How did medieval peasants do it?

The simple three field rotation of grains, followed by legumes, followed by fallow (animal grazing) was pretty standard in much of Europe in the medieval period I understand. I find it difficult to believe though, that people stuck loads of pea stick in the fields for their peas and beans to grow on and then took them off again the following year - it just sounds like rather too much work on a field sized system!

How did they manage it? I experimented this year with not supporting most of my peas. I interplanted some with my fava beans and some were just by themselves, but (as you might expect!) the results were less than satisfactory - the pea vines scrambled over the ground, and the slugs and mice had most of the peas produced (despite a good growing year for me generally). I don't think shorter peas (which are one obvious solution) were available till about the 19th century this article has some background reading on peas...) so that wouldn't be the medieval solution.

failed pea experiment in early summer

So my questions are - did they use pea sticks or another method? What do you think might work with less labour on a larger scale?

Field peas and beans grow as a bush.  Usually less than two feet high these days.  Three or four feet high seemed more likely pre industrial revolution.  Bush growth pattern with lots of branching out early, broadcast close together so the plants can support each other. They had to be tall enough to harvest by scythe but not so tall as to lodge.

We have something like this sold under cover crop peas.

Also, favas were far more popular in the middle ages in England than they are now.  

Climbing beans and peas were/are for the kitchen garden where space is limited so vertical growing is desired.

I believe back then growing was a family affair.  All hands on board for the planting, watering and harvesting.

I agree that they probably planted bush varieties.

Vine varieties might have been more popular for kitchen gardens.

r ranson wrote:Feild peas and beans grow as a bush.  Usually less than two feet high these days.  Three or four feet high seemed more likely pre industrial revolution.

Interesting, I haven't found any sources for drying type bush peas, so I guess I'll have to take another look for 'field peas' and 'cover crop peas'. All the older traditional drying peas (like carlin peas) I've found are taller varieties - 5 to 6 feet, but maybe I'm looking in the wrong place!

I had a flash of inspiration: bush or field peas will be known also as a grain pea or legume. In modern terms, combine-harvestable peas.

Description:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/field-pea

Growing advice:
https://www.pgro.org/growing-combining-peas/

UK varieties:
https://www.pgro.org/downloads/DL-LIST-PDF.pdf

Variety breeding companies:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1IMNrtNV_FEb4E-DxWfDZnvj2i8zhe4V7?usp=share_link

So, for example,
Cope Seeds & Grain have a range of combineable pea seed varieties: https://copeseeds.co.uk/products/peas/

https://www.saltspringseeds.com/collections/non-staking-pea-seeds-pisum-sativum

These are considered non-staking peas.  Although if grown in a solitary row, they do like a net.  When growned in a block, they self support. Most traditional drying peas are like this as they would be harvested by scythe and thrashed.   Sticks would risk damaging the scythe.

Soup peas is another common term here.  Some container or dwarf varieties that sell for a lot here, look suspiciously like field peas.  Maybe it's part of being raised in canada, we spent a lot of schooling watching documentaries of what the other parts of the country produced, so the arial footage of vast fields of peas and canola stuck in my mind.


Another issue, most of the medieval period in Christian europe didn't document mundane things like farming until about 1500, so there was a lot of interchangeable language between peas, chick peas, pulces, beans, lentils, favas, etc.  It was pasent food and usually got lumped in legume (or a variation on that spelling).  For more info, the scientific studies in Arab spain circa 1100 to 1450 has some great info, but very little translated into english when last I looked.  

Fun fact, peas was both singular and plural for most of English history.  It's not until the latter part of the 20th century that we get the word pea coming into common use.   A bit like sheep and the new word, sheeps.  

Those saltlakespring seeds look very interesting to start a landrace covering a whole plot of land. I'd love to do this to gain land of grass to grow crops on it.
I dream of a covercrop of winter rye. plunk it down after harvesting a replacing quantity of seeds. Growing dry land pumpkins that need not a lot of soil nutrients that will cover the plot over summer by the foliage and then enter winter-seeds like the legumes you describe, fixing nitrogen and covering a decomposing mass of grass killing mulch.
It would make my gardening so much easier if there was less grass creeping in constantly.
I have the rye, and the pumpkins seeds, but so far seem out of luck with my neighbor farmer having flat tires constantly. They inner tubes he buys are chinese rubbish which seems to be all the market provides.

Next year I plan to try co-growing climbing peas with sunroots, so the sunroots act as a climbing frame for the peas, and the peas feed the sunroots nitrogen. I seem to remember someone on here (Thom, maybe?) saying they grew sunflowers as a climbing frame for beans, and that they were doing well, so sunroots and peas feels like a combination that might work. Also, I have heard of people growing sunroots and aardaker (Lathyrus tuberosus) together, for the same reason.

Those salt spring seeds look awesome! What a variety you have - even some UK varieties. I have found some UK field peas, but the suppliers all seem to be aimed at farmers, so I would have to buy a ton of them (literally!). As you said, r ranson, all the gardeners seem to have reverted to green peas. Virtually all the soup and drying peas that are available in smaller quantities here are taller now. It makes sense that machine harvested peas would not be staked, so just about any commercially grown pea will be semi-dwarf...
I could try sourcing some dried peas for eating - that would be an easy way of getting a kg or two. If UK grown, they would be a start....Ooh look! Hodmedod's do a ready mix for me - a mix of five UK grown peas!

Nancy Reading wrote:Ooh look! Hodmedod's do a ready mix for me - a mix of five UK grown peas!

Oh, great find!!! Would you sow the whole packet? Because if not .. !!

Actually I think they probably did it exactly as you describe.

Here in the UK  many of our ancient woodlands were actively managed as coppice - hazel, hornbeam and chestnut are the most common species.  A common product was bundles of pea sticks made with the brash from trimming other more valuable products.



Here you can see them tied with twine, but they would likely have been bundled with twisted withies of hazel.

Coppice products were used extensively - faggots for bread ovens, stakes for fencing, hurdles etc... and then most furniture for common folk would probably have been made in the woods by a bodger.  I think we underestimate hugely the amount of manual labour that was dedicated to these crafts.

Michael Cox wrote:Actually I think they probably did it exactly as you describe.

Here in the UK  many of our ancient woodlands were actively managed as coppice - hazel, hornbeam and chestnut are the most common species.  A common product was bundles of pea sticks made with the brash from trimming other more valuable products.

I was contemplating making something like sheep hurdles with cleft hazel and setting them up zigzag fashion as Larisa suggests for cattle panels here for growing beans up. I'm imagining they could be stored under cover through the winter and would last a few years. I must admit though, for my simple farming area I fancy no trellis as a first aim with a view to dry peas. I'll move my climbing pea seeds to my new kitchen garden area for cropping green peas, and use pea sticks there.

Also, if we are genuinely talking about "medieval peasants" it's worth looking at the systems they actually used in practice. Again, in the UK the common agricultural system was "ridge and furrow". A field was ploughed in strips with ridges and troughs that grew over decades of consistent use. These were tended communally by people from the community with crops grown on the ridges. I have always envisaged this more like market garden agriculture than the typical modern mono-crops.

In ridge might be planted in a single crop, but it would be unlikely to be a whole field because a modern "field" didn't really exist. In this context sowing your peas and then using pea stakes on a long broad row seems much more reasonable.

Depends on where and when in the medieval period as farming was adapted to local conditions.  In the southern half of England, 1100-1400 (and in parts a hundreds of years either way as this was still in practice in parts of east Anglia by at least the 1930s as my great grandfather and his generation were part of that farming system), it was a combination of market gardening and field monoculture.  The land owners would have several acres of monoculture crop and part of the rent of the farmers would be labour to help grow the field crops.

Likewise, the farmer might have half an acre or so (1/8th for widows for example, maybe 10 or more for the "boy", our equivalent would be farm manager, but more).  Most of that would be low labour staple crops. With maybe a small kitchen garden that needed high labour.

The spanish books I mention, some of them go into indepth explanations on the standard ridge and furrow system common in Europe at the time of al Andalusian conquest (circa 750ad).  The seed is broadcast uniformly, some landing on top of the ridges, some landing in the furrows.  This made agriculture more sustainable against poor weather as on dry years, the furrowed grain grew and on wet years the ridge grain grew best.  

The agriculturalist Jethrow Tull (like the music group) has some interesting insights into where farming in europe was at when he introduced changes to the system.

But again, it wasn't uniform across europe, or even in one country, or even in one village.  They adapted to the land and what it could provide.  

What was universal was the need for a staple crop for the village, considerably more for selling, and quite a bit to give to the monarch.  And a bunch to keep a reserve of at least three years of bad harvest so the population didn't starve if the weather turned.

The seed is broadcast uniformly, some landing on top of the ridges, some landing in the furrows.  This made agriculture more sustainable against poor weather as on dry years, the furrowed grain grew and on wet years the ridge grain grew best.

Oh, very interesting observation.

"With a broad range of crops, RF cultivation raises yield and N uptake, and generally increase N use efficiency (NUE; yield / N uptake) and water use efficiency (WUE; yield/evapotranspiration (ET)), and reduce ET, compared with flat planting.

"RF cultivation has good adaptability to climate change, effectively addressing various environmental stresses."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378377425003713

[youtube]https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjgZr0v9DXyK9Cc8PG0ZhDt2i2eQ_PEvg[/youtube]

I seem to remember there being a field pea crop in the Tudor farm show.  But I haven't watched it lately, so I'm not sure.

I grow beans sprawling on the ground. The semi-sprawling varieties grow best for me. They sprawl over whatever else grows in the field with them. Bush beans get overpowered by weeds. Vining beans prefer their poles. Peas and grains grow great together.

The planting of the peas



24 min They talk about the quality of the soil to show it's ready for ploughing for peas (interesting it's more about moisture content than temperature).  

at 36:30 ish, they are finally ploughing the soil.  It looks like the later medieval system rather than the early, anglo-saxon style that left the deep, permanent ridges.  They eventually harrow the soil, once the oxen are agreeable to helping.  

47 min in, they are broadcasting the seeds.  

I forgot how much I enjoy this series.

As far as I can tell, the video features living history work by Ruth Goodman, but isn't available to view from the UK.

I found another YouTube account with a Tudor farm featuring Ruth Goodman which will play in the UK:

https://youtu.be/wWJZxEGdUiQ?si=lM43IKaQ_y8VWEZD

which I've not watched yet, however.

Nancy Reading wrote:The simple three field rotation of grains, followed by legumes, followed by fallow (animal grazing) was pretty standard in much of Europe in the medieval period I understand. I find it difficult to believe though, that people stuck loads of pea stick in the fields for their peas and beans to grow on and then took them off again the following year - it just sounds like rather too much work on a field sized system!

How did they manage it? I experimented this year with not supporting most of my peas. I interplanted some with my fava beans and some were just by themselves, but (as you might expect!) the results were less than satisfactory - the pea vines scrambled over the ground, and the slugs and mice had most of the peas produced (despite a good growing year for me generally). I don't think shorter peas (which are one obvious solution) were available till about the 19th century this article has some background reading on peas...) so that wouldn't be the medieval solution.

So my questions are - did they use pea sticks or another method? What do you think might work with less labour on a larger scale?

This is a great question.  I've been messing around with soup peas the last few years, and harvesting them before they are ruined by the weather is the biggest hassle about them.  I've grown four different varieties, Roveja, Blackeyed Marrowfat, Australian, and Blue-pod Capucijners.  I like the Roveja and Blackeyed Marrowfat the best in the kitchen, but Blue-pod Capucijners is by far the easiest to harvest with the least mold and ruined seeds, as well as having the easiest pods to find when harvesting by hand.  

The problem with no trellis/supports is that the tall peas flop all over the place and lots of seed is ruined before harvest, and it is a PITA to harvest them.  Easiest is to cut the entire mass and haul it someplace under a roof to dry down completely and then thresh the whole thing.  I think this might be the historical way?  At least in the Colonial era here in the Western/Northern hemisphere.  Beans and peas brought into the barn to thresh out.  It is most time efficient but wastes a LOT of the harvest.  

Trellising keeps the vines up off the ground, but when they start to dry down they tend to let go of the supports, especially in wet windy conditions, and it is much harder to separate the plants to thresh them when they are tangled up in a trellis or pea brush.  I want an efficient way to harvest these.  

I extremely doubt they were using dwarf varieties or any of the modern soup pea genetics like hypertendrils etc.  I might switch to those varieties or try crossing these old fashioned soup peas with the modern dwarf, self standing types, to waste less of the harvest.  

Tim Springston wrote:The problem with no trellis/supports is that the tall peas flop all over the place and lots of seed is ruined before harvest, and it is a PITA to harvest them.  Easiest is to cut the entire mass and haul it someplace under a roof to dry down completely and then thresh the whole thing.

If I had my polytunnel, I would have done just that - cut the whole plant and hang it up in there to ripen a bit and dry off.

One other thing I have heard is that pease were (and are?) also grown as a polyculture with grain crops so that you harvest, thresh and eat the whole crop together. I'm not sure how this might work, but you'd get a nutritious porrage I suppose. It may also have been fed entire as an animal food with the stalks as well

I'm also leaning towards starting again with my dry peas aspirations with the field peas (hey someone's done some of the work for us!) and use the tall peas as the start of my kitchen garden plants where tall doesn't matter (or is an advantage) and pretty is also good

Hi everyone,

Interesting question Nancy, and I never seem to manage enough or fully functional pea sticks no matter how I vow to do it!
Anyway, I just happened to come across a Dutch website on rare seeds and they listed a pea that's been saved by one if their farmer - seed growers and they described their technique of growing the peas together with wheat (or some grain, but I think they said wheat). I'll try this one of these years once I get grain going in my garden. I can see it work even if you wanted some fresh peas, as long as you leave space you can just walk along the rows and pick some.

Marieke De Jong wrote:
Hi everyone,

Interesting question Nancy, and I never seem to manage enough or fully functional pea sticks no matter how I vow to do it!
Anyway, I just happened to come across a Dutch website on rare seeds and they listed a pea that's been saved by one if their farmer - seed growers and they described their technique of growing the peas together with wheat (or some grain, but I think they said wheat). I'll try this one of these years once I get grain going in my garden. I can see it work even if you wanted some fresh peas, as long as you leave space you can just walk along the rows and pick some.

Hi Marieke, which website was that?  Thanks!

This looks interesting: "Intercropping grain peas with barley" although it assuming farm-scale mechanisation. Grain peas are the same as field peas, I presume? Pea "lodging" is when the pea plants are compressed by the combined with of growth and developing peas, I gather?

"Mixed crops of grain peas and barley can produce stable yields for protein production; with the risk of yield loss being reduced.

"Barley prevents pea lodging, reducing losses during threshing and increasing the quality of the harvested crop.

"The cereal crop also improves the soil cover, suppressing weeds."

https://agricology.co.uk/resource/intercropping-grain-peas-barley/

Nancy Reading wrote:

r ranson wrote:Feild peas and beans grow as a bush.  Usually less than two feet high these days.  Three or four feet high seemed more likely pre industrial revolution.

Interesting, I haven't found any sources for drying type bush peas, so I guess I'll have to take another look for 'field peas' and 'cover crop peas'. All the older traditional drying peas (like carlin peas) I've found are taller varieties - 5 to 6 feet, but maybe I'm looking in the wrong place!

The standard field peas/green manure type/seed type peas grow well here without sticks. Also Oregon giant snow pea is really good for self-supporting, and very tasty. I'm trialing 'greenfeast' this year, a popular dwarf shelling variety.

Nancy Reading wrote:

Tim Springston wrote:

One other thing I have heard is that pease were (and are?) also grown as a polyculture with grain crops so that you harvest, thresh and eat the whole crop together. I'm not sure how this might work, but you'd get a nutritious porrage I suppose. It may also have been fed entire as an animal food with the stalks as well

In Estonia, meal from toasted mixed grains is a traditional food. I wonder if the mix of grains in this recipe was grown and harvested together in olden days?

Recipe for “kama” https://estoniancuisine.com/2017/08/11/kama-estonian-muesli/

Hello there! I'd like to find out what Irish, German and Swedish medieval gardens look like back then cause I wanna make my European settler gardens better in a more ancient way to help others in my community and region remember their motherland's true past and their ancestors. I don't know where to begin. Please let me in this section. Thanks!

Hi Blake, We hear more about how grand houses and monasteries gardens were laid out than how the common people grew around their houses. There are some interesting vidoes on this thread you may find of interest. I suspect that most people had a fairly small space around the house to grow and it would have been a mixture of flowers, herbs and vegetables to gather fresh, with a fence, hedge or stone wall to keep livestock from eating the cabbages! Haddon's guide covers a range of European medieval gardne information, which might be of some use too.
I went ahead and ordered the peas from Hodmedod and they arrived very quickly! This means I'm all set now to try a new landrace for field peas that (hopefully) will grow reasonably well for me without support.

all the peas

I couldn't resist the rye grain and Susan's book on beans too (although it doesn't seem to cover fava beans much unfortunately)

Good afternoon dear! How are you? Are there any plants in this modern time that would pull off the restoration of an historic and ancient European garden today? Trying to recapture what the settlers had in their former homelands at my community gardens in Chicago this coming year. I'd like some feedback from somebody either on the comment boards or at the Purple Mooseage in exchange of ideas. Take care!

Blake Lenoir wrote: Are there any plants in this modern time that would pull off the restoration of an historic and ancient European garden today?

Hi Blake - UK seed and plant sources I would suggest are Thomas Etty and Pennard plants - also good as sources of information, as many of the varieties may well be available in the US as well. Thomas Etty publishes a vegetable timeline (presumably for UK) which, if you haven't already seen it you may find interesting