The Truth About Plows

OK, so the simplest plows are nothing more than a blade attached to a frame that can be pulled by people or animals. They have been around since pre-historic times and function like I mentioned yesterday -- they carve a shallow scratch or furrow and leave an undisturbed strip of ground between the furrows. So several passes over the field, usually at right angles to each other, were necessary to fully ‘till’ the land.

The heavy plow is more complicated and does much more. It consists of four main parts, the coulter, the plowshare, the moldboard and one or more wheels at the front of the plow.

The coulter is a vertical blade that cuts into the turf. It creates a slit in the ground that the plowshare can get into to do its work.

The plowshare is an iron or steel piece of the plow that dips under the sod and has a horizontal blade that cuts the earth parallel to the top of the soil. It essentially cuts out the top layer of the ground in one long strip and feeds it up to the moldboard.

The moldboard is a curved board that takes the turf cut by the plowshare and pushes it to the side, at the same time flipping it over. This takes that strip of sod and inverts it, dirt-side up off to the right side of path of the plow. All of the grass and weeds are now root-side up and are effectively buried under inches of earth.

The last important piece of the heavy plow is a wheel or set of wheels, whose height can be adjusted, which allows the farmer to set the depth at which the plowshare is cutting.

This is obviously much more work for the animals pulling the plow than the scratch plow. The horizontal blade of the plowshare is dragging through the ground 4-8 inches under and encountering a lot of resistance. In his book, Medieval Technology and Social Change, Lynn White Jr. talks a lot about the ramifications of the adoption of the heavy plow, making these important points:

• That the plow required the pulling force of 8 oxen
• That these large teams of oxen required a lot of effort and coordination to turn around, which changed the shape of fields to long strips
• That few farmers could afford 8 oxen of their own, so peasants had to form alliances in order to come up with enough animals to pull the new plows
• And that with this change came an essential change in philosophy: whereas peasants had once held an amount of land theoretically able to produce enough food to feed themselves, they now held land in proportion to how much they could contribute to the plow-team. Man was now no longer part of a natural cycle, he was now part of a ‘machine’ that exploited that cycle.