By Harvey Tesseyman, Heritage Research Supervisor

January is finally over, a month with five Mondays to kick the year off. Since we’ve spent January out in the field excavating, geophys-ing, and undertaking earthwork surveys, we’ve been thinking about what people in the medieval period would have been doing out in their fields this month.

The Julius Work Calendar was a twelve page book measuring just 200mm by 130mm and produced in c.1020 in Canterbury Cathedral. It was divided into the calendar year we recognise today, each page showing a zodiac sign, the holy days of that month, and an illustration of a particular task  http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Cotton_MS_Julius_A_VI. This ‘Work Calendar’ was a religious text, likely produced to help young monks with their learning (Robert and Danziger 2003). It was rescued from destruction following the Dissolution of the Monasteries by a 17th century Member of Parliament, antiquarian, and book collector, Robert Cotton, from whose shelves the calendar gets its name: each of Cotton’s bookcases in Westminster library was topped with the bust of a notable figure of the classical world; Augustus, Caligula, Claudius, Cleopatra, Domotian, Faustina, Galba, Nero, Otho, Tiberius, Vespasian, Vitellius and, of course, Julius.

The calendar suggests that January’s task was ploughing. The ploughing season began in earnest on Plough Monday, the first Monday after Twelfth Night. Plough Monday may have had associations with rites surrounding fertility, whereby local young men would wear special badges and engage in ploughing competitions (Gilchrist 2012). We decline to pass comment on this aspect.

Ridge and furrow earthworks visible during an earthwork survey in Lincolnshire

The open field systems that dominated much of the medieval landscape comprised areas of arable land up to c.50ha big, divided into furlongs which in turn comprised a number of narrow, enclosed strips. Generally between two and four of these giant fields served a single settlement, with somewhere between one third and one half of the rural population living in places given over to this system (White 2002). Medieval ploughing was difficult work. Teams of people goaded and sung to their slow-moving oxen to drive them through the fields, whilst the plough was steered to deliver the perfect furrow within which to sow seeds; not too shallow nor too deep. It was a system that worked for hundreds of years before oxen were put out to pasture in favour of smaller teams of horses. A plough team could cover an acre a day, which would have involved walking something like 17.5km (Ochota 2016). Quite a distance even on level ground (our geophysicists walk up to 25km a day and that’s with just a magnetometry rig, not a team of oxen)! Unlike modern ploughs, medieval examples had a single blade, not unlike a spearhead in shape, or an archaeological trowel held at an angle. They were designed to cut a small trench into the earth and push the dislodged soil to one side and this created a characteristic set of linear earthworks, known as ridge and furrow (or furrow and ridge, respectively). Due to the wide turning circle on a team of oxen when compared to a modern tractor, ridge and furrow ploughing has a gentle ‘S’ or reverse ‘S’ curve to it to give the animals enough time to turn around and start another furrow, in an area referred to as headland.

With time, many examples of ridge and furrow ploughing were in turn ploughed out. Where evidence for these medieval field systems survives, often soilmarks showing where the old furrows used to be are the only trace but happily for archaeologists, these soilmarks and remaining earthworks can be quite easy to spot both by eye, and using LiDAR. They’re interesting to dig, and useful to identify during a desk-based assessment or heritage statement as they often indicate further activity nearby.

January was busy, and February is already off to a good start. Luckily for us according to the Julius Work Calendar we’ll be out in February clearing vines…

Ridge and furrow visible on LiDAR near a site in Leicestershire

References:

Gilchrist, R, 2012, Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course, Suffolk: Boydell Press

Ochota, M., 2016, Hidden Histories: A Spotter’s Guide to the British Landscape, London: Frances Lincoln Ltd

Robert, L., and Danziger, D., 2003 (3rd ed), The Year 1000: What Life Was Like At The Turn of the First Millenium, London: Abacus

White, G.J., 2002, The Medieval English Landscape 1000–1540, London: Bloomsbury