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Byzantine Agricultural Implements: The Evidence of Medieval Illustrations of Hesiod's Works and Days

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2013

Anthony Bryer
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Abstract

It is argued that Byzantine manuscript illustrations to Hesiod's eighth-century BC poem offer realistic evidence for the appearance and function of common Medieval agricultural implements, of which there is little other record. Fourteen manuscripts illustrated from the tenth to sixteenth centuries AD are analysed in the Table on p. 67. In them seventeen implements not named in the text may be regarded as contemporary Medieval pictures, which may also be true of the six implements which Hesiod describes, for traditional textual or arthistorical rules hardly apply to these rustic drawings. Using the methodology of K. D. White's studies of Roman farming, other pictorial, literary, documentary, and the scanty archaeological evidence, together with that of survivals, is applied to these twenty-three implements alone. Conclusions are that the Byzantines may have introduced an eliktrin spade-fork, and possibly a wheel structure, but the article must be read within the context of Roman, Western Medieval and later Mediterranean studies of technology and means of peasant production, for which it offers only a first step in the largely unexplored Byzantine field.

Type
Research Article
Information
Annual of the British School at Athens , Volume 81 , November 1986 , pp. 45 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © The Council, British School at Athens 1986

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References

Acknowledgements. I am chiefly indebted to Professor M. L. West, Hesiod's own editor, for microfilms, offprints, patience, and generous information. He is not responsible for my blunders, nor is Professor K. D. White, the father of this sort of study. I am grateful to the librarians of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna; of the Vatican Library, Rome; of the Marcian Library, Venice; of the Biblioteca Communale Ariostea, Ferrara; of Trinity College, Cambridge; and of the Beinecke Library, Yale, for illustrations in FIGS. 3–16, as well as to Dr Benedikt Benedikz of the University of Birmingham Library and Dr W. D. Hassall of the Holkham Hall Library. I am especially grateful to Dr Maurice Byrne for not only commissioning, but bringing home, the heavy Trapezuntine bel in Fig. 19, as well as the Amaseian finger-guards; and to Diana Wardle for the Macedonian and Mr A. G. Wood for the Cappadocian finger-guards, all in Fig. 20; and to Mr Joe Pennybacker for wielding the bel in Fig. 18. I have enjoyed the advice and help of Professor Robert Browning, Dr Mary Cunningham, Miss Linda Cheetham, Dr John Haldon, Dr Alan Harvey, Dr John Lowden, and Dr Michael Ursinus. The University of Birmingham's Department of Geography photographic section made the photographs and Mrs Gaye Bye typed expertly. The article is a contribution to a collaborative research project of the University of Birmingham's Centre for Byzantine Studies and Modern Greek on material culture, but began with hunting the bel: an attempt to identify the Pontic Έλίκτριν in Vazelon Act 118 of the thirteenth century.

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38 Haussig (or maybe Hussey), 416 pl. 85.

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