Today, we learn how the horse was put to work. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Western Europe was a pretty
primitive place until a few centuries after the
death of the Roman empire. When it emerged as a new
civilization, it did so because medieval engineers
developed water and wind power and ultimately did
more with it than the Romans had ever done with
slave power.
But this had to wait until European agriculture
became productive enough to support towns with
masons and artisans -- people who did more than
just labor for food. And that in turn required a
more powerful beast than the plodding ox to pull
plows through the heavy wet Northern European soil.
It required that the horse be integrated into
European farming.
Horses were bred in great numbers for military use
in Europe from the middle of the 8th century on;
but three things made it hard to use them for
farming. Their hooves became soft and easily hurt
in damp soil. When they were harnessed in an ox
yoke, their wind was cut off by any heavy load. And
the horse needed a better diet than an ox -- it
couldn't just graze grass, it had to have protein.
The nailed horseshoe and the horsecollar solved two
of these problems when they were introduced in the
9th century. The solution to the problem of feeding
the horse was more complicated, but it also
followed in the 9th century. The solution went like
this:
Ninth-century farmers used two fields -- one active
at a given time, and the other one idle (or
fallow). This kept them from robbing the soil of
nutrients and leaving it unproductive. Then someone
found that a field could be used two years out of
three if it were planted with one crop in the fall
and a different crop in the spring, a year and a
half later.
This meant farmers had to break their holdings into
three fields -- one to be planted with wheat or rye
in the fall, for human consumption; a second to be
used in the spring to raise peas, beans, and
lentils for human use and oats and barley for the
horses. The third field lay fallow. Each year this
use was rotated among the three fields. We remember
the spring planting in the nursery rhyme:
Do you, do I, does anyone know,
How oats, peas, beans, and barley grow?
The odd thing is that this clever scheme
took 200 years to adopt. The horseshoe and the
horsecollar where put to use directly. But
three-field crop rotation required people to
rearrange real estate and to change their social
order. For all its potential advantages, it was very
hard to implement, and the great rebirth of European
civilization that it led to was delayed until the
11th century.
But that sort of thing is no suprise to us -- we
face the social problems of adapting to
technological change every day.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
