of the profits of expansion by encouraging settlement advance and technological
innovation were all more important than the religious orders.
By the 12th century, for which documents are much more abundant, the major parts of
this transformation had taken place. Secondary improvements continued into the 13th
century and were often promoted by the new monastic groups. They included the
consolidation of fragments of old estates, the elimination of middlemen from claims to
the produce of estates, the building and improvement of mills, an improved ratio of
animals to arable land through the introduction of transhumance, and the beginnings of
selective breeding of animals. Efficiencies were also created when monastic owners of
the new consolidated estates of the central Middle Ages cultivated their great demesnes
or granges with hired laborers or domestic servitors or lay brothers. However, this last
was a short-lived phenomenon, for by the 14th century such demesnes had been rented
out to farmers at a fixed rent or in sharecropping contracts.
By the 13th century, the rural world was considerably different from that of the early
Middle Ages. The old villa and the social structure associated with it had broken down,
as manorialism was replaced by seigneurialism. Peasants were no longer on the verge of
starvation but were able to support a growing population of townspeople. Remaining
forest was less dense and was threatened more from demand for building materials and
fuel for the towns than by clearance; contention over forest rights increased. Pigs grazing
in forest, the major protein source for the earlier period, were replaced by transhumant
sheep moved seasonally from region to region. There was a shift in diet, not just from
pork to lamb, but general improvement—from a diet often based entirely on cereals to
one including much more meat, cheese, and other animal products, as well as
increasingly good and abundant wines. Other demand, particularly for industrial
materials, such as wool, hides and leather, dyes, hemp, flax, and parchment for book and
document making, was also beginning to influence rural production.
By the late 12th century, there were indications of problems to come. For instance,
peasant cultivators were already finding that not all the newly cleared and drained lands
were fertile or reliable enough to provide a livelihood and were abandoning some of
them. Grants of frequently flooded but extremely fertile river-valley fields were often
made to monks and other religious groups who could keep up the dikes and absorb the
risks of crop failure. Near the great cities, some owners and peasants ceased cereal
production altogether in favor of commercial production for market, particularly of
wines, dyestuffs, and garden produce, making themselves wholly dependent on grain
shipments, which in times of dearth would not be forthcoming. Population continued to
grow, although by 1300 the pace of that growth was falling off. From that date on, there
are indications of feeble attempts to again breach what remained of the great medieval
forests or to reclaim land on the coasts. A series of poor harvests, warfare, famine, and
increasing malnutrition left the population particularly susceptible to the Black Death in
- Afterward, despite population losses, rural prosperity only gradually declined. With
a smaller labor force was seen the abandonment of the least productive lands, the renting
out of demesnes, and increasing interest in animal husbandry.
In the late 14th and the 15th century, agriculture came more under the control of the
wealthiest peasants, who farmed or sharecropped the demesnes. Lords abandoning the
countryside for the towns, depended increasingly on seigneurial rights and dues, or on
fixed rents. With the exception of the importation into the Midi of new crops and
The Encyclopedia 23