I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of an intriguing, vaguely familiar assertion about legumes made by Tom Jaine in his recent Guardian review of a clutch of food books:
the 12th-century renaissance that gave us Heloise and Abelard was due mainly to better agriculture and more protein-rich legumes rather than heightened sensibility or appreciation of the classics — for Abelard, not so much cherchez la femme as cherchez le pain.
Intriguing, but ambiguous. Legumes which were more protein-rich? Or more legumes? More yield of legumes, or more species of legumes? I remembered having read similar things in the past — medieval agricultural innovation and all that — but I had never looked into the subject in any detail.
I suppose the easiest way to find out more would have been to read the source of the statement, Tom Standage’s An Edible History of Humanity. This is about how foods have influenced history, which sounds pretty interesting. And hopefully one day I will get to it. But until then, there is the internet. ((Edible History is not yet on Google Books.))
The most accessible elucidation I’ve been able to find online of the assertion that pulses drove the 12th century mini-Renaissance is an article by Umberto Eco. He points out that the population of Europe began to increase again at the turn of the second millennium after a long period of stagnation, perhaps tripling in the next 500 years. Why? Eco suggests that agricultural innovation was behind this explosion of population, and of physical and intellectual energy. There was a new(ish) three-field rotation, iron horseshoes, a new collar and ploughing methods. But there were also beans, peas, vetch and lentils.
All these fruits of the earth are rich in vegetable proteins, as anyone who goes on a low-meat diet knows, for the nutritionist will be sure to insist that a nice dish of lentils or split peas has the nutritional value of a thick, juicy steak. Now the poor, in those remote Middle Ages, did not eat meat, unless they managed to raise a few chickens or engaged in poaching (the game of the forest was the property of the lords). …[T]his poor diet begat a population that was ill nourished, thin, sickly, short and incapable of tending the fields.
So when, in the 10th century, the cultivation of legumes began to spread, it had a profound effect on Europe. Working people were able to eat more protein; as a result, they became more robust, lived longer, created more children and repopulated a continent.
I tried to find out a bit more online about the dynamics of the spread of these crops through Europe, presumably from their Mediterranean heartland, but was not all that successful. There’s a little something in a book on medieval population growth.
And also a bit in a book on medieval agriculture. But nothing on exactly how pulses were adopted across the continent. Best I can figure is that they were already known to some extent, and perhaps cultivated on a small scale in gardens, and were gradually incorporated into the field system, replacing bare fallows, as suitable agricultural land ran out and intensification became necessary. ((I wonder if modern examples of crops moving from homegardens to commercial fields and orchards might offer a suitable parallel for this process.)) Anyway, surely the process is fairly well understood by historians and I’m just showing my ignorance here. Who will instruct me?
Instructing you, I cannot. But I am with you that these crops had been know for a long time.
Cicero was named after the chickpea, and Virgil writes in the Georgics:
These crops becoming more important is more likely to be a result of population growth -> rising food prices -> intensification, then its cause.
Bruce Campbell could instruct you further, at least on the English case.
I don’t totally agree with Robert’s Boserupean view, and would give some space to Leslie White’s technological determinist view. I really think technological innovation may be the major driver of demographic change in medieval Europe.
A (geographical) synthesis of medieval archaebotanical material would be needed to answer the question fully. Some day, I hope to work on this.
I suppose the population increase was also at least partly down to a warmer climate?
There is another Campbell paper on the Norfolk system.
* A New Perspective on Medieval and Early Modern Agriculture: Six Centuries of Norfolk Farming c.1250-c.1850
* Bruce M. S. Campbell and Mark Overton
* Past & Present, No. 141 (Nov., 1993), pp. 38-105
(article consists of 68 pages)
* Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society
* Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/651030
Not much on how the introduction happened, but evidence for increased cultivation of legumes from 1250 onwards.
Horses were increasingly being used as draught animals and required feed.
Thirsk (1997) Agriculture and alternative history p. 9 [not part of preview;)] asks whether pig keeping led to an increase in legume cultivation in the early fourteenth century
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=f8jZ48XKBSMC&lpg=PA273&dq=Thirsk%20(1997)%20Agriculture%20and%20alternative%20history&client=firefox-a&pg=PA8#v=onepage&q=&f=false
Have you considered an influence of the crusades and arabic learning?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Agricultural_Revolution
and the seminal paper by Watson?
* The Arab Agricultural Revolution and Its Diffusion, 700-1100
* Andrew M. Watson
* The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 34, No. 1, The Tasks of Economic History (Mar., 1974), pp. 8-35
(article consists of 28 pages)
* Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Economic History Association
* Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2116954