Farming Transformed in Anglo-Saxon England

Agriculture in the Long Eighth Century

Mark McKerracher (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

164 Seiten

2018
Windgather Press (Verlag)
978-1-911188-31-5 (ISBN)

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This fascinating new study shows how farming was transformed, largely under the control of royal, aristocratic and monastic centres, leading to economic resurgence after two long dark centuries of post-Roman decline and political unrest.

Anglo-Saxon farming has traditionally been seen as the wellspring of English agriculture, setting the pattern for 1000 years to come – but it was more important than that. A rich harvest of archaeological data is now revealing the untold story of agricultural innovation, the beginnings of a revolution, in the age of Bede. Armed with a powerful new dataset, Farming Transformed explores fundamental questions about the minutiae of early medieval farming and its wider relevance. How old were sheep left to grow, for example, and what pathologies did cattle sustain? What does wheat chaff have to do with lordship and the market economy? What connects ovens in Roman Germany with barley maltings in early medieval Northamptonshire? And just how interested were Saxon nuns in cultivating the opium poppy? Farming Transformed is the first book to draw together the variegated evidence of pollen, sediments, charred seeds, animal bones, watermills, corn-drying ovens, granaries and stockyards on an extensive, regional scale. The result is an inter-disciplinary dataset of unprecedented scope and size, which reveals how cereal cultivation boomed, and new watermills, granaries and ovens were erected to cope with – and flaunt – the fat of the land. As arable farming grew at the expense of pasture, sheep and cattle came under closer management and lived longer lives, yielding more wool, dairy goods, and traction power for ploughing. These and other innovations are found to be concentrated at royal, aristocratic and monastic centres, placing lordship at the forefront of agricultural innovation, and farming as the force behind kingdom-formation and economic resurgence in the seventh and eighth centuries.

Mark McKerracher is a Research Assistant at the University of Oxford, where he completed his DPhil in 2014. His research focuses on the archaeology of plants, farming and Anglo-Saxon England.

1. The lie of the land

England in the ‘long eighth century’

Rationale and scope of this study

Beating the bounds: natural environments in the study regions

2. Farm and field

Fields

Meadows

Ploughs

Farms

Conclusions

3. Beast and bone

The importance of sheep

The importance of wool

Conclusions

4. The growth of arable

Settlement and structures

Arable environments

Introducing the charred plant remians

Charred crop deposits and arable growth

Conclusions

5. The changing harvest

Wheat, barley, oat and rye

The accidental harvest

Beyond the cereals

Conclusions

6. Farming transformed

Bibliography

Appendix: gazetteer of sites

Erscheinungsdatum	27.04.2018
Zusatzinfo	b/w
Verlagsort	Macclesfield
Sprache	englisch
Maße	185 x 246 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Archäologie
	Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Gebete / Lieder / Meditationen
	Weitere Fachgebiete ► Land- / Forstwirtschaft / Fischerei
ISBN-10	1-911188-31-3 / 1911188313
ISBN-13	978-1-911188-31-5 / 9781911188315
Zustand	Neuware