New Agricultural Technology

The new agricultural technology of the eleventh century was not a sudden invention but a quiet accumulation of tools and methods that slowly transformed the European countryside. The heavy plough, fitted with wheels and an iron ploughshare, could cut through the dense, wet soils of northern Europe far better than the old scratch plough, while the mouldboard turned the earth over in a clean furrow. This was paired with the shift from a two-field to a three-field rotation system, where one field lay fallow each year, another grew winter crops, and the third grew spring crops — so the land was never idle and harvests came more often. Together, t …