medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Thank you for the explanation. I hadn't realized that barley was a spring crop. I thought it counted as a grain (winter crop), which was throwing off my understanding of how the rhyme stood for the spring rotation.
Now I will have to decide if I want to sing Raffi songs in my Early Civ course (with all due caveats about when the rhyme may have been written, of course!).
Kim Rivers
Kimberly Rivers Department of History
Associate Professor University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh
(920) 424-2451 [log in to unmask]
----- Original Message -----
From: "Howe, John" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wednesday, November 16, 2005 2:59 pm
Subject: Re: [M-R] pulses and legumes
> medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and
> culture
> "Although I have some familiarity with 3-field crop rotation, could
> youjust remind me how the rhyme correlates with rotation. I would
> love to
> use the rhyme in class, and I want to be sure that I get it right."
>
> The "three field" connection is that a triple crop rotation would
> ofteninvolve 1) leaving the field fallow, 2) growing wheat (the "money
> crop"), and then 3) growing the oats, peas, beans (peasbeans?),
> barley.There are lots of local variations on this pattern, but,
> over a full
> three year cycle, wheat would generally be a winter crop, the
> alternatecrops a spring crop, and fallow the default (actually the
> field would be
> grazed when it was "off duty"). Such a model is presumed to be an
> improvement over the alternative system (which remained common in some
> Mediterranean areas) which involved one year of wheat and one year of
> fallow because it keeps the land in production longer and
> serendipitously produces all that vegetable protein.
>
> However, just as medieval scholars have been backing away from
> "feudalism" because the concept of an ideal "feudal system," against
> which all local variations would be explained away as deviations, has
> come to seem misleading and sterile, so also some agricultural
> historians have been having reservations about the utility of
> constructing a theoretical model of an ideal "three field system,"
> against which all actual practices would be measured.
>
> --John Howe, Texas Tech
>
> --John Howe, Texas Tech
>
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