… there is a tendency when popular culture represents the past to erase not merely the farmers, but most of the commons generally. Castles seem to be filled with a few servants, a whole bunch of knights and lords and perhaps, if we are lucky, a single blacksmith that somehow makes all of their tools.
But the actual human landscape of the pre-modern period was defined – in agrarian societies, at least – by vast numbers of farms and farmers. Their work proceeded on this cyclical basis, from plowing to sowing to weeding to harvesting and threshing to storage and then back again. Religious observances and social festivals were in turn organized around that calendar (it is not an accident how many Holy Days and big festivals seem to cluster around the harvest season in late Autumn/early Winter, or in Spring). The uneven labor demands of this cycle (intense in plowing and reaping, but easier in between) in turn also provided for the background hum of much early urban life, where the “cities” were for the most part just large towns surrounded by farmland (where often the folks living in the cities might work farmland just outside of the gates). People looked forward to festivals and events organized along the agricultural calendar, to the opportunities a good harvest might provide them to do things like get married or expand their farms. The human drama that defines our lives was no less real for the men and women who toiled in the fields or the farmhouses.
And of course all of this activity was necessary to support literally any other kind of activity.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part III: Actually Farming”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-08-06.
March 7, 2022
QotD: Historical fiction and fantasy works usually leave out the vast majority of the people who did all the work
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