Tag: Medieval Economics – General

Features

Horse vs Ox in Medieval Times (And Horse Power vs Horsepower Today)

Up until late medieval times, the ox is preferred to the horse on farms mostly because the animal is cheaper to own and maintain even though the horse is capable of performing and helping with a greater variety of tasks beyond helping to plow fields, and these other functions of the horse include hauling things such as produce and tools and possibly being used for traveling, herding, and hunting if necessary.

Articles

Recycling in Britain after the Fall of Rome’s Metal Economy

In actual fact, the bulk of contemporary evidence — which happens to be material rather than textual — clearly argues that the people of fifth- and early sixth-century eastern Britain were much more involved in subsistence agriculture than warfare, and that most people during much of this period lived in highly circumscribed worlds in a ranked, rather than a steeply hierarchical, society

Articles

Rapid Invention, Slow Industrialization, and the Absent Entrepreneur in Medieval China

For some sixteen centuries, about eight times the length of the period since the onset of England’s Industrial Revolution, China was the source of an astonishing outpouring of inventions that included a vast variety of prospectively valuable novelties as diverse as printing, the blast furnace, the spinning wheel, the wheelbarrow, and playing cards, in addition to the more widely recognized gunpowder and compass.