© Randy Sublett
(Randy, a practicing farrier, writes articles oriented to horse owners.)
Well there you were, western Europe, top of the ninth. Century that is. Charlemagne was just up to bat bringing everyone out of the the Dark Ages and right into medieval times by standardizing writing and setting up schools to teach the seven liberal arts whose manuscripts and books had been locked away in monasteries as were most of the written texts in those days. (You see, monasteries kept the written books because the non-clerical people should not have access to books. This might encourage thought, and heaven forbid someone might just get curious and educated enough to ask some serious questions about God and creation that could not be readily answered by the Church! Better keep 'em ignorant until at least the thirteenth century.) The seven liberal arts, as set forth by a gent named Capella, were begun with rhetoric, grammar, argument. Later, music, geometry, arithmetic and astronomy were added. Just so you know, this guy Capella lived in Carthage in northern Africa, which was part of the Roman Empire when Capella began to organize forms of knowledge. This was in the fifth century. That's right. Arabia was at least four centuries ahead of Europe in education and knowledge.
Anyway, back to the ninth. If you were a nobleman, landowner or some other form of the upper class of western Europe, going to one of the very few schools set up by Charlemagne would be possible - if not mandated, by your parents, duke, king, whatever. So what is a poor peasant to do? Same as always, farming and animal husbandry. During the Dark Ages, Europe was just that - dark. It may be hard to believe it now, but way back in the ninth century Europe was covered by huge dense forests. To clear enough farmland to support even just your family was about all a farmer could do. Travel to other parts of Europe, or even your own country, was extremely rare. Not because of the wolves and such inhabiting the forests, but because geometry had not yet come to Europe. No geometry, no maps. People were not afraid of the wildlife as much as they just did not know where the hell they were. If they did travel, they had no idea of the location of their destination. So people basically stayed home and farmed, hunted and raised whatever else was needed. Life was pretty basic, as it had been for the centuries before.
That is, until the ninth. Improvements in agriculture brought about an incredible change in the socioeconomics of Europe. These improvements included the mouldboard plow, the harness, and of course, the horseshoe. Believe it or not, the people of Europe did not have a decent way to plow their fields. Not having the plow or harness would put a damper on that activity, now wouldn't it? I have no idea what the hell they were doing with their horses before the harness, but they were not apparently plowing fields. The mouldboard plow (for those of you who really want to know) is a plow that has a mouldboard. A mouldboard is a curved metal plate on the plow that turns the dirt over as you plow. The things we take for granted! I do not know where the plow and harness originated, but the horseshoe came from the Middle East. They got it from the Romans who probably swiped it from the Greeks.
So now the ninth-century farmer could put shoes on his horse which greatly improved the horse's performance over rough ground and helped in preventing various hoof diseases, such as hoof rot. So now Mr. Medieval farmer could farm much greater amounts of land than he ever imagined. Opening up large tracts of the European forests was possible, spelling doom for those same forests. With so much more land under the plow, that much more food was produced. Surpluses in food led to population growth. It also created a new social position. Roughly the middle class.
Farmers could now barter surplus foodstuffs for items they had never before possessed or even knew existed. They could travel to relatively distant markets and towns (although navigation was still tricky), because the horse could now travel twenty to thirty miles a day, meaning people could find the shelter of a village before nightfall and not be left in the forest for the night. Merchants began to appear to buy the foodstuffs right off the farm and take them to other markets where a profit could be realized. Europe rose from a population of people just a step or two out of the cave to an economic force. That part of the world prospered, which allowed the rise of education and knowledge that heretofore had been unknown to them. They even found out there were other civilizations in the world and the world itself was much larger than had been previously thought. The introduction of the horseshoe to western Europe was in a very large part responsible for this emergence from the Dark Ages. Everything was going just great. That is, until the summer of 1347, when a merchant ship returning from the Black Sea entered the harbor at Messina in Sicily. Its' cargo? The Black Plague. Just when you thought you were getting ahead in the world . . . .
Randy welcomes comments or questions about his articles. He may be reached by E-mail.
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