Cities like Rome, Milan, Naples, Bari, and others housed palaces, major churches and monasteries, houses, and also farmland. Productive agriculture took place inside medieval cities, as well as in the fields surrounding them.
This paper examines urban food cultivation between approximately 600 and 1050 CE to reveal they ways in which the medieval societies and economies reshaped city environments and contested hierarchies of influence.
The Roman era had been characterized by decorative gardens and large-scale agricultural supply chains feeding thriving urban populations; the post-Roman period, by contrast, saw the breakdown of long-distance commerce and cross-regional markets, alongside the rise of new attitudes toward prosperity, civic space, and the obligations of care.
Ordinary people built communal bonds by trading rights over cultivated plots, those in power granted garden lands to loyal allies, and religious institutions grew provisions to sustain both their congregations and the destitute.
About the lecturer
Caroline Goodson is Professor at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. Her research concentrates on the nature of power in this part of the early medieval world, looking at how different groups positioned themselves as successors to the Romans’ past glories or as innovators in a new world order.
She takes a transdisciplinary approach to the rise of early medieval polities in the Western Mediterranean, including North Africa and in particular, Italy. She is one of the three series editors of the Oxford Series in the New Medieval History, a flagship series at the cutting edge of medieval history.