Technology of the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds
1 r e t p a h C POWER SOURCES W hile classical civilizations had relied upon a large slave labor force medi eval Europe experienced a labor shortage that stimulated a search for alternative sources of power and the introduction of labor-saving machinery The first instrument of this power revolution was the horse Even more signifi cant was the success of medieval technology in harnessing water and wind power Water and wind power continued to improve in the early modern period while coal became increasingly important too Coal mining even spurred the invention of the steam engine which itself helped usher in the Industrial Revolution THE HORSE The invention of the horseshoe the padded rigid horse collar and the stirrup all of which first appeared in the West in the centuries of 12
13 Medieval horses were bred for various uses Draft horses pulled carts and plows chargers were warhorses and fine riding horses were called palfreys POWER SOURCES the Dark Ages as the early Middle Ages are known transformed the horse from a beast of burden useful only for light duties into a highly versatile source of energy in peace and war Once the horse could be harnessed to the heavy plow by means of the horse collar it became a more efficient draft animal than the ox The introduction of the stirrup made
Technology of the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds the mounted warrior supreme in medieval warfare It initiated complex social changes to sustain the great expense of the knight his armor and his steed in a society close to the subsistence line Using scattered artistic and archaeologi cal evidence historians have constructed an approximate chronology of technologi cal innovation in medieval Europe The war saddle with a single girth was introduced by the 6th century and the iron stirrup was com mon by the 7th having probably been known earlier in the East The curb bit vitally impor tant for controlling a warhorse probably dates from about the same time According to liter ary evidence iron horseshoes date from the end of the 9th century and based on picto rial evidence spurs date from the 11th By the 12th century the European knight was using a war saddle with high wraparound cantle and pommel that protected the genitals and held him securely in his seat the saddle itself was secured to the horse by a double girth that held it firmly in place WATER POWER The Romans pioneered the use of waterpower in the later empire and some of their tech niques probably survived The type of water 14
POWER SOURCES mill that flourished first in northern Europe however appears to have been the Norse mill using a horizontally mounted waterwheel driving a pair of grindstones directly without the intervention of gearing Examples of this simple type of mill survive in Scandinavia and in the Shetlands It also occurred in southern Europe where it was known as the Greek mill While some of the 5,624 mills recorded in the Domesday Book of England in 1086 may have been of this type it is probable that by that date the vertically mounted undershot wheel had established itself as more appropriate to the gentle landscape of England The Norse mill requires a good head of water to turn the wheel at an adequate grinding speed without gearing for the upper millstone the practice of rotating the upper stone above a stationary bed stone became universal at an early date Most of the Domesday water mills were used for grinding grain but in the following cen turies other important uses were devised in fulling cloth shrinking and felting woolen fabrics sawing wood and crushing vegetable seeds for oil Overshot wheels also were intro duced where there was sufficient head of water and the competence of the medieval mill wrights in building mills and earthworks and in constructing increasingly elaborate trains of gearing grew correspondingly 15
