Medieval Demographics Done RIGHT (Pt II)

1)    Location

Any urban area, whether village, town or city, arises out of the need for trade.  While a small town can coalesce in a prosperous inland farming district or gather around a castle (indeed, skilled labor is necessary for a castle to be built), larger towns or cities locate on navigable rivers or natural harbors.  Just as an example, how many cities in the United States before the railroad era were NOT founded on a navigable waterway?  (Answer below. †)  One of the reasons in colonial America that Boston took off as a major port and Plymouth didn't was that Plymouth's harbor is quite shallow and silts up readily.

Consider also access to building materials, wood for fuel, fresh water, and nearby arable land.  The more negative factors there are that deter growth – the site's on an invasion route, a lack of forests for fuel, mountainous or swampy terrain – there must be counterbalancing benefits that make people want to live there (there’s a large gold mine, the location is unusually defensible, the kingdom’s northern border army needs a base, it's the birthplace of the Goddess of Winter and a pilgrimage site) and/or mitigating factors (less need for fuel because the town's on the equator, the local lichen is magically nutritious, the river going through is the only decent water source within 500 miles).  Another reason Boston took off and Plymouth didn't was that the soil of Plymouth's latifundia was sandy and not hugely fertile, and Boston's wasn't.

You’re also not going to get a town of any size far in the outback, away from trade routes or transportation infrastructure, no matter the benefits.  When all is said and done, the main reason people live in towns -- dirty, smelly, crowded, verminous, disease-ridden, dangerous places at medieval tech -- is to find work.  If work isn't to be had, folks aren't going to stick around.  If there are no resources and no trade, a ruler would have to be mad (and filthy rich) to subsidize a city out in the middle of nowhere, for no good reason whatsoever.  It's expensive enough, and hard enough on the soldiers, to subsidize a strictly military outpost in a forsaken outback: ask the Romans, the French, the British, or the mid- to late-19th century Americans, for that matter.

If your realm tries anyway to maintain a sizable town away from key natural resources (see below), that means you need an equally-sizable logistics train to support it.  This is easily disruptible by the realm's enemies.  (This, of course, can form the basis for plots.)

2)     Resources

A town of a thousand people will consume roughly twenty bushels of grain, around 800 gallons of wine, tea or beer, about three cattle, and about a hundred smaller livestock ... daily.  Throw in the vast amounts of vegetables common to the low-tech peasant diet, fruit, cooking oil, herbs ... Coming back to water.  A human needs about two liters of fresh water a day (or liquid equivalent) in order to survive, more to offset strenuous activity or high temperatures.  Cooking and washing use up a good deal more.  The various industries of a large medieval town or city uses roughly ten times that much fresh water per capita – for tanners, laundries, fullers, foundries, smiths, numerous others.  

(Never mind agriculture.  It takes four tons of water to grow enough cotton for a pair of trousers.  The amount of water livestock sucks up as a percentage of their food value is far more than grain or vegetables need.)

You’ll have to have market squares to hawk that food.  That means wagonloads of food and drink (the twenty-five bushels of grain alone takes up not quite two wagons) each and every day, and if your roads are impassible in winter, you need many more wagons coming through before then.  Storage?  Well ... if you keep your civic food stores dry, protected from vermin, and secure, they’ll keep two to four years without magic.  Maybe.  Say, does your gamesystem have a food preservation enchantment?  Because without that, food goes bad fast.  You don't have refrigerators, so the tomato that gets picked or the fish that gets caught needs to be eaten today.  By tomorrow it'll be iffy, and the day thereafter it'll be compost.  Those vegetables and fish -- obviously -- are NOT coming from the next province over.  They're coming from 5-10 miles away at the outside ... or, well, before they get to market, they become compost.

Also consider the stability of the countryside.  If you have continual plagues, invasions, bandit hordes and wars trucking through your lands, you’re not going to have prosperous cities, because there won’t be enough peasants left to grow enough food to feed them, nor enough traders surviving the gauntlet to provide raw materials and needful goods at economically feasible prices.  (That thousand-person town will need a minimum of five square miles of dedicated farmland, exclusive of the aforementioned peasant farmers needed to grow that food ... presuming the soil is good and the land is well watered and flat, there are no droughts, famines or civil disruptions, that the farmers employ sound agricultural practices, and that the harvest isn't whisked away to support a far-off royal capital or the realm's own marauding army.  For anyone who knows anything about medieval life -- or, indeed, low-tech agricultural travails generally -- that is a very tall order, and most medieval towns were food-importers.) You’ll also need a surplus enough to support non-productive elements, such as religious centers, universities, the aforementioned army or the bureaucracy of a capitol city.

3)    Trades

The absolute basic tradesmen without which a village doesn’t exist are a smith and a miller.  Next in importance (not necessarily in that order) comes potters, carpenters, weavers, leatherworkers, masons, coopers, and at least one tavern/alehouse. 

A small town will have multiples of the more important trades, and specialization will start to occur: extra blacksmiths turn into farriers, silversmiths and armorers; weavers into tailors, dyers and fullers; leatherworkers into saddlers and cobblers; carpenters into coopers, cartwrights, cabinet and furniture makers.  Specialized businesses appear: scribe/notaries, brokers, herbalists, shipwrights, healers, various food occupations such as brewers, bakers and butchers.  

(Psst: this doesn't mean that a bog-standard carpenter has no idea how to fashion a new wheel for a wagon, or that the country smith can't figure out how to make a broadsword.  They're just not specialists, may well not have access to specialist tools or the best possible materials, and aren't particularly practiced at making swords or shaping wheels.  Those goods may well be "Cheap", in GURPS terms: something that doesn't work as well as a specialist's creation, which will malfunction more often and break more readily.)

As a town gets larger, more specialization will be the rule.  Some towns concentrate on particular trades – the center of a wool-producing district will have a preponderance of cloth manufacturing trades (as much as two-thirds of all merchants), as well as wool merchants and factors for outside trade.  A grape-producing district will not only need vintners and distillers, but coopers and glassblowers as well.  Two-thirds nautical trades is pretty standard for any port city – chandlers, shipfitters, boatwrights, brokers, warehouses, sail lofts, ropewalks, salters, longshoremen, and the several elements of a fishing industry.  And so on.

Below is a rough outline of what businesses will be found in your population:

Village up to 500 people:

1 church (with one, maybe two clergy, and appropriate acolytes; also possibly lay-led)
1 healer/herbalist/physician (in some cultures, this would be one of the priests)
1 scribe/notary
1 inn/tavern
1 mill
1 smith

2-3 miscellaneous businesses, depending on prevailing local industries.  A seaport village might have a boatwright and a chandler, a farming village might have a tanner, a mountain village might have a mining concern, anyone might have a cartwright – especially if the village is on a highroad.

The village wouldn’t have much in the way of bureaucracy:  the mayor/reeve/headman, who’d be a respected farmer or businessman, and perhaps a single representative from the local overlord or central government.  If the village is on a significant trade route, there may be a tax/toll collector, perhaps a small barracks of a sergeant and three or so soldiers. 

In addition, most other residents will do various jobs – carpentry, pottery, basketweaving, brewing, weaving, masonry – on a part time basis.  There wouldn't be storefronts or colorful shop signs much beloved of Hollywood and Ren Faires – why, when everyone knows what everyone does? – but be more along the lines of "Eh, ma'am, if'n ye want some good jars, Goodwife Adrienne's a dab hand with the pottery.  That there's her cottage, the one wi'the gate missin' a hinge.  The smith promised he'd get t'that next week." 

Neither Goodwife Adrienne nor much of any craftsman the village has will have a plethora of off-the-shelf wares, but this is dependent on the time of year.  Low-tech villagers/farmers spent a lot of time in the winter doing up various crafts for future sale, mostly to itinerant peddlers and merchants coming around when the weather clears. The adventurers swinging by the village in March may well find those good sealed pint pottery jars they forgot to buy before leaving the city.

General merchant?  Not in anything this small.  Small town "general merchants" such as you see on TV shows or in 18-19th century reenactment museums are anachronistic to the medieval period.  Such wares that aren't made locally come from two sources: a local taking orders from his neighbors before taking his cart to the Big City to trade, or traveling peddlers coming through the area from time to time. 

Speaking of itinerant peddlers and merchants ... depending on the area, you might not have a local cobbler -- for instance -- but one riding a circuit.  Fellow's usually in town the first two weeks of May, the locals bring him cured hides, he churns out fitted good quality boots.  Probably would have no problem putting the adventurers on his list, if they didn't mind hanging out.  If the adventurers plod on through any time between June and April, no luck.

Locals also take on minor posts on a part-time basis – a village will have a constable, a handful of aldermen, and other more minor posts: a hayward, a woodward, depending on how stratified your culture is.  The village may have a one-room schoolhouse -- well, the dwelling of the teacher, anyway -- and classes might be taught by the scribe, a priest, or an educated villager.

Town up to 1500 people:

1 bank
3-5 scribes/notaries/lawyers (some working for the others)
2 churches (with 4-5 clergy between them and appropriate acolytes)
3 healer/herbalists/apothecaries
2 butchers
1 baker
1-2 fishers or trappers (depending on location)
1 full scale inn, 2-3 taverns, 1 brothel
3 blacksmiths (one a specialist, such as a farrier), 1 silver/tinsmith
3 cloth shops, one which is likely to be a rug or tapestry maker; 1 tailor
4-5 general merchants, one which is likely to be a specialist (outfitters, say)
2-3 mills
1 large-scale pottery
1-2 masons
1-2 carpenters, 1 cart/wheelwright
1-2 leatherworkers
7-8 miscellaneous businesses

Now we have a prosperous town, and the center of its district.  When the local farmers say "I'm walkin' t' town, be back tomorra," this is where they're headed.  The 500-person village might be in the middle of nowhere.  This town wouldn't have gotten this big if it was.

Other than general merchants and chandlers, they still aren't likely to have much in the way of off-the-shelf wares.  But ... I was struck when visiting the silversmith's shop in Historic Deerfield (replicating a mid-17th century New England frontier town).  It didn't have off-the-shelf either.  What it *did* have was a row of silver and pewter spoons, and a row of pewter plates and bowls.  They were all presentation pieces, done up with various borders, decorations and styles.  Pick a pattern, that's what the silversmith would make up for you.  This is how things were done low-tech.

A number of businesses have a DIY element.  Take a bakery, for instance.  Many a low-tech bakery was less about churning out loaves themselves than in providing oven space for the neighborhood housewives to bring their own loaves for baking, being rather more economical that way.  (This was also a sideline of neighborhood taverns, by the bye.)

This is the point where a small bureaucracy would arise.  The town would have a mayor/reeve, a captain for the local militia and who’d also be responsible for maintenance of any defenses, a tax collector and a dedicated scribe.  The mayor might double as the magistrate, if there wasn't a feudal ruler close to hand.  If a regional center of any sort, the town would attract central government staff – a district governor or noble and his staff, a couple dozen soldiers and officers – and there'd be an appropriate building housing the same: a manor house, a small keep.

For towns of over 1500 people, use the following percentages:

* Bakery: 1 per 750.
* Brewers: 1 per 1500, at a ratio of 3:1 between brewers and distilleries/wineries; obviously variable depending on what booze-producing crops you have.  Inns and taverns often brewed their own tipple.
* Butcher: 1 per 800.
* Carpenters: 1 per 500, at a ratio of 2:1 between "rough" carpenters and specialty crafts such as wheel/cartwrights, cabinetmakers, coopers and carvers.
* Churches: 1 per 750.
* Clergy: 1 per 200, obviously hugely variable depending on how religious your town is.
* Dyers: 1 per 3000.  This signifies a large, industrial-style operation, as opposed to smaller household- or job-lot sized businesses.
* Financial: 1 per 1000, at a ratio of 1:2 between banks and moneychangers/lenders.
* Fishmongers: 1 per 400 (selling fresh) in a port, 1 per 1200 (selling dried or salted) inland.
* Foundries: 1 per 5000.  Again, a large-scale industrial operation.
* General Merchants: 1 per 350, at a ratio of 3:1:1 between “country stores,” salters/spice merchants and brokers/factors/large-scale shippers.
* Inn/Tavern: 1 per 200, at a ratio of 1:5 between inns and taverns.  These neighborhood taverns are not your stereotype Giant Common Room places; a period neighborhood tavern seated about 30 with a bar about the size of a kitchen counter, and the clientele was exclusively from that block. (This aside from that a number of shopkeepers would end the business day by setting out a few stools and a barrel of brew, turning into impromptu barkeeps.)
* Leatherworkers: 1 per 500, at a ratio of 2:1 between generic leatherworkers and cobblers/saddlers/etc.
* Masons: 1 per 500, at a ratio of 1:2:4 between sculptors, masons and stonecutters.
* Mills: 1 per 600, at a rough ratio of 3:1 between grist mills and sawmills, fulling mills and the like.
* Potteries: 1 per 500, at a ratio of 1:4 between glaziers/glassblowers and potteries.
* Scribes: 1 per 150, at a ratio of 1:2:5 between lawyers, notaries and scribes.
* Smith: 1 per 500, at a ratio of 3-4:1 between blacksmiths and silver/tin/goldsmiths/armorers.
* Tanners: 1 per 3500.  Another large, industrial-style operation, as opposed to smaller household- or job-lot sized businesses.
* Teachers: 1 per 200, of which 1 in 4-5 are non-teaching scholars and scientists, who might nonetheless do part-time teaching and tutoring to raise some coin.  Small neighborhood schools and academies were far more common in medieval and Renaissance times than many folks imagine, and literacy rates in urban communities were 50% or better above the blue-collar classes.
* Textile trades: 1 per 100, at a ratio of 3:1:1 between weavers/spinners/carders, tailors/carpet/tapestry makers and furriers.  A town of this size probably has at least one large-scale cloth manufactory.
* Universities: These come around one to a city.  Starting at about 10,000 people, you’ll get at least an advanced institute of learning of some sort.  Capitals of any size, as well as major regional cities, will have a full-blown university.

Miscellaneous Shops: 1 per 200.  Possibilities for these:

* Common: stables, brothels, ropemakers, herbalist/apothecaries, barbers, lampmakers, painters, bathhouses, sharpeners, thatchers.

* Less common: bowyers/fletchers, ship’s chandlers, candlemakers, horse trainers, jewelers, outfitters, pawnshops, soapmakers, undertakers, messengers/heralds.

* Rare: gaming houses, perfumers, papermakers, seers, engravers, clockmakers, animal trainers, architects, cartographers, engineers, instrument makers. 

Keep in mind regional trades – for instance, a seaport would have sailmakers, at least one ropewalk, fishdryers, nautical carvers, chandlers, warehouses, specialty ship’s carpenters and smiths, navigators, steersmen, boatmakers, tattoo artists, shipwrights, and if large enough marine underwriters and freight shippers.  A mountain mining town would have specialty manufacturing shops producing mining tools and equipment, sawmills, assayers, alchemists (to produce certain chemicals necessary for mining and assaying certain ores), trappers and the like.

This is the population level where guilds will start to exist; around 4-5 similar businesses is the minimum number to form a sustainable guild.  Those aren’t the only support groups, of course; churches will have at least one sodality (and usually more than that) each.

The market square of a town this size now only sees the local farmers selling vegetables, but itinerant traders peddling just about everything else.  These are often heavily regulated and taxed, and crackdowns from town guilds are frequent.  Entertainers also exist, largely performing in the market, in front of any civic building or church, or available to play in an inn.

Towns and cities of this level have sizable bureaucracies, operating out of a civic hall.  Areas such as tax collection, records, justice and civic defense spawn whole departments.  A seaport would have a harbormaster, his staff, and naval units; any trading town would have an official in charge of weights and measures ... and probably in possession of the "standard" weights and weighbeams!  Formal military companies almost certainly exist. 

4)    Design

Cities aren’t particularly logical – the odds of having a nice grid layout, if you’re mapping it, are poor.  Consider that your city started out as a village.  It’ll have a relatively primitive tangle of streets in the center, haphazardly radiating out of the original village, which will center around the river/harbor/major road running through the middle, or perhaps around a religious center, castle or other fortification.

Planned towns did exist, but it took certain situations: a government seeking to settle an unpeopled area, a feudal lord wanting the profits and trade a town could provide.  Even so, most of them quickly spread organically from its original planned center ... those that survived.  (Many planned towns quickly failed.)  Plans were sometimes imposed upon extant towns and cities by new rulers or by the growing unsuitability of the original town; numerous cities in Europe had "oldtowns" and "newtowns" pressed together.  Another factor would be in the aftermath of a war or a major fire -- the latter being the chief danger to a medieval town -- where entire city blocks and neighborhoods might be redesigned after being razed.

Obviously, waterborne businesses (mills, shipwrights) will cluster around said river.  It was common for a river town to expand to the other bank, which necessitated at least one bridge.  Oftentimes the rich and poor parts of town were differentiated by which bank of the river they were on.

Low-class and odoriferous trades (tanneries, dyers, soapmakers, slaughterhouses) will cluster downwind in the “poor” part of town.  Beyond that, certain trades required a lot of space -- metalworkers, cartwrights, potters, animal trades -- and gravitated to the peripheries where land was more available and cheaper.

As towns grow larger, civic areas and buildings emerge: courts, wells and aqueducts, town halls, theaters, multiple market squares, caravanserais, jails, belltowers, stadia.

Buildings would also grow taller.  As the town got increasingly cramped, the only way to grow was up.  Townhouses gained a second story, and sometimes a third, and a fourth.  Seldom designed to take the load, with oft-mediocre building materials, and where no one had ever heard of building codes, structural collapses were all too frequent.

Psst ... don't forget canals.  Something you see in a lot of maps of low-tech cities that you do not see on maps of RPG cities are canals.  A lot of low-tech cities had a lot of canals.  It is vastly easier to haul large cargoes on water than it is on land -- much less congestion, many fewer horses, much greater carrying capacity.  (Even today, something like 95% of the world's trade by tonnage is water-borne.)  Canals also help the defensibility of a city ... and speaking of which:
 
5)    Defense

If the town is walled -- and unless your town is in a strong, powerful realm with secure borders and no internal threats (not a hallmark of RPG settings), it absolutely will be -- it may have been gotten its walls quite some time before.  If so, chances are the town’s grown beyond the perimeter.  Medieval towns were almost invariably horribly overcrowded, disease-ridden places, and while it took extreme population pressure to abandon the protection of the walls, sooner or later it happened.

Some medieval cities had several separate walls, built haphazardly over centuries, all attempts to maintain some manner of defensible perimeter.  Consider also that such construction is expensive – building a castle in just a few years took so much money few nobles managed it. The local nobles and magnates were generally taxed to pay for improving city defenses, and generally did so grudgingly, intermittently, and often only under duress.  Defenses were also expensive to maintain (it didn't help that they were often poorly built, with mediocre materials, by the aforementioned strongarmed magnates), and it's entirely possible that broad sections of the walls are in disrepair.  Indeed, the reason why so many Roman-era buildings were in ruins or disappeared entirely is that they were often cannibalized for the stone necessary to build or repair walls, in addition to other buildings. 

Beyond that, walls are inconvenient.  They make carrying goods to and fro a pain in the ass, and they're an impediment to growth and renovation.  (This didn't make the magnates any happier about coughing up the gold to build them.)  Wharves, docks, shipyards and mills are going to be on the wrong side of walls.  Gates built in sufficient number to relieve the pressure compromise the defensibility of the place.

Speaking of which, soldiers.  Standing forces, in medieval western Europe, were by our standards astonishingly small.  Take medieval Southampton, one of England's chief ports and the entrepot for the wool and wine trade between England and France in the Middle Ages, with an estimated population within the walls between 2500-2800.  Even after a catastrophic raid by the French in 1338, with the financial support of major nobles the King directed them to provide, the town struggled to maintain a permanent garrison of as much as a hundred soldiers.  Organized civic police forces just did not exist (at the time, Southampton maintained just six night watchmen), and a castle garrison might well be a couple dozen soldiers or less.

6) Personalities

A theme that keeps repeating throughout medieval annals is that towns and cities are firmly in the grasp of an oligarchy.  A small handful of families and personalities dominate local politics, commerce and social life, often for generations.  They own the guilds that matter, public posts are filled by their patronage, civic amusements are graced by their money and presence.  The laws and rules are rigged in their favor, and the culture is nowhere close to being a meritocracy.  Fail to be very, very polite to the Astirians or the Riannels, and suddenly merchants are very slow to take your orders, and the city's bureaucrats are all "out in meetings" when you show up ...

This ethos doesn't sit well with the average gamer, raised in a Western democracy relatively free of corruption and bearing at least the appearance of a meritocracy, and bringing to the gaming table the paradigm that the PCs are the swaggering masters of the earth before whom lesser mortals (read, "NPCs") all kowtow.  And it's okay if that's one of the aspects of medieval life -- along pervasive filth, disease, slavery, racism, fanaticism and sexual abuse -- you don't want to play.  YMMV ("your mileage may vary," code on many a gaming forum for "Whatever works for you is okay, it doesn't bother me if you have different preferences") is one of the more useful aphorisms to keep in mind when doing tabletop RPG setting creation. 

7) Giant Cities

Yes, I know.  A lot of gamers love giant, million-man cities.  A lot of gamewriters love them, too.  They just don't work.  A city of half a million people or more on medieval tech -- a Rome, a Constantinople, a Baghdad, a Chang'an -- requires a continent-spanning empire and awesome transportation infrastructure to survive.  Once the raiders/pirates have free run of things, once the empire falls, those cities collapse overnight.  In the course of just one century, the population of Rome fell twentyfold, and it didn't get back over a million for over 1500 years, until the 1930s.  And why bother?  A city of 10,000 will have several hundred businesses, more than all but the craziest gamers are ever going to create.  

Heck, take medieval England, the land gamewriters and settings creators love to emulate.  Only two cities in England -- London and York -- are known with a certainty to have broken 20,000 residents at any point in the medieval era.  (London topped out at around 50,000.)  Bristol and Norwich topped out at just over 10,000, and even counting the suburbs, Southampton couldn't have had as much as 5000. 

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POSTSCRIPT:  A kind reader commented on MDDR Pt I, and made a remark that provoked this postscript: that he'd read Ross' numbers, as many gamers have, but that the numbers didn't work for him.

This is important.  Let's take those 52 scabbardmakers, shall we?  That seems ludicrous, but presuming the number is accurate, there are a few possible explanations.  One is simply that there were a honking lot of swords and daggers in 13th century Paris.  (Not the rapiers and main-gauches most people think of when they think of Parisian swordsmen – those weren't invented for over 200 more years.  We don't actually know what kinds of sword for certain; the earliest known combat manual, the so-called "Tower manuscript," dates from no earlier than 1300.)

So, okay: now what happens if you envision Paris with severe weapon restrictions?

Answer: you probably don't have many scabbardmakers.

And that's the notion to have in mind when assigning numbers.  If you have an illiterate populace, there'll be far fewer booksellers, papermakers and the like.  (The number of scribes and teachers might not change – business still needs to be transacted, and those teachers might be working on rote memorization!)  If there's no native clay, there'll be more basketmakers, more turners and more leatherworkers churning out substitutes, and buildings will be made of wood, not brick.  If the Word of the Gods is that anyone who sails out of sight of land is accursed and damned, a "port" town might have a few coast-hugging vessels for bulk transport and a modest fishing fleet, and that's it.  If half the population of your town are 400-lb rock trolls, you'll need a lot more food coming in to support it.  And so on.

One last factor to keep in mind, not just for demographics but for anyone trying to tell you How Things Were In Medieval Times: we're talking about a few hundred years.  The notion that "medieval" was some monolithic state of being where everything everywhere was exactly the same for 400 years is nonsense.  Poor, chilly, backwards, thinly populated Scotland was a far different place than the rich, densely populated, glittering city-states of Northern Italy (and, as to that, both were far different places than China, India, Persia, Africa, Japan, Mesoamerica ... lands our Eurocentric myopia usually leave out of "medieval" equations).  The 11th century was a far different time than the 14th.

Heck, think of our own era, and how quickly things change.  What kind of businesses exist in our cities, and in what numbers?  In 1954, computers were giant installations that cost millions of dollars and filled large rooms; you could no more obtain them retail than you could walk into Filene's and buy an armored regiment.  In 1984, indy computer stores were popping up all over the place: I bought my first one from a dedicated Atari ST store in Boston.  In 2014, those computer stores are now mostly gone – computers are ubiquitous consumer appliances you can get in your average department store.  I doubt it'll take until 2044 for "personal computers" to be museum pieces, and everyone's using smartphones and tablets ... or their successors.

So – YMMV.

 

POSTSCRIPT II:  If you've read this article before, you might have found it changed.  I first published it over ten years ago.  I've expanded it, tossed in a few more things, tweaked the numbers here and there, cited a book or two I've read in the meantime.  I mention this for a reason: medieval demographics and economics is a still-evolving field.  Our scholarship is better.  Our sources have improved.  New facts, new materials come to light.  Old shibboleths are found wanting and slough away.  The bias of the field in favor of western Europe fades.  Scholars of a previous era, their partisan axegrinding and feuds forgotten, are supplanted by newer ones.

And I keep reading and finding new information myself.  So why not?  Anyone writing a blog does so at least in part out of a healthy ego, but the goal, after all, is to open eyes and make it easier for you to run games.  If I point fingers at others and claim that their numbers aren't good enough, then I need to cowboy up and make my own as good as I can manage.  So drop in on this article if you have a mind, every rare once in a while.  I might have gotten a clue between now and then.

 

† - Indianapolis, and the founders thought the White River was navigable.