
someone else will get rid of what you are doing very fast,
annual gardening on land that is not yours will get you to not even bother with perennial things and many other good practices,
you need o have a longer term claim to the land to do the neat things.

I had no idea that people use to be forced into a system that would not allow for a good deal of new things.

Oxen were the beast of choice at the time, but yes, I believe an acre was what one ox can plow in one day. The relationship between number of oxen and speed is not linear, you need more plowmen and plows, oxen move slowly, adding more will only do so much for speed. The big teams were usually only used for deep subsoil plows or cargo hauling where the combined brawn was needed.

Acre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For speed you need horses, but horses were not really practical for cart travel until the roads became well paved, and most folks couldn't afford to keep multiple animals for multiple purposes.

In the odds and ends bucket I take to demonstrations are a pair of ox shoes. With split hoof, left and right side. Also a pair of mule shoes, which are longer and narrower than a horse's shoe.

Many European countries have had community gardens dating back to those which were the basis for this thread. They go by various names but mostly allotments. They are no less secure than if a crop were growing in a large field. In fact, often more secure due to the possibility of someone or another being there from early morning until dark.

Many farmers also go through their entire working years without owning a single square foot of land. They rent the farm, usually 40-60 or 50-50.

Martin

Animals and livestock mostly sharing the same quarters isn't all that uncommon even today. In places in Middle-East goats are raised on roof tops (as were pigeons in cities). The 'grotto' in which Jesus was born wasn't likely such, but a part of a small city homestead which oridinarly housed animals. (And I doubt they had a cow or perhaps sheep).

I love the movie "The Good Earth" based on Pearl Buck's novel.

In places in Europe homesteads were built in a square, with living quarters at one end, one side for livestock, one side for tools and hay/crop storage and the other for an entry/common use area. The inside (middle of the square) would have been used for some purpose, such as composting.

I understand in the general area of Austria it wasn't unusual to have livestock and crop storage on the first level with family living quarters above it.

Scent? When you rarely bathed it probably didn't make much difference.

Only remember the reference. "Farmers of 40 Centuries" - about small-scale farming in China.

I saw that, it was pretty good. Interesting the one map showing individual plots were long and skinny instead of squarish as they are now. I'm thinking that was because of the difficulty in turning the oxen team around. Made boundary issues more difficult but made the plowing easier to just keep going in a straight line.

putts

The single moldboard plow, driven in the traditional pattern produced little ridges. Boundaries were probably located by counting those off.

Its also the reason politicians today want to keep the masses living in poverty. Socialism (Robbing the rich to give to the poor) works quite well when the masses are poor.

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"Nothing so needs reforming as other peoples habits." Mark Twain

we also have to remember that this time period was considered the dark ages for a reason. The church pretty much insured that everything was done backwards and the hardest way possible. So much information and technology was lost that some of which we are finally just regaining. While these pesants probably worked 60 hours a week even though I have heard estimates of 3-4 hours a day. many people pre- Christian era worked much less.

Depends on if they have a beast of burden or not, and the season. The beasts were often given more rest breaks than the peasants, so if you did most of your work as a driver you might get a sizable midday break. There are also down-times of the year and up-times of the year as a full time farmer. I'm even modern farmers have critical seasons where they work 60 hours a week, and other seasons where they stroll down to the workshop and just tinker a little each day.

I worked for a modern farmer once.... ok, that was in 1969 so not so modern by todays standards... he was in the fields by 4 every morning, never came in until after 9 at night. 7 days a week every week. If he had an "off season" I dont know when it was. wintertime when he wasnt in the fields he could be found keeping the same hours in the shop maintaining equipment so everything would be ready to use when needed.

__________________
"Nothing so needs reforming as other peoples habits." Mark Twain

Those boundries later became WW 2 hedgerows. Likely cause somebody didn't see the sense in removing them when small as they likely wouldn't get the land next year, so they were left to grow. ALSO, They eventually grew into inpentrable fences, making them useful for that.

60 hours in a week is a short week. 80 to 120 is not uncommon. 160 happens during busy times. Sleep? It's a theory.

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SugarMtnFarm.com -- Pastured Pigs, Poultry, Sheep, Dogs and Kids

the acreage it takes to support a family depends much on where one is,

in the west when the homesteading act was in place, they figured 160 acres was a good size, but most could not survive on 160 in the west as it was much dryer and the amount that could be produced was much less, then in the east.

In my area of Colorado they figure 20 acres per cow/calf.
back east 2.5 acres per cow calf.
in some areas were it is more arid,it my take up to 50 or more per cow calf,

and the same can be related to crops grown, as well,

so the size of homestead is dependent on where one is located, and it attributes, soil types and land lay and any other resources and benefits, if you want to "live off the land" and if you want some extra to sell, you most likely will need more,

(and since your discussing medieval times most likely your looking at Europe where the climate is not necessarily the climate in the USA.

In medieval times, the European lords charged their serfs very high rents. They also built flour mills and charged their serfs high fees for using them, also forbidding them to even have any grinding rocks to make their own flour. Churches owned land, had tenants, and charge high rents and fees also. The lords were too busy protecting their land and people from robbers and the armies of other lords to take time to work on farming methods. Not that the lords got a free ride, they had to equip and furnish soldiers to the local king for national defense.

It took a long time for these people to figure out the simple idea of covering seed that was sown with a little dirt to protect it from birds and improving germination.

Indians in eastern North America used fairly advanced farming methods, considering that they didn't have draft animals or iron tools. Google Cahokia (IL). Indians there had an advanced enough civilization to produce and store enough food to support craftsman to the point that they traded with distant areas. Their city had about 20,000 people at it's peak. Their civilization collapsed in the mid 1400s, I think, before Europeans arrived.

Hunter-gatherer societies generally had healthier and larger people than farming societies. When the Europeans came, the Indians were taller and more robust than the Europeans. After a few generations of living own their own fertile land the people of European descent caught up.

COWS

Ive heard that the Northern Indians had 100 acre corn fields. Don't know how that could be, but who knows?

Oxen (or horses) couldn't go non-stop, like tractors do. Mediaeval farmers worked out by trial and error that about 220 yards was as far as far as an ox or span of oxen pulling a plough could go before the animal needed to take a breather.

Hence, they set 220 yards - 660 feet - as the length of a standard furrow - a furlong.

Generally one or two oxen were all they used - more meant pulling a larger heavier "whatever", but ploughs took human muscle to control as well as animal muscle to pull, and what could be pulled by one or two oxen was about as much as one ploughman could handle. Any more and you needed more ploughmen on a bigger plough, much more complicated, and when it broke down as it inevitably would, much more time was lost.

They needed some way to keep any variation in furrows controlled, otherwise they'd have a furrow miles long that wandered all over the place. To keep blocks fairly squared-up they decided that after a furlong they'd turn round and make the next furrow beside the one they'd just ploughed, then stop and rest the ox, span or team again. Thus, their paddocks or field were in lengths of multiples of a furlong - generally only one.

Now, oxen could work at very approximately 2 mph. 2 miles is 16 furlongs, so in an hour they'd traverse the field, up and back again, eight times.
Fore ease of arithmetic, assume an eight-hour day - they had to let the oxen rest longer, graze, drink, so the ploughmen got a lunch break too.
Eight hours times eight lengths of the field meant 64 field traverses in a day.
If that were right, and if a field was one chain (4 rods, poles or perches) wide to give an area of an acre, then a field would be 66 feet (22 yards) / 64 = about one foot apart. Actually, work days were longer, more furrows so closer together, but we're in the right area of performance.

Did you notice the measures of length I throw in back there? Rod, pole or perch? Those are standards - I learnt them in school. Four of them make a chain - that's a standard surveyor's chain, 22 yards long (standard length of a cricket pitch, or about from a baseball pitcher's mound to the catcher). I worked with government surveyors at one stage - they still had a surveyor's chain in their museum. While I don't know it for a fact, I'd surmise that when ploughing they'd lay a rod across the width to be ploughed, work till they reached its end, and then take their long breaks - mid-morning, lunch, mid-afternoon, end-of-day.

As they worked, they'd often turn up stones and rocks. They'd carry those to the edge of their acre gradually building rows that suggested building fences along the edges. If they were anywhere near the corners of the fields they'd build cairns there, and a field became accepted as within the boundaries ruled between corner cairns.

Incidentally, they also learnt that one acre a day was about as much as the average harvester could cut with a scythe. Specialists who travelled during harvest - itinerant workers - could manage as much as five acres a day. This was important. Once the grain ripened you wanted it under cover as soon as possible. Until then, it was vulnerable to wind and rain damage - a good crop in the field could be lost to wind and rain in just hours. Harvest was also a consideration in setting field sizes. You wanted the crop in a field to be harvestable before any other crops ripened, so planting them an acre at a time, a week apart, so they'd ripen at different times in small enough bites for your work force to handle, ideally in a day or two, was important.

Im sure ive said this before, but I guess it could use a repeat. When harvesting a field, they didn't cut to a corner, turn around and cut to the next. They cut in a circle/oval. This was so that there wouldn't be any time wasted in coming to a corner, then restraightening the line and starting out again. The corners was appropriated by the church from the earliest days as areas for the poor to cut and glean.
A fellow who wanted to look good in church left his corners open/un cut. It make him look pious, but really it made his field get cut quicker hence he had to pay his help less.