Medieval Demographics Done RIGHT

(January 2022:  Well, people are very interested in this information; this two-part post is responsible for nearly half of the page views for the entire blog.  It's long since gone viral, to the point that some serious researchers have taken notice, and to my enduring wonder, it makes the top page of Google Search.  This warms the cockles of my heart, but listen -- this is the product of many years' research and trying to get it right.  Please feel free to comment below if you don't think I did!)

Medieval demographics and economics have long been an interest of mine.  I minored in the subject in college (seriously), largely because I wanted to become as expert as possible in the field for gaming purposes.  Between a divorce and what’s available on the Internet, I’ve trimmed down my library on the subject to a few dozen books, but I certainly have my opinions.

My opinion is that what you’ve been taught from gaming sources about low-tech cities is almost certainly wrong.

The most influential RPGer on the topic is S. John Ross, whose Medieval Demographics Made Easy article is widely cited and quoted as to what businesses existed in medieval cities and in what numbers.  Now S. John is a smart guy.  We were once on the same GURPS APA together, and we’ve corresponded; I respect the fellow.  But his article has some critical flaws, and I’d like to present this rebuttal both as a rant and for Wednesday’s Stuff.

* For starters, let's take his number on universities: "There will be one University for every 27.3 million people. This should be computed by continent, not by town!" Heck, by 1500 Italy alone had twenty universities which survive to the present day, let alone ephemeral ones in existence back in the medieval era. France, Spain and Germany each had over a dozen in medieval times ... even tiny Scotland (est. population in the Middle Ages, between 500,000 and a million) had three.  I've no idea from where he got that number ... it's bizarrely specific for being so desperately wrong.

* His break point on the population of town vs city is 8,000, but the true figure is around 5,000; if we're going by the legal definition of a city, most cities were chartered in England at between 4,500-5,000 population.  In Europe generally, the numbers and definitions were wildly skewed: in much of Germany and eastern Europe, for instance, the great majority of so-called "Free Cities" had a population of 1,000 or less.

* He asserts that a square mile of land will feed 180 people on medieval tech.  This is, in fact, a hugely variable number.  Under ideal conditions, after the invention of the horse collar and crop rotation, on table-flat completely cleared land, in multi-crop areas like the Nile Delta and northern Italy, presuming the land's at peace, you can manage over twice that.  The presence of forests, orchards, pasture land, hamlets, buildings, roads?  A tidal wave of smallholders tilling just a few acres and not hugely efficiently?  Oxen instead of horses?  Poor soil, swampland or inadequate water?  Cold climes like Scotland or Scandinavia?  Hill country?  Your farmers haven't invented crop rotation, horse collars or heavy ploughs?  (And, oh, let's not discount politics, war, droughts, locust plagues, untimely frosts ...)  If you can manage half that number for much of Europe, you're doing alright, and you'll survive getting less.

(By the bye, there's a conceptual thing you need to get out of your head.  Most cinematic sources, many fictional sources and a whole lot of gaming products depict what I call "vast cities in a sea of empty."  Gandalf rides up to Minas Tirith, Middle-Earth's largest flipping city by a LOT, and outside the walls there's nary a farm, village or tarpaper shack in sight.  Shift the panorama to King's Landing, the capital of a nation the size of India, and outside the walls there's nary a farm, village or tarpaper shack in sight.  Now this nonsense might appeal to directors and set designers, for whom heroic charges against the walls are a lot cleaner to film than house-to-house battles through the suburbs, but why exactly would anyone sane want to import tons upon tons of grain -- never mind the vegetables, which would all rot en route -- from hundreds of miles away in preference to growing it right there?  Seriously.  Cities are at the center of vast webs of agriculture, not lonely bleak outposts, whatever the likes of Jackson, Benioff and Weiss care to depict.)

* The real killer are the totals for businesses, which are way, way, way out of kilter.

See, what Ross -- and many a gamer who doesn’t know any better -- uses for a guide is a single source: the so-called “1292 Parisian tax roll” cited in the end notes of Joseph and Frances Gies’ well-known work, Life In A Medieval City, which purports to give a comprehensive list of the 51 types of business in Paris in that time, and produces some oddities like there being 58 scabbardmakers in Paris in that year.

Yeah, but.

For openers, Paris was a very atypical place.  For most of the medieval period through to the 18th century, it was the most populous city in Europe, the national capital of Europe’s greatest kingdom.  Your average good-sized low-tech city is a tenth the size, much less likely to have baroque luxury trades, and much more likely to be near or on the seacoast and have the nautical trades Paris lacked.

For a second thing, the Gieses heavily truncated that list.  The real list didn’t have 51 entries; it had several hundred.  (As to that, the Gieses made some errors.  The list didn't cite 58 “scabbardmakers,” there were 52. Aside from anything else, in the eyes of a number of medievalists, the Gieses' scholarship has not aged well.) 

For a third, what they were working with was itself an edited list: one a mid-19th century historian named Hercule Géraud edited from the original manuscript.

For a fourth, the accuracy of the list is in dispute.  Géraud lists 116 goldsmiths, more than the combined number of inn- and tavernkeepers, half again as many as there were coopers ... indeed more than any other profession except for barbers, cobblers and leatherworkers.  In the words of medievalist Dr. Norman Pounds, "it is difficult to explain [their] presence, unless we can assume that their market covered much of France."  It's far from the only inexplicable result: only two lawyers?  Two lacemakers?  ONE roofer?  ONE fletcher?  Huh?

Most importantly, it wasn’t what the Gieses thought it was.  Géraud wasn’t attempting to present a comprehensive occupational list.  He was presenting a list of occupations with matching surnames – the French equivalent of “Joe Smith the blacksmith,” “Karen Cooper the cooper,” and suchlike.  If you went by (say) “Bob Traynor the notary,” then Géraud didn’t include you.  If you were a Jew that went by a patronymic ("Robert ben James") – a large percentage of them – then Géraud didn’t include you.  If you went by a placename ("Bob of Quincy") or a byname ("Ravenswing"), then Géraud didn’t include you.

(If that sounds like the 19th-century equivalent of a Wikipedia-style "List of African-American jazz players from Texas," I don't blame you.  The guy researched what he wanted to research, and there must have been some reason which made sense to Géraud as to why he put it together that way.  One wonders whether late 13th century Parisian goldsmiths just weren't in the habit of going by patronymics or placenames, and contemporary lawyers, lacemakers and fletchers were.)

You can see why I wouldn’t trust that list even if I hadn’t stared at it and immediately gawked at the notion that there are twice as many scabbardmakers as blacksmiths -- the fundamental business of the medieval world, and which was underestimated on Ross’ list by a factor of six.  Certain businesses are omitted entirely; potters, for instance, and most of the nautical trades.  (These do appear on Géraud's original, but in startlingly low numbers.  Just twelve sailors?  Seriously?  For a city the size of Paris, bisected by a great river, a thousand involved in the water-carriage trade would be a bewildering underestimate.)  It's hard to look at that list without wondering what the heck the Gieses were thinking presenting that as a credible business list, even as a footnote in an appendix.

Relying on a single source – never mind a single source far out of context – is poor scholarship. For example, I own a 1945 telephone directory for the city of my birth, Boston's immediate southern suburb.  It has listings for only five barbers; by contrast, it has four pages of listings for beauty salons.  Now I'm sure there are those who'd swallow that factoid whole and infer that in a city of 75,000 men wore their hair to their ankles ... or – in an era of close cropped haircuts – it might have been that neighborhood barbers had plenty of walk-up business, didn't do appointments and didn't feel the need for the expense of telephone service.  (Or, for that matter, that a telephone directory wasn't any more intended to be a complete record of every business in the city of Quincy, than Géraud's list of occupational surnames was intended to be a complete record of every business in Paris.  Go figure.)

My own take on the numbers comes from a basket of sources: Medieval Southampton by Colin Platt, Medieval Trade In The Mediterranean World by Lopez and Raymond, the renowned 14th century The Practice of Commerce by Francesco Pegolotti (Evans' translation), Streider's translation of the 14th century Palaelogus by Georgios Pachymeres, the Milanese and Genoese 12th century reductions published some years ago in the Journal of Economic and Business History,  the 13th century Florentine business list I copied from a lovely text in the BPL, The Merchants of Cahors by Denholm-Young, The Medieval City by Norman Pounds (part of the superb Greenwood Guides to Historic Events of the Medieval World published by Greenwood Press, which I strongly recommend), A Day In A Medieval City by Chiara Frugoni, and the magnificent corpus of work of Fernand Braudel.  And since this is rambling on a bit, I’ll save the actual chart for the next post.