After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europeans felt first and foremost hunger.
The Germans, who had caused the fall of the empire, had no interest in agriculture. But after entering the original possessions of the Roman Empire, the Germans and several other nomadic peoples from Central Asia had to try to abandon their pastures and become farmers in order to support themselves.
The German historian H.E. Jacobs, in his book The Great Bread: A 6,000-Year Sacred and Everyday History of Bread, argues that the Germans were rather dismissive of this transformation, and that the unfairness in the distribution of land and the natural difference in fertility of the fields made the distribution of grain different among ordinary soldiers. Soon, some people began to buy and sell farm tools, selling their fields to people who were better at farming or more diligent, and selling their physical strength for others. In exchange for a full meal, but at the cost of freedom.
Of course, the more common practice at that time was that the Germans, as conquerors, forced the inhabitants of the original Roman Empire to be slaves, and for generations to cultivate and raise cattle for the former. The Great Bread: A 6,000-Year Sacred and Everyday History of Bread says that, according to the Anglo-Saxon view, the person who owned the land was then called the lord (hlaford), that is, the "bread-giver", which was later abbreviated as lord; The lord's wife was hlaefdigge, meaning "the one who kneaded the dough", which was later abbreviated to lady.
European lordship has since become popular. Lords had an extra responsibility to the serfs, and they were not always harsh, not only needing to provide food and security, but also did promote a certain degree of territorial and group belonging, which later became a source of nationalism throughout Europe.
Throw away the legacy of ancient Rome
Interestingly, a very important reason for the Germanic rejection of farming was that they aspired to be unrestrained, so they had a strange empathy, believing that unfettered nature was important, and that forcibly changing the land was guilty— they even defined agriculture as theft. Before farming, the preparation work of farmers such as weeding is also considered to be a manifestation of the use of magic spells to tame the land.
In The Great Bread: A 6,000-Year Sacred and Everyday History of Bread, it is stated that the Germans, Celts, and Slavs even assumed that the plough was an animal with its own consciousness, and named it "pig nose", "bear", and "wolf" respectively– an operation aimed at shifting the responsibility for the destruction of the earth to the animals.
When the harvest came, the Germans engaged in the harvest devised a specific ritual of lifting their scythes to harvest the ears of wheat, which was performed as a kind of slaughter. "Clumps of rye fell under their scythes, and there were fewer and fewer 'enemies.'" In the end, the entire grain army was defeated and tied up until the 'last bundle'". The grain that was harvested was also dressed and ridiculed during loading.
The above peculiar ideas were subsequently adapted by Christian priests to make them less obtrusive. In any case, since the Germanic people were mostly unable to learn Latin and were not interested in the many agricultural works left by ancient Rome, this meant that medieval European agricultural production actually went backwards compared to the ancient Roman period.
The book recounts a plague that occurred in Limoges in the Frankish kingdom in the 10th century AD, in which many people died of illness for no reason and also had rotten bodies; The bread that people eat, after cutting, is wet inside, and a black viscous substance will flow out. People at the time suspected that it was cursed by the devil. Of course, we are now well aware of the source of the plague at that time - that is, ergot disease, a fungal disease of rye, which contains two toxins, one that can make people and animals twitch on all fours; The other will cause the limbs to rot. Germanic farmers carelessly chewed infected ears of grain in the fields and ground them into flour, with serious consequences.
The book points out that when the rye ears are infected, they will emit a sweet taste, which will attract insects to suck them; This allows the fungal spores to spread faster. But black wax-like grains are actually visible to the naked eye, and in ancient Rome, ergot disease has become common knowledge for farmers, because agronomists have studied this before to confirm this, and the infected grain will not be taken to thresh and further milled and processed. There was never a similar outbreak during the Roman period.
Famine after famine
During the Middle Ages, famines often occurred in Europe. The more prominent are the five long severe famines in Germany in the 12th century, and the century-old "hunger" war experienced by England in the 13th century.
The Germans often shifted the blame for food shortages to ethnic minorities, as well as to practitioners such as millers and bakers. The Book Of Great Bread: A 6,000-Year Sacred and Everyday History of Bread says that medieval European millers had lost the technology to sift flour, resulting in citizens who made bread from flour having to eat about four pounds of stones a year.
Famine was frequent, but France, as a European country, had already formed a lavish court ceremony at that time. First there are piles of bread, and then there are the exquisitely dressed," dressed in Ayara satin and fur, feet in leather shoes with buckles made of Moroccan leather, gemstone ornaments and gold chains. When hosting a banquet... Peacock meat is usually a must-have dish, and other meat dishes are also carefully carved into the shape of buildings and gardens." At that time, the court also made dough into tablecloths.
Therefore, the poor and even the commoners would often gather at the gates of the palace and wait for the tablecloths to be distributed to them after the banquet.
Hunger drove Europeans to seek alternatives to wheat and rye. But the problem was that the Age of Discovery had not yet ushered in, which meant that Europeans had not yet had a chance to obtain such a great alternative as potatoes. The book describes how the French used acorns to bake bread, but not with the patience they had, as the ancient Romans did hundreds of years ago, or as the North American Indians of the same period were able to finely break each acorn and grind it, sift it through a wooden sieve and brush, and finally soak it in hot water—the medieval French ate bread baked with acorn powder, while the Germans ate bread made of weeds. As for the people of northern Europe, weeds and wild oat seeds and rhizomes are milled and then used to feed them.
In the book, I can't help but sigh that Europe in the early and middle Middle Ages was almost "infinitely retrogressive, retreating back to the stage of primitive people tens of millions of years ago, eating whatever you encountered." At that time, it was also popular to add animal blood to flour, and after baking, the middle of the cake was perforated and hung to dry.
Books Reviewed:
Title: The Great Bread: 6,000 Years of The Sacred and Everyday History of Bread
Author: (de) H.E. Jacob
Translators: Cui Min, Wen Tong
Publisher: Guangdong People's Publishing House
Publication date: May 2022