In the X-XI centuries, Europeans significantly increased the energy, first of the water wheel, and then the muscular strength of the horse: a horseshoe, stirrup and collar were invented. This was the beginning of the economic revival of Europe and the renewal of scientific thought on the continent.
After several "dark ages" following the collapse of the Roman Empire, progress has resumed in Europe. Already starting from the VIII century, water mills began to be massively built throughout the continent, which even in the Roman Empire had limited use. At the same time, the waterwheel was improved, which turned them into a universal source of energy that can work both on any rivers and in any industry. By the 11th century, water wheels supplied power to felts, breweries, sawmills, powered hammers and bellows, and were used to draw wire and scuttle hemp. The scale of the spread of the water wheel in Europe is evidenced by the following fact: in the Book of Doomsday (1086) to the south of the Severn in England, there were 5624 water mills - approximately one for every 50 households.
In the 11th century, tidal mills even appeared in Europe - in the vicinity of Venice, in the south of England and on the west coast of France.
Progress has also been made in the use of muscle energy. The horse has served man for thousands of years both in war and in peacetime, but its effectiveness has been dramatically increased by three innovations. The first was a horseshoe. In Rome, hipposandals were used to protect horse hooves, but the appearance of the horseshoe was an undeniable improvement.
Horseshoes were particularly useful in the moist soils that prevailed north of the Alps and for heavy horses. The horseshoes protected the hooves from contact with the soil, which made them damp, quickly worn out and cracked. The horseshoe came into wide use in Europe in the 9th century. Pack horses and mules were also shod, which led to the increasing use of horses for commercial transport.
The second important innovation was the invention of stirrups, which were primarily useful in war, although peaceful horsemen also appreciated them. According to the famous statement of the historian Lynn White, the stirrup was the direct cause of the rise of feudalism. The stirrup for centuries provided the rider with indisputable superiority over the infantryman, making it necessary to equip and arm large knightly armies. Due to the shortage of both horses and iron, the entire economic system had to be rebuilt to finance such armies.
The third major innovation is the modern clamp. In the early twentieth century, retired cavalry officer Richard Lefebvre de Knott wrote a study comparing the use of the horse in antiquity and the Middle Ages. The Greeks and Romans used a harness consisting of two belts that wrapped around the belly and neck of a horse. The collar, wrapped around the throat, under load squeezed the jugular vein and trachea of the animal, preventing it from breathing. Through experiments, Lefebvre de Knott found that the horse's strength, harnessed in this way, was used no more than 20%. Because of this, the horse was placed behind the cart, and did not pull it, but pushed it (with the exception of light chariots).
Promotional video:
In the early Middle Ages, people stopped putting up with this, finding an easy way to end such a waste of valuable energy. The solution to the problem was found with the invention of a chest strap and a collar attached to the horse's shoulders. Both of these devices eliminated the need for a yoke, thereby avoiding the main disadvantage of the Roman harness.
As a result, horses gradually began to play an important role in agriculture and transportation. The harness was complemented by other advances in horse-drawn technology. In the early Middle Ages, a train of horses began to be used (when they were harnessed in a row one after another). In the XI century, a drawbar appeared - a wooden pole that connected the clamp to a cart or harrow.
Thus, at the beginning of the Middle Ages, the most elementary mistakes in the exploitation of the muscular power of animals, committed by the highly developed civilizations of the Mediterranean over the course of centuries, were corrected. At the end of the 11th century, 70% of all energy consumed in English society came from animals, and the remainder from watermills.
The increased speed and range of horse carriages, combined with improvements in the carriages themselves, contributed to the revival of overland transport and trade over medium distances.
The improvement of horse harness also made it possible to use it more actively in agriculture, gradually displacing oxen - the main draft power in plowing in the early Middle Ages. At the same time, two more important innovations appeared - the heavy plow and the three-field system.
The ancient plow, used in the Mediterranean economies, only scratched a furrow in the ground with a wooden or iron point (a ploughshare), which cut and crushed the soil, preventing moisture evaporation. Such a plow was not well suited for heavy and wet soils in the plains north of the Alps.
The heavy plow, in its final form, moved on wheels and was equipped with a knife that cut the soil vertically, a share that cut it horizontally, and a blade that turned the cut pieces of soil over and left a deep furrow. The heavy plow made it possible to develop vast fertile lands that in Roman times remained unused or were cultivated using primitive slash-and-burn techniques.
However, a heavy plow required a large harness of oxen or horses (4-6 animals; the advantage of horses over oxen was that their use in the economy was wider). The overwhelming majority of households could not afford this. In an attempt to solve this problem, medieval society created a semi-cooperative system (manor).
The need for draft animals for plowing created the technical problem of what to feed the livestock. In the early Middle Ages, this problem was solved.
First, under a three-field crop rotation system, one third of arable land remained fallow and was used as pasture: livestock both fed on it and fertilized it with dung. Under the three-field system, each land plot was in turn used for fallow, for winter crops and for spring crops.
Secondly, after the harvest, livestock was also released on the fields allocated for crops - this custom began to be called "the right to common grazing."
Thirdly, the village began to contain a separate common pasture, which did not participate in the crop rotation and played the role of pasture.
The introduction of the three-field system has made it possible to expand the cultivation of additional crops in addition to the main crops, such as wheat and rye. The second field began to grow oats (ideal horse feed), barley and beans. The increase in the number of livestock led to an increase in the "yield" of manure, which the peasants could now allow to make not only for grain, but also for garden crops (which significantly expanded the diet of both peasants and an increasing number of townspeople).
It was with the widespread introduction of the water wheel and the "improved" horse that Europe began to diverge from other societies of the world, at that time even more developed - from the Muslim world, India and China. As historian Lynn White notes, medieval Europe became the first society in the world to build its economy not on the humps of slaves and coolies, but by finding other sources of energy.
+++
Let us compare the time of the appearance of the heavy plow in Western Europe and Russia. In Russia, before the abolition of serfdom, the abundance of free labor made the use of improved machines economically absolutely useless. Even the extensive economy of the Volga region and Siberia did not present a demand for labor-saving machines and implements, because the lack of good communication routes excluded the possibility of marketing the crop and made expansion of plowing unprofitable.
Leo Tolstoy was still plowing with a plow.
The heavy plow began to be actively used in Russia only in the 19th century (after 7-8 centuries, as it became common in Western Europe). Until that time, the plow was the most common tool. In 1726 V. N. Tatishchev, returning from Sweden, firmly spoke out for the transition from plow to plow: "It is better to plow on oxen with a plow, and not plow on a horse." This appeal did not meet with support from the majority of farmers. Many writers and landowners spoke out in defense of the plow. Prince Rostopchin even published in 1806 the book "The Plow and the Sokha", where he wrote: "As far as English cultivation of the land can be beneficial in the vicinity of more cities, it is so useless, or better to say, impossible everywhere for Russia in its present position. Not being completely an enemy of the plow, I will remain a friend of the plow, not from stubbornness and not from ignorance, but from thatthat from an early age he was used to love and respect the old Russian, and found by experience that good Russian economy enriches."
