Key Players in the Rural Clearance of Medieval Europe 1050-1150

Between about 1050 and 1150, Europe underwent one of the most transformative periods in its environmental and social history. Forests, marshes and wilderness were rapidly reshaped into fields, villages and monastic estates. This sweeping “Age of Clearance” altered landscapes, power structures and daily life in ways still visible today and provided for the establishment of both new monasteries and preceptories. But what forces drove the major actors in this dramatic rural reshaping of medieval Europe?

The immediate landscape signature of the Age of Clearance is the replacement of forest and wetland with hedged fields, drainage ditches, new roads and nucleated villages. Archaeobotanical records and pollen studies record falls in woodland pollen and rises in cereal pollen in many catchments from the 11th–12th centuries. Engineers, lay and ecclesiastical, cut drains in fens, built polders in lowlands, and exploited hill slopes for new terraces and pastures.

Clearance strengthened landed elites: more arable land increased income streams and allowed lords to grant new tenancies or to consolidate seigneurial control. It also enabled local elites to found or endow new institutions ( churches, castles, markets) that anchored authority. For peasant communities the picture was mixed: opportunities existed for new tenancies or migrating to new clearings, but clearance could also intensify obligations, rents and labour demands. Where colonisation proceeded (e.g., frontier zones east of the Elbe), new legal forms and settlement charters accompanied the landscape change — an institutional re-ordering as important as the environmental one.

One of the clearest links between the Age of Clearance and medieval institutions is the role of monasteries. Monastic foundations, especially the Cistercians but also other reformed Benedictine houses, the Premonstratensian and Carthusian Orders, were often sited in forested or marginal lands and became engines of transformation. The clearing of land for agricultural purposes normally commenced soon after a monastery was founded. That process included forest clearance, drainage, establishment of granges (monastic farms), sheep pasturage and technological diffusion (water-mills, hydraulic works). In short, monasteries frequently acted as both colonists and tech-transfer centres.

The Cistercian Order in particular, founded at Cîteaux in 1098, expanded extraordinarily fast in the 12th century. By the end of the century the movement had spawned hundreds of daughter houses across Europe. Many of those daughter houses deliberately located in wooded or marginal zones which the monks then transformed into productive landscape units (granges) in ways that were both economic and environmental. By the end of the twelfth century this one community had spawned an international monastic Order with over 500 abbeys, a scale that amplified the environmental impact of monastic land-making.

As from the 1120s the Knights Templar, through their quickly expanding network of rural estates and preceptories, operated many large farms, mills, and agricultural holdings across Europe. Preceptories typically included farmland, barns, water‑ and wind‑mills, fishponds, pastures, and tenant cottages; they were managed as estate complexes rather than small monastic retreats. In that way they contributed to the Templars major raison d'être: their continuing presence in and contribution to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. 

This blog is original work by TemplarsNow. Major references and further reading: Andersen, Thomas Barnebeck; Jensen, Peter Sandholt; Skovsgaard, Christian Stejner. “The heavy plow and the agricultural revolution in Medieval Europe.” Journal of Development Economics, 118 (January 2016): 133–149; Hamerow, Helena; Bogaard, A.; et al. A Long ‘Agricultural Revolution’, Chapter 7 in: Feeding Medieval England: A Long ‘Agricultural Revolution’, 700–1300. Oxford University Press, 2025; “The heavy plough.” Medieval.eu; “Agriculture, The Medieval Period (600–1600 CE).” In Encyclopedia Britannica; “The Knights Templar & their Preceptories.” Leaflet by The Templar Heritage Trust (2024); “Templars’ impact on urban and rural development: the Order’s estate centres (preceptories) as agricultural-holders.” Urban History, 50 (2023), 366–386. All on line sources were consulted and verified December 3, 2025. The illustration shows a medieval plough (folio 77v) from The Macclesfield Psalter, probably produced at Gorleston, East Anglia circa 1330 , © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, website Illuminated: Manuscripts in the Making, Free Use. 

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