Cereal Yields on the Sussex Estates of Battle Abbey during the Later Middle Ages.

The article discusses the cereal yields on the Sussex estates of the Abbey of Battle during the later Middle ages in England. One of the general deficiency of most of the early studies of medieval productivity was the examination of yield data in almost complete detachment from the environmental, socio-economic and technical conditions, which seemingly influenced the production under review. The types of arable farming practised on the Battle Abbey estates in Sussex at Alciston, the principal estate and home-farm, Apuldram, Barnhorne and Lullington invest the yield data with special interest and importance. By the late thirteenth century, when the extant documentation first reveals the economy of the Battle Abbey manors, cultivation for commercial purposes flourished and this was most clearly manifested in the arable husbandry by the suppression of fallow on the best or most conveniently manured land. The density of seed sown per unit of land is a much neglected aspect of medieval farming despite the importance of the relationship between the seeding rate and the yield, which up to a certain point increases as seeding is intensified.