The technology of medieval sheep farming: some evidence from Crawley, Hampshire, 1208–1349

Sheep farming was a profitable business for the bishops of Winchester before the Black Death. Evidence from the manor of Crawley demonstrates that investment in the management of the flock peaked in the early fourteenth century. Elsewhere on the estate, improvements in the provision of sires, housing, feeding, medicaments and the labour supply have been shown to impact favourably upon fertility and mortality rates. However, this was not the case at Crawley. Instead, this paper confirms Stone’s view that productivity was determined by conscious decisions taken by demesne managers and argues that their concern in this period was to raise fleece weights. The pessimism which for so long pervaded historical writing about the performance of medieval agriculture has now almost entirely evaporated to be replaced by a much greater appreciation of its achievements. In particular, the ability of medieval farmers to feed a population of about six million in England at the beginning of the fourteenth century, of which perhaps 15 or even 20 per cent lived in towns, has been acknowledged to be an impressive demonstration of the effectiveness of agricultural production and distribution at this time.1 This more optimistic assessment of English agriculture in the century or so before the Black Death of 1348–9 has come about largely as a result of a sustained assault upon the influential ideas of M. M. Postan. The ‘Postan Thesis’, put briefly, states that as the population grew in the thirteenth century, so grain yields were undermined by an extension of cultivation onto poorer ‘marginal soils’, and through a reduction in animal numbers and manure supplies as permanent pasture was converted into ploughland.2 Furthermore, Postan held that the possibility of technological change in this period was so limited that the likelihood of improving grain yields was still further reduced.3 In more recent years, the work of a number of historians, in particular B. M. S. Campbell, has demonstrated conclusively that, contrary to Postan’s belief, grain productivity was raised substantially in various parts of the country in the decades prior to the Black Death.4 Moreover, this was achieved in part because of the introduction of new agricultural techniques. Our understanding of agrarian innovation and technological advance has witnessed a considerable 1 B. M. S. Campbell, English seigniorial agriculture, 1250–1450 (2000), pp. 20–1. 2 M. M. Postan, The medieval economy and society (1972), pp. 20–6, 63–70; C. Thornton, ‘Efficiency in medieval livestock farming: the fertility and mortality of herds and flocks at Rimpton, Somerset, 1208–1349’, in P. R. Coss and S. D. Lloyd (eds), Thirteenth-century England IV (1992), p. 25. 3 Postan, Medieval economy and society, p. 49. 4 Campbell, English seigniorial agriculture, ch. 7. AgHR 51, II, pp. 137–154 shift in emphasis over recent years. No longer is it thought necessary to equate technological change with such revolutionary advances as the widespread adoption of the mouldboard plough before the end of the tenth century or the introduction of new fodder crops such as turnips and clover in the sixteenth century. Certainly no such comparable advance occurred during the later Middle Ages. Instead, attention has been focused on ‘a host of minor technological adjustments’, the individual significance of which was less important than their interaction with other practices in what has been described as the overall ‘technological package’ or ‘complex’.5 In the light of this new, more evolutionary model of agrarian innovation, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries can be regarded as an era of significant progress and development. Discussions of agricultural technology in the Middle Ages have tended to concentrate on the productivity of arable farming and the methods employed to improve it. Much less attention has been paid to developments in livestock farming and the techniques used to care for the flocks and herds which formed such a vital part of both the demesne and the peasant economy. In part this is a reflection of the dominant role played by arable farming on most of the estates for which records survive in the century or so before the Black Death. In terms of the amount of land under cultivation, the profitability to both largeand small-scale farmers of producing grain for the market, and the importance of those grain sales for the feeding of the population of England, arable husbandry clearly occupied a pre-eminent place in the national economy. By contrast, livestock farming was a sector of much less significance. Even on the estate of the bishopric of Winchester, which, as we shall see, adopted methods of farming certain to raise the profile of livestock, particularly sheep, the profits derived from grain production outstripped all other sources of manorial revenue during the period 1208–1349, rarely falling below 30 per cent of total receipts. By contrast, income from the sale of wool, the single most valuable animal product, hardly ever reached even 10 per cent of total receipts, and was at best only equal to other profits from animal farming.6 Another reason for the historiographical tendency to concentrate on the technology of arable farming is that the areas most receptive to innovation were also the areas of most intensive arable production, where livestock husbandry, including sheep farming, was relatively insignificant. Thus, in Norfolk before the Black Death, demesnes consistently stocked sheep at a density per sown acre well below the national average.7 In other parts of the country, where more extensive systems of production were practised, sheep farming assumed a role of much greater significance in the manorial economy. This was certainly the case on the estate of the bishopric of Winchester, where, in the early thirteenth century, the sales of cheese and wool were sufficient on some manors to cushion the bishop’s need to maximize income in the cereal sector. Instead, the harvested grain was largely consumed by the episcopal household and manorial servants, with relatively little reaching the market.8 On these manors the incentive to intensify arable 5 Ibid., p. 15; C. Dyer, ‘Medieval farming and technology: conclusion’, in G. Astill and J. Langdon (eds), Medieval farming and technology: the impact of agricultural change in northwest Europe (1997), pp. 293–4. 6 J. Z. Titow, ‘Land and population on the estates of the bishops of Winchester, 1209–1350’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1962), pp. 54, 57. 7 Campbell, English seigniorial agriculture, pp. 136, 159, 423–4. 8 K. Biddick (with C. C. J. H. Bijleveld), ‘Agrarian productivity on the estates of the bishopric of Winchester in the early thirteenth century: a managerial perspective’, in B. M. S. Campbell and M. Overton (eds), Land, labour and livestock: historical studies in European agricultural productivity (1991), p. 120.     