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The carruca or caruca was a kind of heavy plow important to medieval agriculture in Northern Europe. The carruca used a heavy iron plowshare to turn heavy soil and may have required a team of eight oxen. The carruca also bore a coulter and moldboard. It gave its name to the English carucate.
The most important technical innovation for agriculture in the Middle Ages was the widespread adoption around 1000 of the mouldboard plow and its close relative, the heavy plow. These two plows enabled medieval farmers to exploit the fertile but heavy clay soils of northern Europe.
Carruca (Heavy Plough ) A type of heavy wheeled plough commonly found in Northern Europe. [5] The device consisted of four major parts. The first part was a coulter at the bottom of the plough. [6] This knife was used to vertically cut into the top sod to allow for the plowshare to work. [6]
The carucate was named for the carruca heavy plough that began to appear in England in the late 9th century, which may have been introduced during the Viking invasions of England. [2] It was also known as a ploughland or plough ( Old English : plōgesland , "plough's land") in the Danelaw and usually, but not always, excluded the land's ...
A plough or plow (both pronounced / p l aʊ /) is a farm tool for loosening or turning the soil before sowing seed or planting. [1] Ploughs were traditionally drawn by oxen and horses but modern ploughs are drawn by tractors. A plough may have a wooden, iron or steel frame with a blade attached to cut and loosen the soil.
In the early Middle Ages ploughing was done with large teams of small oxen (commonly eight oxen in four pairs), and the plough itself was a large, mainly wooden implement. The team and plough together were therefore many yards long, and this led to a particular effect in ridge and furrow fields.
A four-ox-team plough, circa 1330. The ploughman is using a mouldboard plough to cut through the heavy soils. A team could plough about one acre (0.4 ha) per day. The typical planting scheme in a three-field system was that barley, oats, or legumes would be planted in one field in spring, wheat or rye in the second field in the fall and the third field would be left fallow.
Threshing and pig feeding from a book of hours from the Workshop of the Master of James IV of Scotland (Flemish, c. 1541). Agriculture in Scotland in the Middle Ages includes all forms of farm production in the modern boundaries of Scotland, between the departure of the Romans from Britain in the fifth century and the establishment of the Renaissance in the early sixteenth century.