4 - Agricultural technique
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
In many areas between the Alps, the North Sea, the river Loire and the Rhine, a primitive irregular fallow system to restore fertility to the soil, in which the same crop was grown for several years in a row before the soil was left fallow for a similar length of time, had been superseded in the centuries before and at the beginning of the Middle Ages by a more regular fallow system with one grain crop and shorter, more regular, three-year periods of fallow. This system in turn evolved during the ninth century into a system in which two kinds of grain instead of one were grown in regular rotation side by side during the same harvesting year, namely winter-sown corn and spring-sown corn. Every third year the fields that had produced spring corn the year before were left lying fallow for a year, before being sown, after two ploughing turns in June and October, with winter corn, followed in the subsequent spring by the sowing of spring corn. This is what is called the three-course rotation, to be distinguished from the later topographical three-field system, in which three fields corresponded each to one of the phases just indicated. The new system made the cultivation of two different and complementary grain crops possible: one – spelt, rye and wheat – was meant for human consumption as grain for bread, while the other – mainly barley and oats – was used as animal feed.
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- The Carolingian Economy , pp. 61 - 71Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
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