As did I, Arthur. And, though the raw numbers might be tweaked downward to reduce the amount available for export, I think you can still use them to show areas of relative surplus and relative shortage.

This squares with your idea of Kaldor as a bit of a bread basket and the economic map of Harn which does show Kaldor as an exporter of grain, at least on the regional level. Our rough figuring, then, helps answer the question about where it is going....in relative terms, Kaldor produces more grain per capita than Orbaal or Azadmere, so if it is being exported on a regional basis that is likely where it is going. Those kingdoms probably are self-sufficient, at some level of a standard of living, but they may like a little more than the minimum since they have what they need to trade for it.

_________________
::Age doesn't always bring wisdom. Sometimes age comes alone -- all by itself.::

I'm willing to bet that it's shown as such specifically because of Azadmere.

Have we given any thought to exactly who is selling grain to whom? In other words, if Kaldor does indeed produce a slight surplus, does that mean that the average serf has an extra bushel or so each year that he can sell or trade at the nearest market? Or, is it only freehold farmers, or perhaps even only landholders, who actually own the surplus and profit from it? The question has a lot of implications in terms of how the value of the surplus is spent and the consequent demand for other goods.

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Keith Mann
I really must get around to changing my .sig

I think so too. Also bear in mind that the figure of "4 acres per person" doesn't say four acres of crops...in some areas it will be more grain than animal products, in other areas it will be vice versa. So the trade in grain with Orbaal is less about feeding the starving than it is about balancing diets. Azadmere is perhaps a different case.



Nothing in depth, but I've given it some preliminary thought. I reckon villeins with some extra acerage, freehold farmers and yeomen, etc, might have a few bushels that will find their way to the local market (along with hams, wool, flax, and other cash crops) but the lord's demense is the major source of grain in the marketplace, I think.

The scale of each of those might imply that the individual farmers sell their stuff in stalls at the local market town, or to merchants (millers?) there who resale it, while the lord's might be bought up by a wholesaler for export or held in bulk and sold on a regular basis over the coming year to feed the townsfolk.

I've been browsing HarnManor looking for a way to scope the quantities involved, but the best I can offer right now is the guideline from HarnManor that the lord's "privy purse" (the bottom line net after all expenses) is cash, as is about 1/3 of what he expends on the household's bonded craftsmen. (There is probably more that is measured in cash and not kind, but those examples will do to illustrate.)The source of that cash pretty much has to be surplus agriculture that gets to market (whether direct from the demense, or from tenants who pay their own rents in cash vs kind). It can be a sizable amount of silver, depending on the fief, but is easily drawn from the demense when using the algorithms of HarnManor.

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::Age doesn't always bring wisdom. Sometimes age comes alone -- all by itself.::

I have been doing a fair amount of calculation about surpluses for my piece on Millers (which draws ever nearer to completion!). Now here's the key elements as per who has the surplus.

Effectively it takes 10 acres of grain to feed one household.
- Slaves, I have assumed, are supported by their masters.
- Cottars only have 1d6-1 acres or on average 2.5 acres; they must intensively farm vegetables to trade for spare rye - wheat for them is too expensive.
- Half Villiens have 15.5 acres on average. Now on a manor, approximately 45% of crops are cereals/corns. I would assume that a half-villein would try to up his cereal amount to be more self sufficient. Assume they have no spare.
- Villiens have acg 30 acres, and a further 20% have 70 freehold acres. Assuming half their land is fallow meadow to feed animals, the remaining 15 acres would be used for food crops. they would not have a surplus. . . but the 20% with the extra acreage would. They account for 7% of the manorial population, and they should each produce, on average, about 405 bushels/yr spare. The Cottars, about three times more common than this class of villein, need about 69 Bushel/year extra each, or 207 of the villeins 405 spare..
- Farmers have on average 35 acres, which, on manorial averages, means they need about 20 Bushels extra per year, and they are twice as plentiful as the rich-type villeins. Note though that 20% of farmers actually have an average 70 acres, and would therefore contribute 75 bushels/annum. there are 4 poor farmers for every 1 rich, so they roughly cancel. We still have ~200 bushels/rich villein/annum spare.
- Craftsmen have about 17.5 acres, and that translates to a shortfall of 55 bushels/annum that they need. There are about 1 1/2 of them for each rich villein, so they need about 75 bushels - call it 80 per rich villein. that takes the total to 120 bushels spare per rich villein assuming that estates are statistically evenly distributed. If you assume - and someone may have these stats to hand - about 20 households per manor, then about 1.4 households/manor are surplus producers. Each estate then has 1.4 x 120 or 168 spare bushels per year - enough to feed 1.8 further households.

Now look at the demense. There is no stats for average demense, but the average size of property of a tenant is about 23 1/2 acres. assuming 20 households that is 470 acres as tenant. Assume a 1500 acres average estate - and again maybe someone has these stats - with 20% woodland, the demense would be 1200 - 470 = 730 acres. 45% of that is cereal crops so 328 1/2 - call it 330 acres. Assume that the lords household has about 16 persons attached to it (based on Harn Manor 17) or 4 households worth. They need the produce of 40 acres, but let's be generous - 60 acres. That leaves 270 acres spare or 2484 bushels!

So a manor should have about 2650 spare bushels per annum. Great, but there is wastage, milling inefficiencies, etc. About 50-60% would make it to a market town (assuming non was held in reserve). I would guess that the spare would be close to 1/3rd or about 875 bushels - enough, say, to feed 10 households for a year.

Now look at the Urban populations. If a town had 320 people, that is about 80 households! that would take the spare of 8 manors.

Look at Yeged (Kaldor 17) for an example.
It needs about 6624 bushels of grain / year to feed the town its bread.
There are 336 households on manors totalling 18140 acres (1814 avg).

Of the 18140 acres, 363 is woodland, leaving. . .
17777 cleared land, of which 7896 is tenants land, leaving . . .
9881 acres demense.

Assuming 19 people per household in the lords estate (avg for 1800+ acres), you get 50 extra households to feed (and assuming a 50% bonus to the lords house), they take 750 acres for food.

That leaves 9131 acres producing ~84000 bushels spare. and another 2800 from the villeins. Assuming the 1/3rd to market, you get ~28,644 at Yeged. But Yeged only needs 6624, so about 22,000 is spare!!

... Of course, What I have not accounted for in this calculation is the amount of grain used as animal feed, but it does give an idea of the maximums.

rgds nick

_________________
Nick Lowson
nick@nlowson.demon.co.uk

BTW, the 10 acres per household is based on an average 9.2 bushels per acre of cereal crop, with an average 75% efficiency of mill.

9.2 x 10 = 92 bushels
92 bushels grain @ 75% efficiency = 69 bushels flour
69 bushels @50 lb /bushel = 3450 lb flour
3450 lb flour equates to about 3680 lb bread
3680 lb bread has about 4,683,636 calories (280cal/100g)
4,683,636 calories @ 2250 per adult per day = 2081 adult days of bread
(UK recommended amount is 2500 cal men / 2000 cal women)
2081 adult days @ 360 per year = 5.78 adult years of bread
An average Harnic household is about 4.5 persons, so assuming the spare goes to chickens - and that the work is more physical and thus needs a slightly higher calorific intake, 10 acres will support 1 houshold.

Of course, substituting meats, eggs, cheese etc. would reduce this, but adding in non-consumables like flax, hay, fallow etc. would increase this. On balance 10 acres/household seems like a good number to work with.

rgds nick

Did you account for seed in there, Nick?

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Keith Mann
I really must get around to changing my .sig

Well, I did say that the spare could go to chickens Part of the excess that I mentioned in the previous post, you'll note, I reduced by 2/3rds - effectively seed, waste etc.

I have also been reading a bit more of Astill & Grant's The Countryside of Mediaeval England, ISBN1-0904490-01-8 - It is part of the BBC History Magazine Classics range and I would say a must for the research library!

Any-hoo, they note that crop yields were 10-20 bushels per acre for wheat. The Harn yields are at the low end of this range.

A&G note various interesting extra considerations.
• that problems were wastage, weeds, the need for seed etc.
• Harn manors will likely have a corn/cereal mix, but most mediaeval manors had a prime crop and lesser amounts of other crops. Oats in the north, Spelt Wheat in Wales and the South. Barley was fairly ubiquitous.
• Wheat was for bread, Oats as fodder and oatmeal, Barley for ale/beer (allocation was 1 gal/day! in one record, but it was small beer 1 1/2% alcohol) and Rye for bread, which was not as nice as wheat bread, and for wattle and daub and thatching.

But, yes I did try to account for seeds in a sense - the 10 acres cereal should feed over the average of a household, especially as a child requires less than an adult - I would assume the remainder would go to wastage and seed.

BTW, Sophia's quoted number of 4 acres per person would work if you take the standard of HarnManor that 45% of cleared land is cereal crops. An average household is 4.5 persons. 10 acres means that 2.2 acres supports 1 person = 4.9 acres assuming 45% cereal. You can reduce the amount as the extra acreage alos produces fruit and veg.

rgds nick

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Nick Lowson
nick@nlowson.demon.co.uk

It is indeed excellent. I've been singing its praises for several years.



I think you'll find the 20 bushel figure was for Norfolk, which used pretty advanced farming techniques.

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http://www.penultimateharn.com

Yup. p27. Norfolk had 20 bushels/acre, whereas the Bishop of Winchester's lands were 10 bushels / acre. What I was getting at was a yield comparison.
Current modern yields are about 25 bushels per acre (according to University of North Dakota data. Organic farming yields about 20 bushels per acre - in line with the Norfolk numbers BTW. But Harnic yields average 9.2 bushels per acre for all cereals, and not more than 10 for any cereal (bearing in mind LQ). A&G comment that the norfolk numbers used very fertile land, eliminated fallows, and much manure., even lowering it back to a 10-12 range, the average Harn yields is still at the low end - albeit a small range.

Note too that this is with Harn being at what should be a more temperate latitude.

Another point of note, BTW, is that HarnManor shows the Hay is garnered from the planted land, when, from what I read about UK native grasses, Hay came from the fallow fields.

rgds nick

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Nick Lowson
nick@nlowson.demon.co.uk

Well, HManor has to be taken with a big grain of salt. The fruit acres rotate from pasture one year to apple trees the next. Sheep pasturage in the hills one year, nice flat wheat fields the next.
Oxen are needed for all the planted acres, whether plum trees or hay meadows or barley fields.
The lord's demense gets a share of the crop as a strict percentage of the total, irregardless of whether the lord has chosen to go with, say Fruit and sheep. All this and more has to be adjusted for.

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Laboro diem, carpe noctem.

The Feeding the City project looked at nearly 200 manors in the Thames basin and counties around London. These are the averages they came up with (for the years 1288-1315):



HarnManor doesn't deal in bushels, but in the cash value of the crops concerned. This makes comaprisons somewhat more problematic.




Only if we assume that Harn's equivalent of the Gulf Stream is as effective as the Terran one -- in other words, although Harn is at a lower latitude than England, their temperatures may be equivalent. Since we have no hard data on Harn's temperature (which is generally expressed in terms like "Cold", "Warm", etc on the weather tables), one guess is as good as another.



Hay came primarily from meadows, which were rare and valuable before the invention of artificial water meadows in the 16th/17th centuries.

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http://www.penultimateharn.com

Thanks for the data Andy!

However,
Isn't strictly the case.

Here's why:
Price from HarnPlayer, yield from Harn Manor
d/bushel d/acre Bu/Acre
Wheat 8 72 9
Rye 6 45 7.5
Barley 5 48 9.6
Oats 4 42 10.5
Cereals 5.2 48 9.2

And that is pre-seed yield, as HarnManor 24 states that Crop Seed is 12d per Crop Acre!

Thus the yield is, on average, 6.9 Bu/Acre after seed - well down on the data you cited, and again highlighting Harn's low yields. This actually might explain in one fell swoop why so little of Harn is civilised!



You're right. I was writing from memory of a passage in George Homans English Villagers in The Thirteenth Century, that essentially stated that Hay was not a cultivated crop. Winter Hay did come from the meads or meadows. The fallow fields yielded grazing. Homans also pointed out (p42) that the lack of meadow hay = lack of winter fodder = lack of ability to support cattle = less manure = lower yields! Norfolk, thanks to the Broads, likely had much more hay, and thus could support higher yields.



I agree. This was discussed in another thread though, and some of the analysis of the snowfall and rain data showed that the numbers were only slightly off those of the UK IIRC. Also you can tell some weather data from the crops grown - for example, hops are grown but only in the south (Orbaal doesn't use hops in their ale).

The data is there, but subject to some subjective assessment. That said, the data still looks quite "England-ish".

rgds nick

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Nick Lowson
nick@nlowson.demon.co.uk