Shortly after the middle of the eleventh century the political map of Scandinavia took the form it retained in the main during the whole of the medieval period. Conditions for agriculture were far more favourable in the third Scandinavian kingdom, Denmark, than in Sweden or Norway. A fundamental problem in the agrarian history of Scandinavia is the type of the original settlements and the age of the medieval type. There are two settlements: village settlement and farm settlement. In the central Middle Ages, the villages developing in various ways. knowledge of stock-raising during these centuries in the Swedish and Danish agricultural areas is rather scanty. An important development of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was that the old aristocracy of peasants either disappeared or changed, fused with other groups and was linked up with the royal power as a nobility of military service with the privilege of immunity from taxation.

This chapter focuses on France, the Low Countries, and Western Germany. Geographical and chronological frameworks are modifications which took place respectively in the extent of land under cultivation, in the management of the soil and in the character and distribution of landed property. The old collective economy was replaced by a system of agrarian individualism. This basic change in the system of cultivation was particularly noticeable in Flanders during the thirteenth century. The dominant fact in the history of estate institutions is the decomposition of the villa, or the classical estate. The break-up of the villa was but one aspect of the changes in manorial organization which began in the tenth century. In the first place, as a result of the dissolution of the classical villa and the progressive loss of force of the dominium direction over the rural tenancies, die tenants tended more and more to become in practice small or middling peasant proprietors.

A glance at the topographical and meteorological characteristics of the Iberian Peninsula is the first prerequisite of the study of Spanish economic history. The differentiation of social and economic phenomena of Spain arising from isolation and separatism, accentuated by the varied and shifting patterns of political control, present serious obstacles to a comprehensive survey of agrarian conditions. Information on the study of the character, efficiency, and well-being of agricultural workers topics appears as byproducts of work primarily concerned with medieval property rights, land tenure, and legal institutions. The various arrangements for appropriating land were in large part products of Spain's unique role in making Europe safe for Christianity. An important chapter in Spanish agrarian history is the relation between agriculture and grazing. The merino sheep, Spain's great contribution to international trade and to the pastoral industry of the world, were probably introduced from Africa in the twelfth century.

Italy, in common with the rest of Europe, progressed through a cycle of economic change in the course of the Middle Ages, is now an established commonplace. Two agrarian systems are the customary and the individualistic, came to dispute the soil of medieval Italy; and to each corresponded different methods, extensive and intensive, of agricultural production. As Italian commerce expanded, so the market grew for the products of Italian farming generally, and agriculture everywhere began to respond to changes in international trade. Rural Italy in the Middle Ages experienced radical change has been recognized since the early days of the Agricultural Revolution. In the history of Europe generally it is traditional and convenient to describe rural society in terms of the villa or manorial system, of its rise in the early Middle Ages and its subsequent supersession by the system of putting estates to farm or working them with wage-labour.

This chapter presents the agrarian history of Poland, Lithuania and Hungary in the Middle Ages by focusing on the landownership, economic organization of the great estates, the burdens of the rural population, and the colonization under the German law. Post-1386, Lithuania was constantly under Polish influence. Poland and Hungary have many features in common both in their political and in their economic structure. In Lithuania, the economic organization of the great estates is found to be in the main similar to that which prevailed in Poland, only that in the former country the characteristic forms appeared a few centuries later. In Poland, the burdening of the rural population with imposts and duties was the most important change in the social structure brought about by the rise of large estates. Again, in Poland, the system of villages under Polish law gave way in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to colonization under German law.

This chapter talks about the lands to the east of the Elbe and the German colonization eastwards. During the later Middle Ages, from the twelfth century onwards, rural economy of Central and North-eastern Europe was transformed, mainly as a result of German immigration. Existing developments were caught up and absorbed into the transformation. But the East German rural colonizing process, which gave direction, form and power to it, was only part of the wider so-called German East Movement. The internal colonization of Germany had furnished varying, but well-tested, types of field, of village and of law. Urban life had gradually developed to a point at which the main lines of town layout and town law were established. Surveying the course of events in the agrarian history of the lands east of the Elbe from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, what first strikes one is the extraordinary extension of the cultivated area, which was accompanied by a growth of population.

This chapter discusses the medieval agrarian society in England. It focuses on the agricultural land, colonization of the population, manorial estates, the landlords, and the peasants and the villagers. The course of English agriculture in the medieval period was dominated by the history of the land itself, its productivity, its relative abundance or scarcity, its use and distribution. In the Middle Ages of England, internal colonization went in step with the contemporary population trends: as population increased or declined, so settlement expanded and contracted. Some manors did not dominate the countryside as much as others, had fewer functions or a more rudimentary organization and exercised a more remote control over the lives and the lands of the tenants. For a time in the thirteenth century, the economic conditions provided the landlord with both the incentive and the means for maintaining his claims where the claims were still worth maintaining.