8.4 Economic Expansion and Change


 * The development of new farming technologies, such as the iron plow and a harness to use horses with the plow,  brought about an agricultural revolution.
 * Windmills were also used to harness the power of the wind in order to help grind yeast.
 * Farmers began using a crop rotation method called the three field system. In one field they would plant grain, in the second, some kind of bean, and the third they would leave fallow. This allowed the farmers to grow more food and it helped the soil to regain the nutrients that are lost through the crop growing process. Thanks to these advancements in farming, the population in Europe soon doubled.
 * As trade began to flourish, the people of Europe started to move towards places where they would be able to obtain goods that were transported and sold by merchants. This led to the rise of cities and social centers, the most prosperous of them in northern Italy.
 * As new towns and cities were established, the merchants would often request that the local lord, or even the king himself grant them a charter. A charter was a document that set out the rights and priveledge sof the people who lived in that town.
 * With the rise of cities, merchants and extensive trade came the need for money. Merchants now needed a way to purchase their goods and in turn wanted money for the sale of their goods.
 * A renewed use of money began to erode the typical economic system associated with feudalism. Peasants began to sell their crops and started paying their Vassals with money, or even hiring someone to work their land for them.
 * Usury, or lending money to be repaid with interest, became a social problem. Many of the members of the Church spoke out against usurers, claiming that their practices were immoral.
 * Merchant guilds, which are associations of people with similar jobs, dominated life in medieval towns. They were in charge of passing laws, paying for public works, and many times, enforcing the laws.
 * Lower class workers began to resent the power held by the merchant guilds and established their own craft guilds. Guilds limited the number of people that could join them and were very strict in their rules that people who were not part of the gild could not  work in that particular trade. In order to become part of the guild a person would have to apprentice to a guild master. Very few apprentices ever become guild masters, many of them simply continue to work for the guild master as a journeyman, or paid worker.
 * Even with the economic revival, life in medieval cities was dirty, dark and crowded.