Rural Society - The importance of the harvest
3 important questions on Rural Society - The importance of the harvest
Who were involved in the agrarian economy?
In rural society, virtually all men, women and children were involved at various levels in the agrarian economy - as producers of foodstuffs either for the provision of their own households or for sale at market, as processors of agricultural goods (especially wool for textiles and hides for leather) in the manufacturing industries (which were commonly located in the countryside) and as purchasers both of food and drink and of consumer goods.
What were many farmers dependent on?
- Many farmers were thus dependent on selling goods and labour services to their landlords in order to keep a roof over their heads.
- The position of those landless labourers who could not self-provision from arable plots was even more precarious, for the quality of their diet rested on their ability to pay a market price which was by definition dependent both on medium-term levels of supply and demand and on the short-term vicissitudes of scarcity and plenty.
What did Europe fear in terms of agriculture?
- Even when there were runs of good harvests, however, contemporaries could never be entirely confident that the Malthusian trap had been sprung, and the diaries and correspondence of the period are full of neurotic concern about the implications of summer rainfall.
- The fear of creeping malnutrition, if not actual starvation, stalked most of Europe until the agricultural revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
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