16 November 2013

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.

16 comments:

  1. Ive been using a companion to Britain in the late middles ages and life in a medieval barony to try and come up with a more realsitic demographics and economy.
    The bit they did on Castles is WAY OFF as well, a country of 1.4 million would have 35 fortified dwellings of which 22 were in occupation ???

    there 1,400 known castes in England. Towers houses and castles are common enough sight in my part of Ireland that they don't elicit much notice.

    they must have used the number for fortified places around Paris , Densely populated and extrapolated by the rest of the population ?

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    1. Mm, I know this is coming in late, but on rereading your comment, I've some thoughts that other readers of this post might like.

      While I’ve mentioned how variable “medieval” is as a concept, pertaining to economics, a business listing isn’t too offbase. Blacksmiths, millers, potters are there in the 11th century and the 14th alike, and they do pretty much the same things, and you need roughly as many per capita, and that holds pretty much true for Charing Cross as well as Coucy or Chelmno. If a border region becomes a no-man’s land, the businesses will up and move. If the queen names Newtown the imperial capital, businesses will move there. I’m comfortable with my business lists.

      But there’s no way in hell I’d ever make a “There are X castles per Y population” statement. There are just too many variables. How secure are your borders? How large is your nation? – Imperial Rome, for instance, wasn’t throwing up too many fortifications in Italy or Egypt or Spain. Do you have a strong monarch (who’ll not be keen on her nobles having their own private fortresses) or a weak one (who can’t prevent them from doing so)? Is the infrastructure there to build them – the materials, the money, the labor force?

      And the key wrench in the works: stone fortifications last a long, long time. Krak des Chevaliers was built nearly 900 years ago, and was used in warfare as late as 2014. It’s likely (and in some cases certain) that the family that built a fortification is long extinct, the border’s long since shifted, the very nation it was built in no longer exists, the infrastructure needed to maintain it has eroded, the technology – magical or mundane – has made it obsolete ... and it may not even be occupied any more. (How many of those “X castles per Y population” tables take into account ruined castles?)

      When all is said and done, a few too many gamers who put out alleged "guides" are more interested with getting something into print than in getting it *right*, with the least amount of effort and research as they can manage.

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    2. You could also have a monarch who isn't keen on them having their own great fortresses but due to the fact that he or she doesn't actually control most of the country can't stop them though they might try

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    3. Sure. Me being a realism bug isn't even really "you must slavishly follow how life looked in 13rd century western Europe." It's that a GM who seeks to replicate medieval life needs to take into account the ramifications of any major change that's made.

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  2. it doesn't have to be spot on accurate , just not so glaringly wrong.
    There are so many games which the core economics just seem to be made up on a whim, but also include massive inconsistency.

    One example which springs to mind is AD&D birthright world, where given characters were supposed to be running a domain youd think some thought would go in to how a kingdom would be run.

    A kingdom would generate 20-40 Gold bars a year in tax, a gold bar was worth 2,000 gold pieces , so 40,000- to 80,000 gold pieces a year to rule a kingdom, doesnt seem like much for a vast kingdom.

    seems even less when it costs 4 gold bars (8,000 gp) to raise , train and equip a unit of 200 soldiers, thats 40gp each, and the suit of half plate they are supposedly equipped with cost 300 gp. Now unless your players are a complete bunch of morons they will notice this.

    Dáithí (cant remember how to log back in :) )

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    1. Well ... D&D doesn't -- and never actually has, their propaganda notwithstanding -- seek to be an accurate emulation of low-tech life. It seeks to make things fun for PCs. What D&D players seem to find fun is to have goods-on-demand, to have instant buyers (and at least fair market value) for their loot, and for these things to hold true no matter how small the community is.

      And that's fine, of course. Where my hackles go up is when they pretend this is anything more than a game fiat.

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  3. The easy accumulation of items takes away from the game, being able to buy a plate mail just off the rack, which fits takes away from the achievement of having earned the ability to buy it.

    I know Gurps seemed to have a better stab at how things relate to each other is cost, but is there any system which had a decent go at it.

    it really detracts from the game if youre player loot another 80,000 GP from a dungeon, and use it to hire 1,000 guards etc. it takes a lot more work on the DM's behalf to rewrite a system. We couldnt have been the only players out there who asked these questions and wanted to do other things except clear out another Dungeon and add more loot to the pile.

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  4. Thank you for this post and for demographics deux. I enjoyed Ross's work, if only for the list of occupations. But his numbers never worked for my campaign, so I used it as a source. I appreciate your better set of researched numbers, along with the academic critique of the Paris list.

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    1. Thank you kindly! I admit my own numbers aren't a be-all and end-all either, however much better researched ... and I think I'll amend the second MD post to say why!

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  5. I always figured that the "Medieval Demographics Made Easy" article had some pretty strange/averaged numbers, from the "how many castles" figure (even Wales has FIVE HUNDRED surviving castles) to the number of water-carriers. (WATER IS HEAVY! There's no way a single water-carrier, or even their family and a wagon can supply a huge village of 850 people!).

    Also, having bought Gies' "Life in a Medieval Castle," I distinctly remember thinking some of the info must be outdated--they mentioned the "fact" of medieval peasants being forced to eat rotten food that they disguised with spices, so I'm taking most of their stuff with a grain of salt now.

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    1. Yep. The large waterskins I've seen pictures of watercarriers lug seem far more aimed at street vending -- getcher cup o' fresh water, one sinver the mug! -- than in supplying the water needs of a household.

      Life in a Medieval City is fifty years old now, and yep, the Gieses' research hasn't aged well. The "spices" business is definitely one that failed the common sense test from multiple angles: what, the expensive imported spices the peasantry couldn't afford? The peasant diet that was heavily vegetable- and fish-based in the first place?

      It's not as if they had excuses, either. They were contemporaries of historians like Braudel, Lopez, Raymond and Pounds, who were not afraid to admit what they didn't know and distinguish between facts, conjectures and wild-ass guesses.

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    2. At least Ross actively tells you to fiddle with stuff to reflect your needs for the kingdom, so that's what I do, lol.

      It always baffled me on how the "people used spices to disguise spoiled meat" myth got started until I found out this article ( http://medievalcookery.com/notes/drummond.pdf ) stating that the misconception started with Jack Drummond in 1912, a chemist who clearly didn't know how to cook ANYTHING, wasn't a known historian, and made a lot of weird assumptions about medieval folks on top of it.

      And he accidentally counters his own spoiled-meat argument right in his book. Like, wow, man.

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    3. Well, sure. Drummond wasn't the first would-be historian to imagine that all ages, times and climes worked from the shibboleths and paradigms of his own time.

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    4. So that's where the bit about the spices came from!

      Because yeah, the peasants had preserved food (smoked sausages, dried fish, etc.), and the nobility had fresh food (hunting wasn't just for fun, plus lots of livestock, and salted or dried meat, at least for the servants) so nobody was in fact eating spoiled food. The people who could afford spices *definitely* weren't eating spoiled food. What they were eating was food "seethed" into tastelessness, which needed spices to supply the flavor that had been cooked out of it.

      Also, if rotten meat is what you're used to, you wouldn't need to cover up the taste. See: muktuk. Or, for that matter, cheese. As I type this, I'm noshing on fermented milk; the container is labeled "yogurt".

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  6. Thank you very much for this write up. I found it very useful. even after the original you are adressing has more or less vanished from the web.

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    1. Which is a shame -- S. John having a heavily laden site with many true and useful gems like his Big List of RPG Plots -- but fear not, the Wayback Machine rides to our rescue. For instance: https://web.archive.org/web/20070706202036/https://www.io.com/~sjohn/plots.htm

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