CHAPTER 11
Road Apples
The Medieval Agricultural Revolution and the Making of Modern Europe
In the aftermath of Hastings, William upended Saxon rule and granted loyal Norman barons and allied lords sprawling estates and large tracts of land across England. This feudal tenurial obligation of servitium debitum secured the fealty of more than five thousand knights. Imposing harsh taxation upon his newly sworn subjects, the new king also raised bulky contingents of mercenaries to consolidate his rule. In his newly annexed territory, however, humans outnumbered horses by a margin of one hundred to one. With England relying predominantly upon oxen as beasts of burden, the Normans continued to import stronger stallions from across the Channel, while crossbreeding with domestic stocks.
These measures gradually sired stouter horses that were more anatomically suited to the rigors of heavy husbandry. Stocky horses with a lower center of gravity and shorter drawing axis expend less traction energy than their taller counterparts. Guided by the human hand, burly draught and plow horses, including the shire, Clydesdale, Flemish, Belgian, and Percheron, were bred to be bulkier and stronger, befitting their role as beasts of burden rather than the swift and sleek Arabian warhorse.[*1]
Alfred the Great’s Old English Orosius of the late ninth century records the first reference to horse plowing in England. When Pope Urban II issued his call to arms in 1095, exhorting Christians to unite and recapture the Holy Land from Muslim rule, igniting the First Crusade, he promised absolution not only to all men who marched to war but also to all Christian oxen and plow horses. This sanctified mention indicates that horses were being integrated onto European medieval farms in large numbers.
Like the original earth-shattering Agricultural Revolution ten thousand years earlier, this pastoral shift from oxen to horses was equally groundbreaking and, like its predecessor, permanently altered the course of human history. According to historian John Langdon in the meticulously researched Horses, Oxen and Technological Innovation: The Use of Draught Animals in English Farming from 1066–1500:
It is possible that a certain difficulty occurs in imagining the introduction of the work-horse as a technological innovation, since, whatever its advantages, the simple substitution of one animal for another might appear to be technologically irrelevant. But in fact this “simple” transition marks the culmination of a series of intricate mechanical and biological changes. These involved not only developments in harnessing, shoeing and breeding, but also refinements in plough and vehicle design. It was, in essence, the substitution of one technological package for another, for which the physical replacement of the ox by the horse in front of the cart or plough was simply the most eye-catching step.
Throughout Europe horses became profit-spinning engines occupying a place of pride across medieval society. This horse-powered medieval Agricultural Revolution, however, was made possible only by cutting-edge Chinese equine technology that had worked its way across the steppe to Europe. The full-scale Chinese adoption of the horse in the second century BCE to counter the Xiongnu led to four of the most important and impactful equine equipment innovations in history: the effective harnessing system based on the breast strap; the horse collar; the whippletree; and the moldboard plow. “This society,” stresses historian Daniel Headrick, “produced a technological revolution in agriculture that set the stage for the modern world.”
Like China’s mastery of bronze and iron metallurgy and its development of the stirrup, these revolutionary inventions finally transferred the full potential of horsepower to agriculture, transport, and war, while recentering the path of human history. They also produced other unintended consequences. This horse-driven overhaul and increased productivity fueled population growth, urbanization (and spillover pathogens), the Commercial Revolution, intellectual sophistication, and, eventually, a Renaissance.
The original “throat and girth” harnessing system was devised for oxen. It was not anatomically suited to equids and failed to channel their full tractive power. The physiology of the two animals, as we have seen, is far from synonymous. The initial collar was not intended for the longer neck of a horse and put undue pressure on the windpipe. The compression impinged on its ability to breathe, inducing suffocation as it stepped forward to pull against the harness. The Romans, for example, adhered to a strict law that limited the weight of horse-drawn wagons to 717 pounds to prevent strangulation. Similarly, the empire’s compilation of laws, the Codex Theodosianus, ratified in 438, listed the maximum legal weight hauled by a two-horse team at 1,100 pounds.
As a horse-specific substitute, in the fourth century BCE the Chinese adopted a hard yoke, or shaft, that ran across the chest. This was quickly replaced by a more economical breast strap, or “trace harness,” designed to transfer the unrivaled strength and speed of the horse to a plow or vehicle.
The horse collar, devised in the first century BCE, further streamlined this breast-strap harness system, with traces (the straps on each side of the harness on which the animal pulls) connecting the horse directly to whatever was being towed. The padded and contoured collar rested on the withers, wrapping the chest, making it the simplest, yet most efficient, hauling apparatus designed specifically for horses. “How the Chinese were led to make one of the greatest breakthroughs in equestrian history is still a mystery,” contends Bill Cooke of the International Museum of the Horse. “One theory holds that the invention of the breast-strap harnessing system for horses was derived from the human harness system used for boat haulage on China’s canals and rivers. Men would have realized from their own experience that to be effective, pulling force must be exerted from the sternal and clavicular region in such a way as to permit free breathing.” By allowing the horse to push with its shoulders, the horse collar increased drive power fivefold. The upgraded power output of the modern Chinese system was staggering.
These novel configurations fostered the development of sophisticated and advanced “shafted” horse-drawn vehicles—with four wheels, swiveling front axles, and brakes—that were far more economical than their predecessors. A single horse could now pull a Chinese chariot or carriage containing up to six passengers, as opposed to those in Greece or Rome that were fueled by four-horse teams accommodating only two people. Teams of four to eight horses easily pulled fourteen thousand to twenty thousand pounds.
With these revolutionary horse-specific amendments, the cost of transport dropped precipitously, heralding the dawn of the modern public transportation system and the mass movement of commercial goods and professional armies. They also facilitated the massive horse-powered Chinese construction projects mentioned earlier, including canals, Great Walls, palaces, roads, a postal system, and the first emperor’s self-aggrandizing terra-cotta tomb.
Complementing these groundbreaking innovations, the Chinese added the whippletree mechanism in the third century CE, further increasing the horse’s pastoral power and carriage capacity. Consisting of a loose horizontal bar (originally wooden) between the horse and its vehicle or plow, whippletrees are used to evenly distribute tension forces from the traces of draft animals to a hauled, drawn, or dragged load. Sometimes referred to as equalizers or shock absorbers, they also balance the pull from each side of the animal (minimizing alternate tugging), while preventing the weight point of the traces from collapsing into the sides of the animal.
A series of linked and interconnected whippletrees are utilized for teams, ensuring an equal share of the workload and a smooth turning radius, or pivot, preventing the vehicle or plow from upending. A swingletree (or singletree) is a term used to describe horse-specific systems. We have all noticed these ingenious gadgets and dismissed them as another simple piece of equipment without thinking about their pragmatic function of increasing horsepower.
Correspondingly, the first moldboard plow also appeared in China in the third century. This design was more sophisticated than the scratch plow used by the Romans and other Western cultures. Its weight was transferred downward, digging deep furrows in the soil. This required increased traction power, which was generated by the horse and its new harnessing systems. This novel technique allowed the Chinese to exploit untapped fallow lands along riverbanks and recessed valleys with damp, thick soils previously too heavy to cultivate.
In combination, the trace harness, horse collar, whippletree, and moldboard plow quickly made Chinese agriculture the most productive on the planet. Between 300 and 400, the Chinese population increased by a whopping 32 percent. These four contributions to world culture had impacts far beyond their place of origin. When disseminated across the Eurasian Steppe, this game-changing package of equine innovations (along with the Chinese invention of paper) revolutionized agriculture and transport and, by extension, food production, distribution, demographics, economics, and academia, most notably in Europe, to where our story now shifts.
The breast-strap trace harness spread throughout Europe during the seventh and eighth centuries, with the horse collar arriving a few hundred years later. Together with the moldboard plow, which had been developed independently by Slavic peasants in the sixth century, maximum yields could now be extracted from the soggy, heavy loams of northern Europe.
The first appearance of nailed iron horseshoes in Siberia in the ninth century further elevated the position of the horse across European society. “This coincided with the start of selective breeding for a heavier horse,” notes Ann Hyland. “Mounted warfare was the catalyst, for horses bred in wetter than steppe and/or desert conditions develop softer, shallower hooves. With the stresses imposed by the weight of a cavalryman and the pounding impact with the ground, hooves needed protection from splitting, cracking, laminae deterioration, and sole bruising.” These tailored iron shoes, which quickly spread to China and Europe, were certainly a better fit than the previous slide-on Roman hipposandals.
This novel footwear allowed draft horses to operate in those heavy, wet soils by preventing their hooves from going soft and wearing down prematurely. Shoeing also prevented the same wear (while adding grip) on the hooves of transportation horses clip-clopping down now common hard-packed or cobblestone roads. Iron shoes significantly extended the working life of horses across their multivariate vocations, further increasing their numbers, employment, and value. The blacksmith instantly became an integral and vital part of any settlement. This multifaceted medieval transformation was accompanied by pervasive demographic, socioeconomic, and military repercussions across Europe.
With the adoption of harnessing systems, the horse collar, iron shoes, whippletrees, the moldboard plough, and three-crop rotation practices, horses propelled the medieval Agricultural Revolution forward. Horse-based husbandry steered the socioeconomic and demographic transformation of Europe.
A new class of cosmopolitan entrepreneurs, artisans, bankers, financiers, academics, tradesmen, and merchants emerged to venture into the commercial guilds and markets of medieval capitalism. “Thanks to the discovery of ‘horse-power,’ with its significant repercussions for warfare and agriculture, this was a time when the horse came into its own as a vital contributor to life at all levels of society,” writes curator at the British Library Pamela Porter in Medieval Warfare in Manuscripts. “In one sense, it might even be said that the very foundations of medieval social structure rested on the horse…. The horse of the Middle Ages had become an indispensable member of society, making valuable contributions to numerous facets of everyday life.” Riding the financial surplus of agrarian horsepower, Europe entered a profit-margined, cash-based economy. The traction capacity of medieval horses planted the seeds of our modern cultural and financial portfolios.
Medieval horsepower: English peasants with workhorse and harrow plow. Note the horse collar, harnessing, whippletree, and horseshoes. From the Luttrell Psalter, circa 1330. (Heritage Image Partnership Ltd./Alamy Stock Photo)
During the transitional period of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, mixed teams of oxen and horses were customary until horses became more common and correspondingly cheaper. The same holds true for the more expensive horses hauling wagons, carts, and carriages. As horses became more abundant, there was a steady increase in plowing speeds and a corresponding reduction in the size of cultivation teams. It was a win-win for farmers: amplified production with slashed overhead and maintenance costs. Horses maximized the profit ratio of traction power on medieval farms, estates, and demesnes. “Light two-horse plough teams of the fourteenth century,” states economic historian at Queen’s University Belfast Bruce Campbell, “were no less than 65 percent cheaper than conventional eight-ox teams.”
The great Domesday survey of 1086, for example, counted horses as only 5 percent of draft animals across England and no more than 10 percent in any single county. By 1300, however, horsepower skyrocketed to 20 percent on estates and over 50 percent on peasant farms, with some regions reaching 75 percent. When horses replaced oxen, the energy output on European farms exploded.
Horses can work two to three more hours per day than an ox while moving 33 percent faster. Average working years also favored the horse: draft ox, 5.1; plow horse, 5.5; and cart horse, 7.0. In short, when hitched to a moldboard plow, one horse produced the traction power of two oxen, allowing farmers in the colder climes of northern Europe to exploit previously fallow lands.
This combination cut deep furrows into dense or clay-infused soils with one pass as opposed to multiple passes with the scratch plow (ard), or in the case of the heaviest loams, not at all. Repetitive plowing wasted enormous amounts of time, in addition to animal and human energy. The thick ruts scored by iron moldboard plows allowed excess water to drain off the crops to drown and kill strangling weeds, as did the trampling iron-shod hooves of industrious traction horses. Consequently, farmers did not need to share plow teams to till their lands in sequence.
Advancements in deep mining and forging techniques also ushered in the widespread use of iron scythes, hoes, shovels, and pitchforks, enhancing human efficiency. The wheelbarrow, invented in China in the second century, first appeared in Europe around 1200, adding to agricultural proficiency. The interwoven application of these innovations meant that more land was being turned over more quickly. The advent of the resourceful three-field crop rotation only quickened the pace.
This system of land management was a crucial component of the medieval Agricultural Revolution sweeping through Europe. In the past, farmers traditionally planted only half their fields each year, leaving the rest to replenish, alternating annually. Given that more land was now available to sow thanks to the horse and moldboard plow, they could now grow wheat, oats, barley, or rye for bread, soup, and brewing on a third of their land; peas and other legumes (amenable to storage) on a third; and leave the remaining third to rejuvenate, moonlighting as pasture for horses and cattle. “Compared to the old two-field rotation, this method increased the productivity of the soil by one-third to one-half with no additional labor,” asserts Headrick. “It also reduced the risk of crop failure, provided more protein in the diets of humans, and produced oats for horses.” Oats, containing more protein than wheat and barley, became the staple fuel for large European draft horses.
This rotational configuration produced a complementary rather than competitive environment between arable and grazing lands. It also reduced soil exhaustion, decreased land idleness, and diversified crops, leading to a healthier diet and a sustainable food source in leaner times. The nitrogen generated by the legumes and rich horse manure fertilized the soil within the cyclical interchange. “Substitution of legumes for bare fallows, more thorough application of fertilizers, better preparation of the seed-bed, improved weed control, and more scrupulous harvesting,” summarizes Campbell, “were all possible with increased labour inputs”—courtesy of the horse.
Within the oxen-powered feudal system, most European peasant farmers were raising crops for subsistence and for the local tables of knights, vassals, lords, and the clergy. Attached to horses, food production became cheaper, a cost savings that was passed on to the consumer. Agricultural yields increased so much in certain regions that nutrition became an exportable commodity. By the late thirteenth century, for instance, foodstuffs accounted for 10 percent of English freight.
As a result of this affordable surplus, European populations and densities soared. According to historian Bernard Slicher van Bath in his seminal work The Agrarian History of Western Europe: “The tenth century saw the introduction of improved harness, which enabled horses to be used for ploughing. Thanks to three-course rotation, there was enough fodder to keep more horses. In all likelihood, it was through this augmentation of the sources of energy that the ensuing rise in population from the eleventh to the thirteenth century was made possible. Now it became necessary, and only now was it feasible, to start developing on a big scale.” Populations, which had plummeted alongside the collapse of the Roman Empire, were rebounding due in part to the elevating impact of equine-based farming. Horses were progressively supplying the daily bread for surging urban, and increasingly specialized, populations.
By the twelfth century, modern towns and cities, although comprising no more than 10 percent to 12 percent of the total populace (increasing to 20 percent by 1300), began to spring up across Europe to accommodate horse-powered agricultural commercialism and its increasingly complex economic coattails. Paris, the most crowded city in Europe, reached 230,000 residents by 1300. The population of England surged from 2 million in 1086 to 5.5 million by 1300. London alone grew from 10,000 inhabitants to 80,000 during this same period. Across England, thirteen other cities topped 10,000 people.
In fact, the location of the towns and cities dotting the medieval European map would be almost indistinguishable from today. Urban centers sprang up along natural overland or waterway transportation routes, at the crossroads of communication, around monasteries, castles, and trading hubs, and adjacent to fertile agricultural hotbeds. Horses transformed the demographic, economic, academic, and physical landscapes of Europe.
Instead of rural farmers living in isolated hamlets, urban clusters developed around the needs of the horse to include blacksmiths, lumberjacks, carpenters, wheelwrights, masons, cobblers, tanners, veterinarians, stable masters, grooms, farriers, and other horse-related employment. These medieval characters spill off the pages of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, a collection of twenty-four stories written between 1387 and 1400.
As mentioned, in 1250 Giordano Ruffo penned his six-part De Medicina Equorum, one of the oldest comprehensive European horse-specific medical texts. The Company of Marshals, founded in London in 1356, changed its name to the Worshipful Company of Farriers to better reflect its high-demand craft.[*2] The skilled trades were professionalized and controlled by tiered guilds with orderly Jedi-like ranks of apprentice, journeyman, and master.
Of course, these new city dwellers and suburban agriculturalists required the vital services of churches, taverns, mills, mines, banks, hotels, and, by the close of the eleventh century, universities, such as Bologna, Oxford, Salamanca, and the Sorbonne. Local languages began to replace Latin among the educated. Academic disciplines devoted to the analysis of humans, or the humanities, pulled up alongside the theological study of God.
When the first Bible rolled off Johannes Gutenberg’s world-altering movable metal-type printing press in 1455, no more than a hundred thousand books could be found throughout all of Europe.[*3] But within five years, more than six million volumes competed for space on crowded shelves. By 1500, 236 towns had print shops, and Europeans enjoyed access to an estimated twenty million books. Thanks in part to the power of the horse, Europe began to tinker with the ideas of humanism, which gave birth to magnificent and flourishing Renaissance cities such as Antwerp, Bruges, Toledo, Venice, and Florence.
The diversified economic specialization of the Commercial Revolution has been hailed, for better or for worse, as the “birth of modern capitalism.” This rapid ascent of money was attended at all echelons of society by bankers, creditors, partnerships, accountants, masters of coin, and bookkeepers. The rate of European enterprise rose so quickly, however, that there was not enough coin currency in circulation to keep pace. Peppercorns, with a relatively standard weight and long shelf life, served as a convenient, albeit strange, substitute. The church’s ban on usury (lending money at interest) was circumvented by the creation of contracts, which imposed stiff fines for late payments or defaults.[*4]
The shift from Romanesque to Gothic architecture in the twelfth century is symbolic of the molten wealth circulating through the social ranks of merchants, guilds, nobles, kings, and, of course, the affluent aristocracy of the church. Medieval towns were dominated by towering cathedrals and bustling and noisy markets dripping with the waste of animals and swarming with a bourgeoning merchant class selling local agricultural surplus and commodities.
Massive annual or seasonal fairs supplemented daily or weekly markets. The busy Belgian port of Antwerp, for example, held four fairs per annum, each lasting three weeks. These were grand commercial events centered around wholesale markets where dealer negotiated directly with dealer. The entire community—from taverns and inns to blacksmiths and brothels—benefited from the massive influx of top-tier traders, small-time merchants, and a shady assortment of wanderers and swindlers peddling all types of wares, snake oils, and fortunes.
Many festivals were product specific. The annual wine fair held since the seventh century at the Saint-Denis monastery near Paris, for example, attracted vintners, sommeliers, vendors, and wine enthusiasts from across Europe. At Scania in southern Sweden, the star attraction was herring, while the cloth halls of Flanders showcased woolen fabrics. Textiles spawned the origins of light industry, with horse- or water-powered mills driving presses and flails to extract oils, clean, and thicken organic cloth fibers.[*5]
Networks of local stables and brokers acted as intermediaries for thriving horse fairs akin to our modern car shows. Like today, when American football legend Tom Brady’s Bugatti Veyron costs more than my Chevrolet Equinox, the same could be said for medieval horse markets where both rich and poor bargained for animals within their budgetary range. An eyewitness from the marketplace adjacent to the Sorbonne in Paris reported seeing “over three thousand horses, and it is most remarkable that there should be so many, since markets are held twice a week.” The horse fair in Whitson, Wales, across the River Severn from Bristol, was a three-day affair where the horses “were beautiful to see and profitable.” Given their utilitarian value, horses themselves entered the commercial culture of the Middle Ages.
Horses became the economic backbone of medieval Europe. While they increasingly bore the brunt of agricultural labor, they also became a common sight pulling vehicles loaded with market goods, produce, livestock, or human passengers. By the end of the thirteenth century, horses accounted for 75 percent of English hauling. “On the basis of the weight of goods transported by animal, the pack-horse was patently inferior to the cart-horse,” concludes John Langdon. “The maximum load for the former is thought to have been just over 400 lbs. On the other hand, a good cart-horse in the fourteenth century was seemingly capable of hauling over a ton on his own.” Of course, this commercial traffic required an expanding network of manure-soiled roads.
Many of the old Roman roads, including 13,000 miles in France and 2,500 in Britain, were revamped, while new routes were constructed to transport the diverse and greedy commercial demands of horse-driven Europe. Given the volume of goods in transit and the uptick in capitalist ventures, most roads must have been reasonably passable throughout the year. “The Roman roads were the backbone of the system,” explains British historian and archivist Geoffrey Martin, “and new roads had come into existence, not through systematic construction, but simply through continued use during a period when transportation was becoming continually more important to most aspects of national life.” The travels of the English kings John, Henry III, and Edward I, who ruled in succession from 1199 through 1307, are well documented. They encountered no difficulties covering great distances relatively quickly with their horses, wagons, and carriages during any season of the year.
As horse populations increased, urban and rural stables became standard infrastructure. While they were not quite as extravagant and sophisticated as the lavish “ideal stable,” with its automatic cleaning and feeding devices envisioned by the animal-loving Leonardo da Vinci, they were pragmatically utilitarian. Most were rustic, wooden buildings with a raised hayloft and adjacent water cisterns or basins. Excrement was collected and mixed with other organic materials and stored in compost piles on the fringes of fields for use as fertilizer.
Manure itself became a commodity, especially the road apples produced by urban cart horses and stables. “Towns, with their concentration of animals and humans, were the single greatest supplementary source of organic fertilizer,” writes Campbell in English Seigniorial Agriculture, 1250–1450. “Their demand for provisions provided farmers in the immediate countryside with a powerful incentive to intensify their output. Purchasing urban manure provided one means of achieving this.” The supply, however, always exceeded the demand. Horse dung (and urine) was a compounding sanitation and health concern, and one of many cordial invitations extended to disease within the densely populated European urban landscape.
The 140 to 350 horses kept by the seven thousand residents of Luxembourg City during the fourteenth century, for example, produced between 165 and 405 gallons of urine and 1.8 to 4.5 tons of manure per day in an enclosed space covering no more than 119 acres. While some was collected and sold, most was left on the streets along with dead horses to fester and stink. “Also eight groats for removing a dead horse which lay under the castle,” records one contemporary bill of service. “And some of the citizens requested to have it removed because it stank a lot.” Luxembourg City was not the exception.
In most medieval cities, official cleanup occurred only before major events such as royal visits, fairs, and tournaments of knights.[*6] As cities became more equestrian, and their human and horse populations boomed, “horse pollution” piled up and became, quite literally, an exponentially rising problem.
The horse and its medieval Agricultural Revolution transported the West to the threshold of the modern age. Europe, which had long been a splintered, impoverished, global backwater, finally caught up to the cosmopolitan and cultured polities of China, Southeast Asia, India, Japan, Persia, Anatolia, and Arabia. The transition to horse-powered agriculture and its technological counterparts supported and maintained an unprecedented period of academic, economic, demographic, and urban growth between 1100 and 1350. Eventually, this package, hitchhiking on the mercantilist tentacles of imperialism, was transferred to temperate zones in the Americas, southern Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, where the horse was unwittingly conscripted as a conquistador of colonization and in the subjugation and desolation of Indigenous peoples.
In 1492, when Christopher Columbus was eight thousand miles lost, and the last vestige of al-Andalus Islam was expelled from Spain during the Reconquista, Europeans controlled a mere 15 percent of the Earth’s landmass. By 1800, they dominated more than 35 percent, and on the eve of the First World War in 1914, Europeans had colonized a staggering 84 percent of the world. As the requisite machine driving the arteries of agriculture, transportation, and war, the horse was not replaced until the rise of the machine at the dawn of the twentieth century.
Of course, if crops failed, this swelling medieval population was susceptible to mass starvation chaperoned by the Malthusian checks of disease and war.[*7] Precipitated by disastrously wet and cold weather triggered by the five-year volcanic eruption of Mount Tarawera in New Zealand, the Great Famine between 1315 and 1317 marked the beginning of the end to this era of development and prosperity ushered in by horse-powered agriculture. Stalking its way across Europe, the famine culled an estimated 10 percent to 15 percent of the population.
Sheep and cattle herds were also cut down by disease. Roughly 80 percent of European cattle succumbed to the deadly rinderpest virus between 1315 and 1320.[*8] “The floods of rain have rotted almost all the seed,” lamented a chronicler in 1315. “In many places the hay lay so long under water that it could neither be mown nor gathered. Sheep generally died and other animals were killed in a sudden plague…. The dearth of grain was much increased. Such a scarcity has not been seen in our time in England, nor heard of for a hundred years…dogs and horses and other unclean things were eaten.” The horror had only just begun.
This period of unprecedented growth and change came crashing down a few generations later amid the most lethal epidemic in human history. During the mid-fourteenth century, bubonic plague cut a murderous swath of wanton destruction through an already weakened and cowering population. The Black Death was delivered by the reaping whirlwind of Chinggis Khan and his Mongol hordes, on horseback.
*1 The Acte for Bryde of Horses (Horses Act) issued by King Henry VIII in 1540 standardized the measurement of a hand to four inches, while decreeing that all horses under fourteen hands should be eliminated.
*2 The military rank “marshal” is derived from the Old French mareschal, denoting “a person who tends to horses,” particularly a craftsman who practiced marescalcia—the shoeing of equine hooves—known as a farrier.
*3 Bi Sheng, a Chinese commoner, invented movable type in 1045, and Koreans were employing metal type by the thirteenth century.
*4 This competitive market and the population boom were also buoyed by the demise of slavery in England during the twelfth century.
*5 Windmills were also erected across Europe between 1180 and 1300.
*6 King Richard the Lionheart legalized the “Tournament of Knights” in England in 1194 upon his return from the Third Crusade.
*7 In 1798 English cleric and scholar Thomas Malthus published his groundbreaking An Essay on the Principle of Population, defining his enduring ideas on political economy and demography. He argued that once an animal population has outpaced its resources, natural catastrophes or checks such as drought, famine, war, and disease will force a return to sustainable population levels and restore a healthy equilibrium.
*8 Thanks to modern vaccines and tireless global eradication campaigns, rinderpest was declared extinct in 2011.