Medieval Farming Villages

[Glupii]

Re: Medieval Farming Villages

 

I understand I could make alot more farms of a larger size. But I do not want the entire area domesticated completely. I want to leave room for some woods and "forbidden" areas and such.

 

So what I am seeing is that for a family sized at about 8 or so able bodied workers they should have approximatly 30 acre's of land per farm? That seems like alot to me. But there still seems to be a problem of feeding the population I have given the area. The number of Non farming individuals I am thinking would be approximatly 350. So I guess the question is, how many acres would be needed for 8 folks to work that would supply enough to feed their own family of 12-15? Or maybe the best question would be how many mouths could an acer of land feed in general? I am not going to get into the nitty gritty of what they grow. Just a generality is all I need. I need to figure out how many farms would be needed to feed the additional 350 non farming folks. I would estimate that 15% of there diets would be supplemented by fishing and another 15% of their diets by their own gardens. (And those numbers could be off a bit) But that still leaves the remainder to be covered by the outlying farms. So How big can the farms be when only worked by 8 or so folks and how many would I need to cover the extra mouths?

 

-edit-

OK I see I didn't read Roland's post well enough there. So if I understand correctly, a family with 8 or so able bodies folks could work 30 acres of land? If that is correct than how much of the harvest would be needed for their own family of 12-15 and how much would be surplus? How many more mouths other than their own family could they feed?

-end edit-

[prestidigitator]

Re: Medieval Farming Villages

 

I understand I could make alot more farms of a larger size. But I do not want the entire area domesticated completely. I want to leave room for some woods and "forbidden" areas and such.

 

So what I am seeing is that for a family sized at about 8 or so able bodied workers they should have approximatly 30 acre's of land per farm? That seems like alot to me. But there still seems to be a problem of feeding the population I have given the area. The number of Non farming individuals I am thinking would be approximatly 350. So I guess the question is, how many acres would be needed for 8 folks to work that would supply enough to feed their own family of 12-15? Or maybe the best question would be how many mouths could an acer of land feed in general? I am not going to get into the nitty gritty of what they grow. Just a generality is all I need. I need to figure out how many farms would be needed to feed the additional 350 non farming folks. I would estimate that 15% of there diets would be supplemented by fishing and another 15% of their diets by their own gardens. (And those numbers could be off a bit) But that still leaves the remainder to be covered by the outlying farms. So How big can the farms be when only worked by 8 or so folks and how many would I need to cover the extra mouths?

 

-edit-

OK I see I didn't read Roland's post well enough there. So if I understand correctly, a family with 8 or so able bodies folks could work 30 acres of land? If that is correct than how much of the harvest would be needed for their own family of 12-15 and how much would be surplus? How many more mouths other than their own family could they feed?

-end edit-

Agriculture

 

At the medieval level of technology, a square mile of settled land (including requisite roads, villages and towns, as well as crops and pastureland) will support 180 people.

Looks like you generally need about 2 square miles. If your setting has more advanced/efficient methods of agriculture, you could probably get away with half of that. If you have any sort of magic involved, you could of course reduce it as you feel is appropriate.

 

Each square mile is 640 acres. If a household farms 30 acres, those two square miles are going to require about 35-40 households, roughly (assuming most of the area is farmland, which is pretty likely).

[Glupii]

Re: Medieval Farming Villages

 

Good work, but does that take into account the farming families themselves? OK Let me see if I can figure this out.

 

For the village of 350, 1280 Acers of land and 43 families assuming each family can handle a far of 30 acres. No if each family averages 14 mouths as well that is another 602 folks to feed. Oy this could get tricky. Wait....

 

If 640 acres feeds 180 folks then each acre feeds about 3.6 people. If we say a family of 14 (only 8 or which are ablebodied) can manage 30 acres then 14*3.6 = 50.4 acres just to feed themselves. So in order to have a surplus of any kind, I either have to increase the size of the land on each farm, or increase the output of each farm.

 

If the Village is 300 folks and 30% of their needs are met by Fishing and home gardens, then we have 210 folks left to feed. Add to that the 50 that maintian the Manor and the Guard and we have 260 extra mouths to feed. So what ever number of farms that we decide on has to have enough surplus to feed that 260.

 

Add to the crops the flocks of sheep and you likely will drop it another 8-10% but I will let this go for now and let them have some excess to barter with and make money on.

[Cantriped]

Re: Medieval Farming Villages

 

If the area has sufficient grazing land you can add in livestock, which would probably increase production to cost ratios slightly at the very least

[Markdoc]

Re: Medieval Farming Villages

 

Problem here! In medieval times people would think of their family as parents' date=' siblings, kids, sib's kids and such like, so that's 'bout the right size for a family, but it ain't a [i']household[/i].

 

Actually I meant to correct this before, but that's backwards: the Household (old english: Husholdningen) was the whole schmoe. So "family" is wife, kids, granma and uncle Ulf - all the people living together and related by blood. "Household" is all of them plus the three serving girls, two swend and the boy who looks after the pig ie: everyone who lives in the house or holding (Holding comes from the old word meaning "to include" as it happens). In medieval times a wealthy household also included a priest (or more) and personal guards. Basically everybody who lived in the house and derived their living from the head of the household.

 

So... to get back to the topic at hand, your area is about 150 square miles (Von D-Man's right - that's space for a pretty big fief). 2 square miles or so will be the village and surrounding fields (might be as little as 1 square mile, if 30% of the population are fishermen) and each of the independant households would be less than a tenth of a square mile in area (that's plenty for the size you are describing). That leaves more than 90% of your coastal strip essentially unsettled Given that the households are probably going to be no more than a half-day's walk from town that fits the medieval pattern: everybody crammed into one corner of the fief and then nothing for two-three days travel.

 

No wonder the baron spends all his time in town - sounds like he lives in the boonies. If I was him, I'd be looking for right trusty adventurers to build holdings out in the woods, to bring more land under his control before someone else does it.

 

cheers, Mark

[oakfed]

Re: Medieval Farming Villages

 

Here's a summary of Norman English village sizes from 'Domesday Book and Beyond', an old but as far as I know still accurate treatise on the Domesday book statistics:

 

The minimum size village considered sufficient to provide for one knight was a '10-hide' village. The Saxons had set the minimum land for 'thegn-right' at 5 hides. Coincidently, large numbers of the villages listed in Domesday Book have 5 or 10 hides. (Aside: the Saxon 'hundred', an administrative division of a shire, was called because it theoretically had villages with 100 hides).

 

A hide is a unit of both area and taxation.

 

Area-wise, a hide is usually considered to be 120 (cultivated) acres. A hide had four virgates (30 acres); a typical villein (about 1/2 the peasant families) held a virgate, though some had as much as a hide, while the rest - bordars and cottars - made do with less than a virgate, or no land at all (and made their living as hired labour).

 

You have to be careful with the hides in Domesday book, though, because they were used primarily for taxation. We know a lot about taxation in Norman England because of Domesday Book (which was compiled so the Normans could continue to collect the Danegeld as the Saxons had done; the Danegeld was assessed on hides.) As units of taxation, hides had flexible areas. Large swathes of England were either punitively or beneficiently 'hidated' - assessed 'for geld' at more or less hides than usual, as punishment or reward.

[Glupii]

Re: Medieval Farming Villages

 

OK here is what I have come up with so far. Please keep in mind that the political structure of the area I am putting together is fantasy and so is different from the typical historical X serfs per Knight owing Y% in taxes etc.

 

Here are the knowns:

 

1. An average able bodied worker can care for 5 acres of land. This averages out since a family has many able bodied workers and they work all the land.

2. An average Family (Household) will have 18 members with 13 being able bodied workers.

3. As this is a highly fertile area, I have chosen to go with the high end of the yields so an acre will yield 300 liters of wheat, 720 liters of barley, 340 liters of Peas, or 400 liters of Oats.

4. Liters of grain required to feed a person for the year = 400. I have read it to be 500 but I am also not adding in livestock, cheeses and fish, foraged foods, and private vegtable gardens. So I figure 20% of the persopns diet being made up by these things is not a bad figure. Plus there is a fruit tree orchard here as well growing a few different trees Apple, Plum, and Pear. Again, this is not counted in my equasion to be conservative.

 

What I get out of this is an average farm size of 65 acres yielding an annual harvest of 9600 L. of wheat, 15206 L. of Barley, and 4026 L. of Peas or Oats depending on what the farmer used to rebuild the nutrients in the field that year. This also leaves 1 acre on each farm for use as room for livestock and vegetable gardens.

 

The total Grain yield per farm will be 28832. of that 7200 will be eaten by the family itself. At a tax rate of 10%, 2883 will go for that. That leaves 18748.8 which will feed an additianl 46 folks. Given that some of the grains and fruits will go to make Beer, Mead, and wines, I will lower this to 36. So in order to feed a town of 350 non farmers, I will need a total of 10 farms which will still give surplus so the folks will live, if not wealthy, at least comfortable which is what I was shooting for.

 

Thoughts and suggestions are welcome.

[Roland]

Re: Medieval Farming Villages

 

It sounds like your village is shaping up!

 

Two suggestions:

 

1) You'll need more than 1 acre for livestock. Cattle and sheep can eat a lot of grass! And, unless the climate is warm year-round, you'll have to grow extra food to feed the livestock through the winter.

 

2) Don't forget that you will need to leave some of the cultivated land fallow each year. Even with good crop rotation, you can't plant every acre every year without artificial fertilization (though the livestock might be able to help you there).

 

One question: How does the local lord collect his share? In the early Middle Ages, the lord would have had his own lands, and the peasants would been obligated to spend some time working on their lord's land. Later, many lords collected rents from the peasants in kind or in cash. (As late as the early 20th century in the US, landowners could be required to spend a few days every year working for the county. They would perform tasks such as clearing land for roads and digging ditches.)

[Curufea]

Re: Medieval Farming Villages

 

Here's a summary of Norman English village sizes from 'Domesday Book and Beyond', an old but as far as I know still accurate treatise on the Domesday book statistics:

 

The minimum size village considered sufficient to provide for one knight was a '10-hide' village. The Saxons had set the minimum land for 'thegn-right' at 5 hides. Coincidently, large numbers of the villages listed in Domesday Book have 5 or 10 hides. (Aside: the Saxon 'hundred', an administrative division of a shire, was called because it theoretically had villages with 100 hides).

 

A hide is a unit of both area and taxation.

 

Area-wise, a hide is usually considered to be 120 (cultivated) acres. A hide had four virgates (30 acres); a typical villein (about 1/2 the peasant families) held a virgate, though some had as much as a hide, while the rest - bordars and cottars - made do with less than a virgate, or no land at all (and made their living as hired labour).

 

You have to be careful with the hides in Domesday book, though, because they were used primarily for taxation. We know a lot about taxation in Norman England because of Domesday Book (which was compiled so the Normans could continue to collect the Danegeld as the Saxons had done; the Danegeld was assessed on hides.) As units of taxation, hides had flexible areas. Large swathes of England were either punitively or beneficiently 'hidated' - assessed 'for geld' at more or less hides than usual, as punishment or reward.

The Domesday book is 11th century though - just at the beginning of the Middle Ages. Farming practices did improve of the the following centuries.

[Glupii]

Re: Medieval Farming Villages

 

Good questions. Let me see if I can answer them.

 

1. The livestock that the farm would have would be likely a few cows for milk to convert to cheese, a herd or whatever of pigs, and a flock of chickens and/or Geese. They might have a few goats for milk for drinking. But there will not be any widespread cattle for meat cultivation going on and there will only be one or two families on the outside of the area in the foothills that raise sheep and goats as a living. I might add a second acre for their extras but I am not sure if more would be needed.

 

2. OK here is where my NOT being farm born is telling. I thought the reason they planted oats and peas was to replace the nutrients and it was actually better than letting it lie fallow? I was going off the ratio the one artical cited in here was telling me where 1/2 the land would be Wheat, 1/3 would be Barley, and the rest would be oats or peas to allow the land to recover. If this is not correct, then my whole equation is off. So if anyone can answer this, I would be thankful.

 

3. How the lord collects his share is a level of detail I was going to basically ignore and just say it happened. It might be that he collects some in cash and some in traded goods or crops. He has a household to maintain and he is responsible for feeding his soldiers and staff as well. So He would be glad to take alot of his taxes in foodstuffs. But either way, I was not going to go into alot of detail about this as I don't think it will really come up in the game.

[Roland]

Re: Medieval Farming Villages

 

If you have the best possible pasture land plus the most efficient feeding regimen, you will need at least 3 acres per cow and 1 acre per sheep. Realistically, you should figure you will need 3 times that much land per animal. (Livestock farming requires a lot of land, relative to crop farming, but less labor.)

 

You will also need livestock (most likely oxen) to pull the plow. (These can, of course, be eaten when they get too old to work.)

 

Crop rotation goes a long way toward preserving the fertility of the land, but not quite far enough. One trick is to plant your fallow fields in clover, which adds nitrogen to the soil. When the clover is mature, then you graze your livestock in the field. They eat the high-protein clover and fertilize the field with their manure. Then you plow the clover and manure into the field and it's ready to be planted again. In short, this enters the calculations by letting you count your fallow fields toward your grazing-land requirement. (But you will need additional grazing land besides the fallow fields.)

 

The question of how the lord collects his share enters the calculations. If he collects his share in kind, then each household must produce enough extra food to pay rent/taxes to the lord. If he requires payment in labor, then each household will have that much less labor available for its own production.

[Basil]

Re: Medieval Farming Villages

 

Please note: all my comments are based on actual Medieval farming techniques (as far as I know them). If you wish to change things to fit a fantasy setting, feel free. I'm only trying to help by giving you a grounding in reality.

 

1. An average able bodied worker can care for 5 acres of land.

Not quite: a Medieval family (of two adults and 1-3 children on average) needs 5 acres to barely survive in good years. I know of no figures for the maximum a single worker can care for.

 

This averages out since a family has many able bodied workers and they work all the land.

No. An average Medieval family has 2 able-bodied workers, one of whom spends most of her time in and around the house.

 

2. An average Family (Household) will have 18 members with 13 being able bodied workers.

Here is a major problem. So long as you use families of this size, all figures from medieval history will need to be greatly adjusted. First, the average family in the historical sources is about 1/3 this size. Second, and even more important, the fraction of able-bodied workers is much, much less. The average medieval farming family is about 1/3 or less adults, and children, even into their preteens, are not "able bodied" in the sense of able to handle plowing and other heavy tasks. The fact is that children, even up to 13 or 14 did most of thier work around the house, or herding fowl, sheep, goats--and that only near the village. Farm work, particularly using medieval technology, is extraordinarly hard work, taking a full grown adult (and some of it beyond the strength of most women). If you want to adjust your number to a larger family, use the ratio of able-bodied persons, which means the family you've described above is about SIX TIMES as large as a typical medieval family, for purposes of calculations.

 

BTW, a family of the sort you envision will require enormous advances in health care, especially pediatrics, to have such a large fraction of children reach adulthood. You'll need to either give your people advanced understanding of health, nutrition, and sanitation, or make health-related magic a commonplace.

 

3. As this is a highly fertile area' date=' I have chosen to go with the high end of the yields so an acre will yield 300 liters of wheat, 720 liters of barley, 340 liters of Peas, or 400 liters of Oats.[/quote']

As has been pointed out, these yields are way beyond medieval technology. For instance, one third of the land is fallow at any given point, and the plowing, sowing, and reaping techniques are fairly primitive. Also, the use of Open Fields, with each family owning small strips of land scattered about, greatly reduced efficiency.

 

BWT, the use of clover on the fallow didn't come in until the 16th or 17th century. Also note that the larger livestock was driven onto the fallow field soon after the harvest (to eat the stubble), but they were driven off well before plowing, so that their manure was not accumulated for an entire year. This was done because fresh manure will "burn" plants and seeds, killing them off. The manure was left on the fallow field to prevent this, letting it "age".

 

4. Liters of grain required to feed a person for the year = 400. I have read it to be 500 but I am also not adding in livestock' date=' cheeses and fish, foraged foods, and private vegtable gardens. So I figure 20% of the persopns diet being made up by these things is not a bad figure. Plus there is a fruit tree orchard here as well growing a few different trees Apple, Plum, and Pear. Again, this is not counted in my equasion to be conservative.[/quote']

I believe the figure you've cited assumes a modicum of non-grain source of food, so I'd suggest you use the full 500 liters.

 

What I get out of this is an average farm size of 65 acres yielding an annual harvest of 9600 L. of wheat' date=' 15206 L. of Barley, and 4026 L. of Peas or Oats depending on what the farmer used to rebuild the nutrients in the field that year. This also leaves 1 acre on each farm for use as room for livestock and vegetable gardens.[/quote']

The average medieval family had 1/3 to 1/2 acre around the house, used for vegetables, raising chicken (and the rare goose), and such. If you want larger livestock than that, figure a further 3 1/2 to 4 acres per sheep or goat, double or triple that per cow, triple or quadruple per bull or ox. However, in the middle ages, livestock larger than geese were pastured together, in one flock (or one flock per animal type). That was what the "commons" I've mentioned before were used for. Thus, the land for major livestock was not part of the farm.

 

The total Grain yield per farm will be 28832. of that 7200 will be eaten by the family itself. At a tax rate of 10%' date=' 2883 will go for that. That leaves 18748.8 which will feed an additianl 46 folks. Given that some of the grains and fruits will go to make Beer, Mead, and wines, I will lower this to 36. So in order to feed a town of 350 non farmers, I will need a total of 10 farms which will still give surplus so the folks will live, if not wealthy, at least comfortable which is what I was shooting for.[/quote']

Here's another major problem. In the middle ages, the village (averaging 300-400 people) was 95%+ farmers. The farmers lived in the village, there's no "350 non-farmers to feed." Note, by the way, that that's actually 95% effective non-farmers; that is, an person who makes half his living by farming and half by other work is counted as "half a farmer". Indeed, most of those who depended on others' food-growing only did so in part, and got part of their food by farming. The soldiers you've mentioned as putting in the lord's manor-house will be (along with the lord and his family) some of the very, very few not farming at all. And note that the married soldiers' wives will be growing vegetables and raising chickens around the house.

 

In short, in the middle ages, in a village, everyone farms, save the lord and his family. And the lord's wife will be raising herbs for flavoring and medicine.

 

Thoughts and suggestions are welcome.

I hope these helped.

[prestidigitator]

Re: Medieval Farming Villages

 

Let's remember on the, "able-bodied worker," end that a child who is old enough to do a full amount of work is essentially considered an adult. By the age of fourteen or so (perhaps even earlier), the young ladies will be being considered for marriage (at which point they will leave their original home for good) and the young men other than the eldest will be thinking of setting off (since they will typically be left little or nothing of the estate, at least among the lower classes).

[oakfed]

Re: Medieval Farming Villages

 

Yes - acres are not linear lengths' date=' but areas...[/quote']

Late replying to this...

 

Actually, although an acre is indeed an area measure, there was a linear length associated with the acre - the furlong, which was the customary length of a plowed strip. It's 40 rods long.

 

Similarly, the breadth of an acre was 4 rods (sometimes called a chain).

 

A rod was about 18 feet; it was the width of one strip in the field. Peasants were allocated specific strips in the common fields - scattered about, not contiguous. 4 strips were considered to make up an acre.

 

Like all medieval measures, though, rods, furlongs, and acres were not standardized and varied from place to place (even in the same field, not all the strips were the same length, because they had to fit the contours of the land, but they were all considered 'furlongs'.)

[Markdoc]

Re: Medieval Farming Villages

 

I wouldn't get too hung up on this - statements like "a family is X persons" or "A family requires X acres" are only applicable to certain cultures in certain areas at certain times.

 

For example, the acreage mostly quoted here is more or less based on medieval english history, using grains such as early (small-head) rye and wheat. Medieval germany - especially north Germany - used a crop rotation system with a much heavier emphasis on root vegetables that supported a higher population (one of the reasons the Germans were so much trouble to their neighbours - they continually outgrew their available space). Modern grains yield 2-3 times as much medieval ones and it's far from unreasonable that in a fantasy world where magic actually works, that some crop improvement has not occurred, even if you want to stick with grains as a major crop. Root vegertables - and especially potatoes - shift the balance even further. Quoting from Hobhouse's book "Seeds of Change" on potatoes "an acre and a half would provide a family of four to six with food for twelve months, while to grow the equivalent grain required an acreage four to six times as large..." - and it required less work, and fewer tools (no ploughing, no plough animals, etc). It's a high density food for primitive farming.

 

At the other end of the scale, Montaillou (perhaps the world's best-studied medieval village) had 250 people (almost all living in single family dwellings) and farmed an area of over 2000 acres - about 9 acres per person. But then, it was an upland mountain village living by a mixture of herding and small-farming.

 

Likewise, what constitutes a farming family varies wildly: in Northen Europe, especially Scandinavia with the Heregaard system, a farm with more than 20 residents and 6-8 adult workers was by no means unusual (large farms could house up to a dozen families in one building complex, with numbers reaching 40 or more).

 

So you have a historical range of land needed per person from 0.25 to 9 acres in different areas/eras - a 36 fold difference, even though the technology was similar! We also have a historical household size ranging from one to nearly 50 (actually in some places, times, like Imperial Rome farms could be much, much bigger, but that's outside the scope of what you described). My advice is to decide what you want in terms of social arrangements, make sure that it is not too unrealistic (you have enough info for that in this thread) and then just go for it. Either way you have plenty of land for the population you described and plenty of wilderness left over.

 

cheers, Mark

[Roland]

Re: Medieval Farming Villages

 

Basil - remember that Glupii's setting includes independent, scattered farms of extended families, in addition to the main village. I think his 18-member families were on these outlying farms, which would not be expected to follow the usual village model.