The WLBOTT Ag Extension Service (Go Waggies!) grew two grains this summer: amaranth and sorghum.
Today we harvested most of the grains (some of the sorghum need a little more time).
Ripe sorghum (left) and sorghum waiting to ripen (right)
Ripe sorghum (left) and sorghum waiting to ripen (right)
So, let’s imagine we are medieval peasants, growing grain. It was a lot of work.
We should note that medieval European farmers wouldn’t have grown amaranth or sorghum. Amaranth comes from the New World, and was a major crop in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Sorghum originated in Africa and spread widely through Asia and parts of the Islamic world. Both like warm weather and tolerate drought.
But the basic process was similar to all grain farming. This goes back perhaps 12,000 years.
The schedule for sowing → growing → reaping → drying were controlled by nature. The other activities had some wiggle room.
Agriculture was a key factor in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated plants and animals created food surpluses that enabled people to live in the cities. While humans started gathering grains at least 105,000 years ago, nascent farmers only began planting them around 11,500 years ago. Sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle were domesticated around 10,000 years ago.
The chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) is the domesticated form of the red junglefowl (Gallus gallus), originally native to Southeast Asia. It was first domesticated around 8,000 years ago and is one of the most common and widespread domesticated animals in the world.
As of 2023, the global chicken population exceeded 26.5 billion, with more than 50 billion birds produced annually for consumption.
Preparing the field would consist of plowing (loosen the soil, to kill the weeds, work in the magic manure, etc.) Note that modern agriculture is experimenting with zero-till farming which has many benefits and would make a great future blott.
The evolution of the plow is another fascinating subject.
Plowing was really exhausting and physical work, which is why we have the Plowman’s Lunch[1].
Sowing: in medieval times, grain seeds were sown by hand, using the broadcast method.
Growing: Very ballpark chart, with regional variations. Note that some grains were planted in the fall for harvesting the following year.
Grain
Typical sowing
Approx. time to harvest
Winter wheat
Sept–Nov
8–10 months
Spring wheat
Feb–Apr
4–5 months
Winter rye
Aug–Oct
9–11 months
Spring rye
Mar–Apr
3–5 months
Barley
Autumn or spring
3–5 months spring; longer if overwintered
Oats
Mostly spring in many regions
4–5 months
Millet
Late spring
2–4 months
Spelt
Often autumn
9–11 months
Emmer/einkorn
Autumn or spring, depending on region
roughly 4–10 months, depending on sowing season
Reaping: (we like to use the word “reaping” rather than harvesting; it has a Stephen King vibe). This was a big community event. The grain was cut with scythes and sickles, then the stalks were bound into sheaves, then grouped into stooks to dry.
The Stephen King Reaping Vibe
And because too much is never enough…
Remember George, our lonely unpaid marketing intern (he’s single, ladies!)? He has bit of a romanticized idea of the medieval grain harvests.
Drying: This step is critical, and again at the mercy of the weather. Grain that was too damp could spoil in storage. Depending on circumstances, some drying occurred in the field and some after bringing it in.
Here’s the WLBOTT Ag drying station (amaranth and sorghum):
Threshing and Winnowing
Now comes the post-processing: threshing and winnowing. These activities could take place in the fields after the grain has dried, or could be done in the winter after the dried grain stalks have been stored, breaking up the labor after the busy harvesting season.
Threshing is a great way to get out your aggression. It basically involves beating the dried grain stalks with sticks to separate the grain kernels from the seed heads
The threshed grain is collected for the final stage before storage: winnowing. This separates the wheat from the chaff. The chaff lightweight seed casings surrounding the grain. The chaff doesn’t get digested and just goes along for the ride, and since we don’t like freeloaders, we want to remove it. Conceptually, the winnowing process is straightforward: throw the grain up in the air and let the breeze carry off the lighter chaff while the heavier grain falls back into the winnowing basket.
What if a peasant brought to the miller wheat that contained too much chaff?
That would be a serious problem—but primarily for the peasant, not the miller.
Before grain ever reached the mill, it was the peasant’s responsibility to separate the edible seed from the stalks (threshing) and the papery husks (winnowing). If a peasant brought “dirty” grain loaded with chaff to the mill, several things would happen, none of them good for the peasant.
The Consequences
Refusal or a Higher Toll: The miller had the right to inspect the grain. If it was poorly winnowed, he might flat-out refuse to grind it until the peasant took it back and cleaned it properly. Alternatively, because the chaff added bulk and weight to the sack without yielding flour, the miller might demand a higher multure (toll) to compensate for the wasted volume taking up space in the hopper.
Ruined Flour: If the miller went ahead and ground it anyway, the heavy millstones would crush the chaff right into the flour. Chaff is fibrous, indigestible, and bitter. The resulting flour would produce heavy, coarse, unpalatable bread. Since peasants largely ate what they grew, they were only sabotaging their own food supply.
Accusations of Cheating: In some manors, bringing chaff-heavy grain was viewed with intense suspicion. Because the miller’s toll was often taken by volume before grinding, a peasant might intentionally leave chaff in the mix to artificially inflate the volume, hoping the miller would take a scoop of chaff instead of a scoop of precious grain. If a peasant was caught trying to cheat the lord’s toll this way, they would be hauled before the manorial court and heavily fined.
Elder G2
[1] Ploughman’s lunch
A ploughman’s lunch is an originally British cold meal based around bread, cheese, and fresh or pickled onions. Additional items can be added, such as ham, green salad, hard boiled eggs, and apple, and usual accompaniments are butter and a sweet pickle such as Branston. As its name suggests, it is most commonly eaten at lunchtime. It is particularly associated with pubs, and often served with beer; the saltiness of the cheese was noted to enhance the “relish of the beer”.
History Bread and cheese formed the basis of the diet of English rural labourers for centuries: skimmed-milk cheese, supplemented with small amounts of lard and/or butter, was their main source of fats and protein. In the absence of access to expensive seasonings, onions were the “favoured condiment”, as well as providing a valuable source of vitamin C.
The reliance on cheese rather than meat protein was especially strong in the south of the country. As late as the 1870s, farmworkers in Devon were said to eat “bread and hard cheese at 2d. a pound, with cider very washy and sour” for their midday meal. While this diet was associated with rural poverty, it also gained associations with more idealised images of rural life. Anthony Trollope in The Duke’s Children has a character comment that “a rural labourer who sits on the ditch-side with his bread and cheese and an onion has more enjoyment out of it than any Lucullus“.
Note that a Plowman’s Lunch and a Dog’s Breakfast are two separate and distinct entities.
A Dog’s Breakfast turned out to be a cute Canadian comedy that the Elders watched yesterday.
Allie’s Medieval Wanderings
Allie has a delightful blog called Medieval Wanderings. She shows you how to make several types of bread from medieval grains and baking techniques.
Bread making was a tightly controlled business in medieval England. In the countryside, villagers were obliged to take their corn [grain] to be ground – for a price – at the manorial mills. Doing your own thing was forbidden, punishable with a fine or even by branding on the hand with a hot iron.
Very few dwellings had a built-in oven, so the dough was prepared at home before being taken to the ‘common oven’, again controlled for profit by the local lord. In the towns, most people bought their bread from local bakers who were subject to strict laws known as the Assize of Bread. Created in the 13th century and enforced by the town authorities, these regulations controlled the price, weight and quality of bread so that even the poorest folk could always afford a loaf.
I’m a medieval historian with a First Class Honours Degree from the Open University, a mum of two, a longbowman and a keen walker. And I have a passion: a driving, all-consuming passion for castles and all things medieval.[…]
So join me on a quest through a thousand years of the best stories, and places our islands have to offer.
Medieval mills were marvels of mechanical engineering, power transfer, stonework, economic planning. The topic could fill many blotts. But today we ask: Were medieval mills monopolies?
According to Elder G2:
Yes, they absolutely were—and it was one of the most fiercely enforced monopolies of the medieval period.
In most of medieval Europe, a local lord or monastery held the exclusive legal right to mill grain within their manor. This wasn’t a monopoly achieved through better business practices; it was a monopoly enforced by feudal law.
Because building a watermill or windmill required a massive capital investment—engineering the watercourses, building the heavy timber structure, and sourcing the giant millstones—only the wealthy elite could afford to build them. To guarantee a return on that investment, the lord made it illegal for his tenants to grind their grain anywhere else.
The millers were the henchmen of their day:
Because of this guaranteed, captive customer base, the miller became one of the most universally despised figures in medieval society. Peasants constantly suspected millers of:
Rigging the scales to take a larger cut than legally allowed.
Skimming extra flour behind closed doors.
Sweeping up floor dust, sand, or chalk to mix into the returned flour to make up the weight.
This resentment is famously captured in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, where the Miller is depicted as a brawny, dishonest thug with a “thumb of gold”—a reference to the miller’s trick of pressing his thumb on the scale to overcharge his customers.
Wikimedia has a nice photo of an Indian woman manually harvesting wheat.
Location of the photo: 22° 56′ 50.77″ N, 77° 39′ 27.9″ E
Steve Winwood gives a step by step guide for growing barleycorn.
There were three men came out of the west Their fortunes for to try And these three men made a solemn vow: John Barleycorn must die
They’ve ploughed, they’ve sown, they’ve harrowed him in Threw clods upon his head And these three men made a solemn vow: John Barleycorn was dead
They’ve let him lie for a very long time Till the rains from heaven did fall And little Sir John sprung up his head And so amazed them all
They’ve let him stand till Midsummer’s Day Till he looked both pale and wan And little Sir John’s grown a long, long beard And so become a man
They’ve hired men with the scythes so sharp To cut him off at the knee They’ve rolled him and tied him by the way Serving him most barbarously
They’ve hired men with the sharp pitchforks Who pricked him to the heart And the loader he has served him worse than that For he’s bound him to the cart
They’ve wheeled him around and around the field Till they came unto a barn And there they made a solemn oath On poor John Barleycorn
They’ve hired men with the crab-tree sticks To cut him skin from bone And the miller he has served him worse than that For he’s ground him between two stones
And little Sir John and the nut-brown bowl And his brandy in the glass; And little Sir John and the nut-brown bowl Proved the strongest man at last
The huntsman, he can’t hunt the fox Nor so loudly to blow his horn And the tinker he can’t mend kettle nor pot Without a little Barleycorn
