"Serves You Right"

A favorite saying in my family: "Well, it serves you right!" I should never have posted a criticism on a book I hadn't finished. (See my post from April 18, 2015, "The Moldboard Plow," which referred  back to another post from August 3, 2013, "Monticello Soup.")

On page 127 of Rural Settlements and Society in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2012), Hamerow clarifies the uses of the moldboard plow: "[H]eavier soils were increasingly being brought under cultivation in the Mid to Late Saxon period . . . . This implies the use of moldboards and strip fields, direct evidence for which is slowly but surely increasing. At Drayton (Oxfordshire), 'broad, parallel stripes of clayey material'--dated archaeomagnetically to the Late Saxon period--were recognized as representing furrows created by a moldboard plough, producing in section 'a very distinctive sandwich of inverted alluvial clay, gravel and redeposited soil.'

She cites another archaeologist, Booth, but I will spare you the details, just as I spared you the [sic]s that should have accompanied the English words, "moldboard plough."

Don't care about moldboard plows or agricultural technology? Or me annotating myself? Fine. Blame it all on Thomas Jefferson.