Research Catalog

Title

Farming transformed in Anglo-Saxon England : agriculture in the long eighth century / Mark McKerracher.

Author

McKerracher, Mark James, 1986-

Publication

United Kingdom : Windgather Press, 2018.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

vii, 154 pages : illustrations; 25 cm

Summary

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.

Subject

• Agriculture > England > History > To 1500

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 146-154).

Contents

Machine generated contents note: 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 -- Settlements and structures -- Arable environments -- Introducing the charred plant remains -- 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.

Call Number

JFF 18-939

ISBN

• 9781911188315
• 1911188313

OCLC

1002835775

Author

McKerracher, Mark James, 1986- author.

Title

Farming transformed in Anglo-Saxon England : agriculture in the long eighth century / Mark McKerracher.

Publisher

United Kingdom : Windgather Press, 2018.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 146-154).

Research Call Number

JFF 18-939