EUROPEAN EXCEPTIONALISM: A DIFFERENT PATH^41tivity. ) This shift away from hunting and gathering, bringing a leap in
the supply of nourishment, permitted a substantial growth of popula
tion and a new pattern of concentrated settlement. It was the Neolithic
revolution that made possible towns and cities, with all that they
yielded in cultural and technical exchange and enrichmentment.
The medieval economic revolution also built on gains in the pro
duction and application of energy and concomitant increases in work.
First, food supply: this was a period of innovation in the techniques of
cultivation. I say innovation rather than invention because these new
techniques went back earlier. Thus the wheeled plow, with deep-
cutting iron share, had come in with the German invaders; but it had
seen limited use in a world of limited animal power and low population
density. Now it spread across Europe north of the Loire, opened up the
rich river valleys, turned land reclaimed from forest and sea into fertile
fields, in short did wonders wherever the heavy, clayey soil resisted the
older Roman wooden scratch plow, which had worked well enough on
the gravelly soils of the Mediterranean basin.
The wheeled plow turning heavy soil called for animals to match. We
have already had occasion to speak of these big, stall-fed oxen such as
were found nowhere else, and these large dray horses, more powerful
if not stronger than the ox. These living, mobile engines offered a
great advantage in a land-rich, labor-scarce economy. For time too was
scarce: agricultural work has peaks of activity at sowing and harvest
when one must seize good weather and get the seed in or crops out.
Especially was this true of European communal agriculture, where
scattered and intermingled holdings and open fields made for much to-
and-fro and one peasant's haste was the haste of all his neighbors.
Strong, quick animals could make all the difference, and cultivators
pooled resources to get the right livestock.
Along with these superior techniques went, as both cause and effect,
a more intensive cultivation, in particular, a shift from a two-field (one
half left fallow every year) to a three-field system of crop rotation (win
ter grain, spring grain, and one third fallow). This yielded a gain of one
third in land productivity (one sixth of total cultivable land, but one
third of the half previously under cultivation), which further con
tributed to the ability to support livestock, which increased the supply
of fertilizer, which nourished yields, and so on in ascending cycle.
Given the character of land distribution and the collective use of draft
animals, this critical change called for strong communal leadership and
cooperation, made easier by example and results.
How much of this was response to population pressure and how