The Wild and the Sown: Botany and Agriculture in Western Europe, 1350–1850

This book describes the spread of new agricultural practice in the half millennium after 1350, and reconstructs a neglected part of Europe's agricultural past: the introduction of fodder crops, and the continuous reorganization of traditional botanical inputs within a new system of farming. It breaks entirely new ground by showing the distant historical origins of a major transformation in land potential and farm productivity. A vast range of evidence is cited from Italy, France, England and elsewhere to produce in effect an economic, social and cultural history of Europe in which the focus is on the long-distance consequences of the "agricultural revolution".