Agricultural History Review, Volume 67 Part 1 (2019), p. 146

Ruralia X is a hefty volume containing papers delivered at a conference in Slovenia in 2013. In all there are 27 papers in a little under 450 pages, plus a short retrospect by the British archaeologist Alan Aberg and a foreword by Eva Svensson and Mark Gardiner. Inevitably it is something of a cornucopia and given the size of the volume it is really only possible to give brief mentions of each paper. Archaeology is, of course, a broad church. As its title suggests, the book really divides between studies of landscapes and field systems and studies of tools with little or no work that spans the two. A few are essentially documentary studies. The range is from Spain to the Danube with contributions from Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and a good wodge of papers from England but little from France and Italy and nothing from Portugal. The arrangement of the book is geographical rather than thematic and the balance of the book is in the first millennium AD rather than the second.

The first paper is a long contribution from the English archaeologists Stephen Moorhouse and James Bond, ‘An approach to understanding medieval field systems across Europe: the structure and anatomy of township field systems’. As one might expect the paper draws heavily on the English evidence but the paper is certainly to be recommended as a statement of where we are with field systems (it has a long bibliography) even if avoids the question of origins. Moorhouse then contributes a second paper, ‘Features within medieval townships farming landscapes in Yorkshire and their function’. Steve Moorhouse will not mind me saying (not least because I have known him since I was a teenager, which is some years since) that his writing appears but slowly, and this is a valuable statement of the work he has been doing on the landscape of the Dales since the 1980s. One is grateful to have it and wonders whether it is a foretaste of a longer discussion, or whether this could be made more readily available for local audiences. Bond then has a second paper on ‘Continental plant introductions to medieval monastic gardens in Britain’. Piers Dixon then contributes a useful paper on medieval and post-medieval Scottish field systems. The paper by Alice Forward and John Hines on the excavation of a manorial site at Cosmeston in the Vale of Glamorgan is a much less ambitious excavation report and discussion: it would have been in the spirit of the book if the paper could have looked at the landscape of the manor and its field systems. So far we have had little mention of tools: Niall Brady offers a discussion of early medieval Irish ploughs which moves from artefacts to discussions of corn-drying kilns and watermills. Brady suggests a shift from cultivation using ards to cultivation using ploughs in the tenth century and suggests some of the implications of this change.

The focus of the volume then shifts to Scandinavia. Ingvild Øye contributes a very useful overview of ‘agrarian technology and land use in Scandinavia landscapes, c. 800–1300’ (including a nice picture of an ard on p. 165). Vibeke Vandrup Martens offers an account of Norwegian farm mounds where he argues they are the natural accumulation of decayed buildings built of turf and wood, and waste from the human activities on the site. Janicke Larsen offers an account of the landscape of a single farm in western Norway. A short paper by Catarina Karlsson then presents the result of experimental archaeology on the rate of wear on iron ard blades (100 grams of iron and steel per ploughed hectare as it happens) showing the continued demand for iron. Skipping ahead, Lars Agersnap Larsen contributes a paper on the mouldboard plough ‘in the Danish area, 200–1500 AD’ and suggests that mouldboard ploughs were known in the first millennium AD. Known, of course, is not the same as used. A paper on excavations in Greenland by Peter Steen Henriksen suggests that barley really was grown in Greenland by its Norse settlers.

Lying almost exactly in the centre of the book is something rather different, perhaps incongruous. This is a paper by Janken Myrdal and Alexandra Sapoznik on spade cultivation and the sources for it, including written sources, archaeology and images. A catalogue of the images is provided. The case that the authors make (and have previously developed in the Review) is that spade cultivation is much more important in the peasant economy in northern Europe than has been allowed, and explains how peasants were able to make a living off apparently very small parcels of land.

We then pick up the logical order of the volume with two papers from the Low Countries, Johan P. W. Verspay on the spatial organization of late medieval settlements (seen archaeologically) in the sandy soil areas of Brabant and Phillippe Mignot and Nicolas Schroeder on the small town of Wellin in Belgium, an early aristocratic estate centre.

Two papers follow on aspects of field systems. Hans Renes contributes a short synoptic discussion of the landscape history and archaeology of open fields in Europe which to my mind would not have been too short at twice the length. Nicolas Poirier’s paper, ‘Archaeological evidence for agrarian manuring’ reviews the documentary and iconographical evidence for manure spreading and shows the appearance of domestic pottery in the fields but the question which is not answered (and perhaps cannot be answered) is whether this pottery was carried out to the fields in human excrement or animal dung.

Poirier worked on Berry in eastern France, but Ruralia X then flies over the remainder of France to Spain. A single village and its territory on the northern coast of Spain is the subject of a paper by Margarita Fernández Mier and Pablo Alonso Gonzalez. Occupation is found from the Iron Age onwards. Appropriate attention is paid to the commons of the village. The advantages of a ‘long-term microterritorial research’ project are handsomely demonstrated. Josep Torró shows the extent of drainage of coastal marshes on the east coast of Spain around Valencia. The technologies employed here offer an interesting counterpoint from those familiar from the North Sea coastlines. We then take wing to the one Italian paper in the volume, by Paolo de Vingo, on agricultural tools found in Merovingian areas. A map would have been a useful addition to this paper, which ranges far.

Rainer Schreg offers a paper (in German) on fields in the low German mountains which combines map analysis with limited excavation. He looks for a revival of research into field systems using the new technologies now available. Iris Nießen writes on the use of place names in landscape studies drawing on examples from Swabia.

Finally we turn to Hungary and the Danube. Miklós Takács writes on tools and agrarian techniques in medieval Hungary. Szabina Merva discusses the agricultural practices of sites on the Danube although I was puzzled by her findings: accumulations of animal bones surely shows the consumption of animals rather than their breeding. Rozália Bajkai discusses a technology which has not featured much before in the volume, hand milling, and offers an account which will be found useful by a much wider audience. In a paper which is not wholly dissimilar to that of Myrdal and Sapoznik, Zdeňka Měchurová offers a discussion (in German) of the farmers’ year and the tools used, mixing surviving specimens with medieval illustration. There is apparently little change over time. Finally the editor, Jan Klápště, who whether through meanness or modesty does not have his name on the title page, offers a short discussion of tools in areas of Slovenia and the Czech Republic.

The papers, with only a few exceptions, are in English. All have abstracts in English, German and French. The book, it should be said, is well illustrated. The papers are of varying interest but no two readers will ever agree which the most interesting are. It would be conceded that the papers show varying degrees of ambition. The lack of papers on France and Italy leaves a big gap in the volume. It is hard to come to any great conclusions about current research interests except to say that plainly a lot is going on. It might be possible to suggest that some countries are more interested in the ethnography of tools than others, and some more interested in landscape archaeology than others. The theme which does emerge is that of the need for iron. Like salt it was a necessity for the functioning of society: like salt, its manufacture, trade and use is poorly documented, but if there is a lesson of this collection of essays, it would be that it would be a mistake to overlook iron and its place in the agrarian economy. Agriculture did not – could not – happen without it.