Tempest in a Teapot

In my post of April 18, 2015, I leveled a criticism at Helena Hamerow for a footnote in her book, Rural Settlements and Society in Anglo-Saxon England, and another at myself, for inexact wording that did not fully explain the uses of the moldboard plow in agriculture. If we are going to understand our history, we need to be specific and exact about the technological advances that shaped it.

Well, Hamerow returns to the moldboard plow later on in her book. (And serves me right for writing a post on a book I hadn't finished yet.) She says, "The greater frequency of certain arable weeds indicates . . . that heavier soils were increasingly being brought under cultivation in the Mid to Late Saxon period, something which could not have been readily achieved without the use of heavy ploughs pulled by teams of oxen . . . This implies the use of mouldboards and strip fields . . . 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 'a very distinctive sandwich of inverted alluvial clay, gravel and redeposited soil.'"

Too boring for you? Sorry, but I needed to exonerate Hamerow and set the record straight.

"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.

The Moldboard Plow

One of the books I am reading right now is called Rural Settlements and Society in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2012) by Helena Hamerow, Professor of Early Medieval Archaeology at the School of Archaeology, Oxford University. Reading? Well, in truth, it's pretty dry, and I am in fact skimming it.

At any rate, a footnote on p. 90, says, "To gain maximum yields from bread wheat, the crop must be kept dry; for this, the ridge and furrow achieved by the use of a moldboard plough was needed (see Banham 2010)."

Now the moldboard plow (American spelling, vs. English spelling plough) appears in Small Talk in my post, "Monticello Soup," August 3, 2013. There I said "With his son-in-law the plantation manager, Jefferson invented the mouldboard plow for the hilly ground of Albemarle County. As you plow a furrow, the topsoil lifts up and over the mouldboard, falling in a strip to one side only. The mouldboard plow made faster work of plowing a field on a hill and left ridges deep enough to help drain off snowmelt and heavy winter rain."

Not bad, as far as it goes, and, like Banham, my explanation does mention that a moldboard plow helps keep the seed dry. But, first, Jefferson may have invented a moldboard plow that worked well in Albemarle County, but he certainly did not invent the moldboard plow, and my writing does not make that clear enough. And, second, the moldboard plow does more than keep the seed dry or let you plow hilly soil more easily, and my writing hints at that, but again does not make it clear.

The moldboard plow also helps, as Wikipedia remarks in the entry Plough, to "grow crops . . . in less fertile areas" by bringing nutrients to the surface, burying weeds, and incorporating the remains of the previous harvest.

The technological advances of the Industrial Revolution, Machine Age, and Computer Age seem monumental to us, and so they are, but earlier ground-breaking technology (sorry, couldn't resist a joke in the midst of stating the obvious) in agriculture, warfare, industry, knowledge, and other fields is what we have built on.

And speaking of Internet research and book research, both of which I do a lot of, it drives me crazy when an explanation of technology is not exact and complete--because often, being a poet rather than a physicist, I cannot tell the difference. But, when I start to pick the words apart and get at the meaning, the explanation does not hold, and I have yet another loose end to try and find more details on.