Medieval Technology and Social Change

White, Lynn. Medieval Technology and Social Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Medieval Technology and Social Change runs counter to the general assumption that the Middle Ages involved a stagnation or regression in human development. White divides his study into three areas of innovation in medieval Europe: the development of mounted shock combat with the introduction of the stirrup; the agricultural revolution made possible by the plough, the discovery of horse-power, and the introduction of three-field crop rotation; and the development of machine power in the later Middle Ages. In each case, White shows that new technologies, whether military, agricultural, or otherwise, had far-reaching impacts on cultural institutions and social organization.

The book is extraordinarily detailed and well researched. White draws from research in a number of different disciplines, including archeology, anthropology, philology, and social, constitutional, and legal history. The book overflows with footnotes and includes over 40 pages of endnotes. At times, the shear accumulation of historical detail can be overwhelming, especially when tracing the introduction and diffusion of the various medieval technologies through their appearance in artifacts throughout Europe and Asia.

White begins by considering the history of the horse in battle. He outlines three stages of the relationship between humans, horses, and technologies: 1) the charioteer; 2) the mounted warrior; and 3) the rider equipped with stirrups. Each of these stages corresponds to a different type of battle and to different organization of society: “The horse has always given its master an advantage over the footman in battle, and each improvement in its military use has been related to far-reaching social and cultural changes” (1). The stirrup had an enormous impact on mounted combat: “The stirrup, by giving lateral support in addition to the front and back support offered by pommel and cantle, effectively welded horse and rider into a single fighting unit capable of a violence without precedent.” The stirrup allowed the rider to deliver a blow not so much with his own muscle power but with the force of the charging stallion, or as White puts it, the stirrup “joined man and steed into a fighting organism” (38). The introduction of the stirrup had far reaching implications for the organization of Europe in the Middle Ages. It created what White refers to as mounted shock combat, a form of combat more violent and effective than any prior in history. But its effects extended beyond the battlefield as well. Mounted shock combat was very costly. It required support and organization, and, in effect, an entire support industry arose around the new military technology. The horse and knights required training and armor. The horses needed large supplies of food. In order to sustain the new form of warfare, new modes of manufacturing equipment and producing food were necessary.

White begins with the revolution in agriculture, outlining the development of the heavy, the horseshoe, and the three-field system of crop rotation. “The plough was the first application of non-human power to agriculture” (41). The primitive scratch plow was not particularly effective at turning over the soil, so cross-ploughing was necessary, meaning fields were generally squarish in shape. The scratch plough was especially ineffective in northern Europe where soils tended to be heavier and moister than in eastern and southern Europe. For northern Europe a new type of plow was needed, and what developed was the heavy plow, a “weapon against the soil” involving a heavier knife and pulled by a team of oxen (43). It is interesting that White continues to use combat terminology throughout the book whether dealing with military or agricultural technologies. For example, heavy ploughs attack the soil with sufficient violence that cross-ploughing is no longer necessary. With the heavy plough, fields tended to become longer, horizontal strips of land. In the 9th and 10th centuries, the development of a new horse harness and the nailed horseshoe made the horse more than simply a military asset, it was now an agricultural and economic asset as well. With these inventions the horse could be used to do work previously done by the ox. Horses could now be used for ploughing fields (which they could do at greater speed and with greater force than oxen) and could also be used for land transport, specifically enabling more effective wagon transport (66-67). This increase in transportation meant that peasants, workers, and goods could travel greater distances, and it tended to encourage urbanization. The three-field system of crop rotation emerged in the 8th century, and its impacts were rapid and widespread. The new system increased a peasant’s productivity by one-half, distributed the labor of ploughing, sowing, and harvesting more evenly throughout the year, and diversified crops, which reduced the threat of famine (72).
“The later Middle Ages, that is roughly from A.D. 1000 to the close of the fifteenth century, is the period of decisive development in the history of the effort to use the forces of nature mechanically for human purposes. What had been, up to that time, an empirical groping, was converted with increasing rapidity into a conscious and widespread programme designed to harness and direct the energies observable around us” (79). The vertical water wheel, a possibility in Hellenistic times, gained widespread use around the tenth century. Around the same time, the tidal mill also came into use. Shortly after, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, people turned to the air for power, with the result being the invention of the windmill. From the windmill, White moves on to consider medieval experiments with steam power and hot air pressure, research in expanding gases and vapors that led to the creation of rockets. In a clever line about the invention of cannons, White points forward to later developments in compressed energy: “The cannon is not only important in itself as a power-machine applied to warfare: it is a one-cylinder internal combustion engine, and all of our more modern motors of this type are descended from it” (100). The major innovation in this direction required only that a piston be substituted for ammunition.

White argues that the crank is the single most important mechanical devise next to the wheel, in that it allows for continuous rotary motion to be transformed into reciprocal motion. For a long time, as White points out, people tended to recoil from the prospect of this reciprocal motion. The psychological reason that White elaborates is interesting. He suggests that continuous rotary motion is typical of inorganic matter and that reciprocal motion is a type found in living things. At core, then, the avoidance of crank power seems to be associated with something like the uncanny effect of seeing a quality of the living in the nonliving (104, 115). Out of this mechanism of reciprocal motion came one of the most important ordering devices of modern life: the mechanical clock (117-128).