numerous middlemen who had inserted themselves between peasants and owners often
meant that what remained of the old Carolingian villa produced little for its owners. In
the 10th and 11th centuries, however, this situation began to be alleviated by an
expansion of cultivation into nearby forest and waste, where new fields, called by such
names as appendariae or bordariae, were both more fertile and more profitable. Lords
attempted to reap benefits from the expanded tillage by instituting new types of taxation
(based on the bannum), by building new mills, ovens, and winepresses, and by
encouraging the settlement of forested areas. It was frequently the lords who instigated
the foundation of new villages in forest and waste, which would yield them considerable
revenues, or who encouraged settlement in reclaimed coastal and riverine marshes.
The main crop produced by medieval agriculture was cereal, but cereal production was
practiced within a mixed system of pastoralism and animal husbandry, gardening,
viticulture, and, along the Mediterranean coastline, olioculture. Relative dependence on
cereals and pastoralism as well as the details of agricultural organization varied with local
conditions in each of the numerous pays, or regions, but two major zones of agriculture
can be distinguished: the flat wheat-producing plain of the north and the more rugged,
often mountainous sheep- and rye-producing regions of the south. Several varieties of
wheat, sometimes mixed together, along with rye, oats, barley, and pulses (peas, beans),
were produced. The Romans and Christianity had encouraged the spread of viticulture
throughout France, even into regions today considered wholly unsuited to wine
production. Particularly in the early Middle Ages, when yields from the fields were low,
there was considerable dependence by all areas on hunting and fishing, and on the forest
surrounding cultivated areas for pasture for pigs and products like nuts, berries, and
honey. Later, although the clearing of forest and increased limitations on its use came at a
time in the central Middle Ages that is associated with increased agricultural yields, the
growing difficulty of access to forest resources must have made the famines of the early
14th century even more devastating.
In the early Middle Ages, the major tool for cultivation was the Roman, or scratch,
plow (araire), which was usually pulled by two oxen over fields made roughly square,
since they were plowed across and then again at right angles to the original plowing.
Even in later centuries, the scratch plow and the accompanying two-year rotation course
would be favored particularly in the Midi, where soils were light and dry, and wherever
rural populations were too poor to adopt the heavier, more expensive wheeled plow,
which needed more animal power for traction than the scratch plow. During the early
period, the organization of tillage was generally on a two-year, two-course rotation in
which winter wheat was sown in one of two fields each fall, while the other lay fallow for
the entire year. Small bits of outfield or garden plots around homesteads may have been
planted with pulses or oats in the spring. Yields were poor—generally no more than 2.5-
or 3-to-l yield to seed.
Probably even in the late Roman period, wherever there was sufficient spring and
summer rain, some spring sowing was done along with the more usual fall planting, or if
winter crops failed. Later, in heavily populated areas of the north (as documented in the
9th-century ecclesiastical surveys of great estates called polyptychs), the spring planting
was gradually incorporated into some variation of a three-course, three-field rotation. In
this rotation scheme, one field was planted to winter wheat, one to a spring crop like oats,
and only a third of the field was left fallow each year. In many areas, this three-field
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