Introduction
Rural Economy
This covers more than just planting and harvesting, though that's the main bit
Crops
3-field rotation
low yield
Conditions of farming affected the structures of village life
Herding
Fishing
Village craftsmen
Villages were not self-sufficient. There was always a certain amount of trade in the form of local markets, where mostly they sold local goods to neighboring villages, but these would sometimes include goods from a city. In addition, there were peddlars who travelled from town to town. These did more than just sell trinkets from the back of a wagon. An ironmonger, for example, might take orders from a village blacksmith for raw iron. Even more common were the wool merchants who brought raw wool into the villages to be woven into fabric.
Population growth
Towns
There were always towns in the Middle Ages, but in the later 11th century, there began a growth of an urban-based economy that is still with us. These towns were still quite small: in 1100, no city in the West was larger than 50,000 and only a dozen or so were larger than 20,000. Most towns were between 5,000 and 15,000 people--very small by our standards.
The towns had a variety of functions. Many were episcopal seats (very few were ducal or royal capitals, as the nobility in general preferred the countryside), and a whole system of services grew up around them. Others were on trade routes, flourishing because they sat at an important crossroad or river crossing, or were port towns. All these grew as the general population grew.
Most of the economic activity of a town was commerce, and most of it was local. Foodstuffs came in from the countryside, millers ground the grain and bakers baked it and sold it (few people had ovens in their own homes). Shoemakers, carpenters, smiths, these are the trades that occupied most of the commercial traffic.
Long-distance trade grew dramatically during the Crusades, and in large part because of them. This trade allowed a few towns to become very wealthy and influential, particularly those that lay along the trade routes from northern Italy, up the Rhine River, to Flanders. A second and much smaller conduit ran from the east end of the Baltic Sea, through the English Channel and down along the French Atlantic coast.
This form of trade was still quite rare in 1095, mainly because there was little direct commercial contact between East and West. Western commercian methods were so primitive that they could not exploit the markets anyway.
Old methods
Crusades
New methods