Tools & tillage: a journal on the history of the implements of cultivation and other agricultural processes (3.1976/1979)

K. I. SANDRED

259
A NOTE ON THE ENGLISH PLOUGH

In his article “Sula” in Tools and Tillage, Vol.
111:2 (1977), Professor Axel Steensberg kindly
referred to my two articles, both published in
Stadia Neophilologica, Vol. 38 and 40 (1966
and 1968), on the linguistic evidence for the
plough in England in which I discussed espe-
cially the terms for its various parts from the
Anglo-Saxon period to the Modern English
dialects.
These articles were occasioned by Lynn
White’s book Medieval Technology and Social
Change (1962) in which the author asserts that
the heavy plough was introduced into Eng-
land by the Vikings. This seemed in my opin-
ion to be far too rash a conclusion. One of the
first scholars to raise objections to White’s
view was the Swedish agricultural historian
Ragnar Jirlow, as may be seen from a paper
which he read at the 7th International Con-
gress of Anthropological and Ethnological
Sciences in Moscow in 1964. Objections were
also raised for instance in reviews in Medium

TEvum 32 (1963) by R. Lennard and in Past
and Present (1963) by R.H. Hilton.
Professor Steensberg’s conclusion that the
Anglo-Saxons had the heavy wheel plough
when they invaded Britain in the 5th century
is certainly consistent with my result. I am
afraid, however, that I must correct him when
he says that I at first suggested that the heavy
plough was a Scandinavian introduction into
Anglo-Saxon England but had changed my
mind in the second article. On the contrary,
already in my first article I stated that my
survey of plough terms which had been in use
in England in the earlier periods pointed to the
conclusion that the plough was not intro-
duced into England by the Scandinavians
{Stadia Neophilologica, Vol. 38, p. 336).
I am grateful to the editors of Tools and
Tillage for allowing me to put this right, and
especially to Professor Steensberg for putting
my observations on the English plough into a
wider cultural and historical context.
Karl Inge Sandred

REVIEWS

SIAN E. REES: Agricultural Implements
in Prehistoric and Roman Britain
BAR British Series 69 (i-ii) 1979. 772pp., £ 17,50
(available post free from BAR, 122 Banbury
Road, Oxford OX2 7BP, England).
The author of this substantial two-part publication
has done a great service to the subject of early
agriculture in Britain by compiling such a compre-
hensive data-bank. This she does in three sections,
covering the ard and the plough, manual cultivating
implements, and harvesting tools. In each case sur-
viving material is fully listed, a large number of
items is illustrated in the 256 figures, and their
distribution (or rather the distribution of their find
spots) given in 19 maps. A lengthy bibliography

brings together the main sources that any student of
early agriculture will wish to read.
She has examined and checked for signs of wear,
452 stone ard shares or points, 3 possible bone
shares, 13 definite or possible wooden ard parts,
too possible iron shares, 14 iron plough coulters, 2
model ards, 1 ard representation on a Roman mo-
saic, 15 yokes from Scotland and Ireland, over 90
alleged ox goads, various types of hoes and mat-
tocks, spades and shovels (including iron spade-
shoes from over 40 sites), spuds for weeding, peat
and turf cutters, sickles, hooks (159 known to the
author), over 50 scythes, mowers’ anvils, forks and
rakes.
In assembling all this data, she has amply fulfilled
her first aim, which was to look at the tools them-