ABSTRACT
To quote but one very influential author, Sir Michael Postan: 'the inertia of medieval agricultural technology is unmistakable'. The German instances of agricultural progress can mostly be timed to the late medieval contraction in arable husbandry, the time of the 'agricultural crisis'. But there are good reasons to suppose that in Germany, as in the Netherlands, it was the pull of the urban market as well as urban entrepreneurship and money that provided the main incentive to the development of such specialized crop cultivation. The early medieval model of agricultural progress was supplanted by a second, late medieval model grounded in an institutional environment where peasants enjoyed a measure of freedom from the coercive power of lordship. A problem concerns the timing and geographical range of White’s agricultural revolution. Big spacious barns for threshing in inclement weather are another example of the rather few labour-saving devices that appear only towards the end of the Middle Ages.
