Question on medieval populations

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13 Spider Bloody Chain

13 Spider Bloody Chain

Grandmaster Knight
Let's take a "mid-sized" village somewhere in rural England or (what is now) France, ca. 1100 AD.

How many people would live in such a village, including men, women, and children but not any nobles in the vicinity? Of those people, what percentage of them would be expected to do mostly or solely agricultural labor (including cattle work)? And of those people, what percentage of them would qualify as army-worthy?
 
This is a very interresting question, and the answers would differ per country or even per region.

[list type=decimal]
[*]About the size of a village compared to that of a hamlet or a town (AngloSaxon; Burh, Norman French; Borough, Middle-English; Burgh)

You could read the Domesday book which was written during the time of Early Norman England. It contains the names, population number and location of all settlements in England at that time. The populations however are various per region since population density in the vicinity of medieval London was different than say medieval Yorkshire, so a village to be called a village in Yorkshire might be considered a hamlet in southern England. Pure guessing is that a town contained roughly more as 500 residents (the largest towns where London and Winchester, containing resp. ca 10.000 and 6.000 inhabitants).
Though the real difference between villages and towns lie in the jurisdiction (in a town there is a court) and usually something of socio-economic importance (a market or a port). A hamlet would contain 1 - 10 families (say 5 to 50 people) and villages would be somewhere between a hamlet and a burgh in population number.


[*]Concerning agricultural work, what do you mean by it? Serfs or peasantry?

Peasantry contains much more than only agriculture (crop growing and stockfarming). Peasantry contains al kind of selfproviding or community providing work to gain basic items like food (including fishing and hunting), clothing and housing, any surplus is either being stored for later or sold on a local market (if available). Most people in villages and hamlets where peasants who either had some rights (for wich they had to pay taxes) or had practically no rights (and no land) and worked as a serf on the land of the lord, in return they were protected by the lord, could keep some of the harvest and where allowed to live in a hamlet/village of the lord.
Farmers in the strict sense of the word were rare in Norman England, farming in a strict sense is based on specialized agricultural work of which the bulk is sold on markets (as well local, regional as international) other products are from their own (partly) peasantlike work or is purchased from markets. Medieval farmers were freemen and wealthy, they stood qua social hierarchy right under the nobility and high church clergy.
Often landless lowranked noble women and men intermarried with wealthy farmers, the nobles to gain some land and wealth, the farmers to gain a noble title.
Farmers were in the timeset of 1100 AD Europe, more common in the less feudalized parts of the Lowlands, the Alps, North-Italy (Contado), Jutland and parts of the Scandinavian peninsula (also Iceland and Greenland btw)


[*] Concering Armywork

For armywork a local Lord usually rounded up some middle aged or adolescent peasants (think about serfs or peasants who didn't payed their taxes/dues) to fill the ranks. In parts of Europe were farmers were more common, farmers themself fought, since as freemen they had the right to carry weapons. Concerning landless freemen, a lot of them worked some time in military service of a lord, town or mercenary captain (though in England mercenaries were rare and mostly of foreign origin in early Norman England) to obtain some money (to purchase land) or work their way up to a respectable position at a town or lords court.

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Interesting...

I'll ask my question in another way: in a village of, oh, 300-400 people, that has no critical socio-economic importance (it's just a village somewhere). Let's assume that roughly half of the populace are male "adults", adults being humans old enough to perform work that is critical to maintaining the village.

Let's also assume that, for some reason, a number of those adult males were somehow conscripted into an army and they never came back (they all died, or were taken prisoner and sold as slaves elsewhere, etc). Thus, the village is partly deprived of a labor source. How many of the adult males can this village afford to lose until it can no longer function?
 
Depends on the village economy. Usually, peasants of both genders worked, and they spent most of their time working their Lord's fields, in return for which they usually got a small parcel of land to work themselves for sustenance. Lowering the labour pool doesn't prevent the village functioning, since subsistence farming is the main means of survival (and is actually helped by reducing the number of mouths to feed). What it does affect is the yield the Lord gets from his fields, which means lower income for him.
 
Depends largely on the local organisation of labour. If most of the villagers are freeholders, then it's a fairly safe bet they'll scrap by, somehow, even if it means old women and blind men and toddlers working the fields. Of course, the general prosperity will decline sharply and the taxes that they'll be able to pay with it--in fact, probably the greatest threat to the village's existence is that some moron with authority gets pissed off at the very low tax income and razes the place.

If they're tenant farmers, they'll probably be expelled for not paying their rent in full. If many landless workers were hired by a few rich farmers, the women and children will probably end up starving, since they won't be hired or won't be hired for sufficient wages. A similar story will occur if they're serfs on the lord's land, since an underproductive serf family "doesn"t deserve food and/or shelter". Sharecroppers might be protected by long leases, but then if the lease is revocable then a few poor harvest means expulsion as well.
 
For the total population of an an average village, it's easy enough to calculate. The Domesday book has about 13,000 entries for an area covering maybe 100,000 km2 (England minus various parts) and an estimated population of about 1.5 million, iirc.

Frisicus had a good description on the difference between hamlets and villages, but I think his numbers are a little low. The Domesday book means one settlement for every 8 km2 if they are evenly spread out (which they aren't) with an average size of about 100 people. Eight km2 means that each settlement has a "catchment" radius of about 1.5 km, meaning that settlements are about 3 km apart if they were evenly spread out, maybe 2 km if they are distributed realistically (along river valleys and roads, with wooded hills in between).

Now, a community of 100 people probably can't support most of the institutions that rural folks will need, if not on a daily basis than on a weekly basis. Mills, castles, churches and/or Friday mosques, markets, etc will probably be located in centralized, larger villages or market towns. In Sicily I'd guess that there were about 150 of these for an area of 22,000 km2. In Domesday-covered England this would mean about 800 settlements, which is probably-not-too-coincidentally close to the number of burroughs that ultimately received a license to operate a market.

So, instead of thinking of villages, think of a "rural economic unit" composed of one large village surrounded by a number of hamlets and small farms. Travel time (a few hours in each direction with a cart, probably) determines the size of the unit, crop yield determines the population per km2, and many, many other factors -- legal, military, economic -- determine the distribution between village and hamlet.

To pull a number out of a hat for England in 1100, let's say each unit represents 120km2. Each hamlet has 20 households, or 100 people each x 15 = 1500 per "unit", and each market village has 100 households, or 500 people, for a total of 2000. Sicily in contrast would have had a much higher total population (it was the grain-basked of the Med for a while) but because of the constant warfare and other reasons, a higher concentration in the hilltop towns. So in Sicily maybe 2500 people live in the towns, and 2500 in each of a dozen small farms, to come up with some very out-of-the-blue answers.

I thought this website did a pretty good job of doing speculative maps for difference village sizes: http://www.aedificium.org/Maps/LocalMaps.html

I might have done the numbers wrong, but that's the gist of my estimations.

If you really want, I took some very detailed notes from the Domesday book on Yorkshire for the (now on hold) Northumbria mod. I can post those if you like.

***

I know that this doesn't address the main part of your question. I don't think that half the population would be fighting-age males -- add in children and the elderly, and you could go as low as 25 or 30 percent. Cirdan's point is very relevant about the type of labor involved affecting what would happen if the males disappeared. There could be huge dislocations of population in the Medieval era that would never have shown up in the aristocracy-centered chronicles at all.

For some very basic, very rough figures, I seem to recall that the conventional wisdom is that pre-industrial societies can supply a maximum of about 10% of the population to the military or to other mobilizations, although I might be wrong about that, and this could not be maintained for very long at all. The largely agricultural Tsarist Russia only mobilized about 7 percent of its population for the whole of WW1.

Labor obviously was a relatively scarce commodity in the medieval era, or they wouldn't have introduced serfdom. However, I suspect resource rather than labor shortages were the ultimate cap of mass mobilization, however. For medieval campaigns, peasants weren't mobilized en masse very often because they were difficult to feed and they weren't much use in battle. This didn't mean that harvests didn't affect the pace of campaigns -- peasants would want to be home at harvest time because it was important to them as individuals, even if there wasn't a critical labor shortage overall.

France in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars might be a better model to answer your question, as better roads and canals meant that you could move and feed larger armies, and the use of the musket meant that large amounts of untrained troops were more militarily useful.
 
You know, I think the real question revolves around a recruitment rate, for example per year, and thus a real answer would have to take birth and maturity rates into account. At some point, you might have x number extra sons hanging around on the farm (or, for the sake of mount & blade, extra daughters, so we might take societies with more egalitarian worldviews into account to fudge numbers even more, if we want :razz:). These men can go and create a new household in the village, move to the city, or possibly be conscripted or join a military force. With a net population gain/infrastructure growth rate high enough to saturate the 'room to grow' in terms of population density one gains from technology and expansion, we might say that we have a certain percentage of adults of the population available every decade/year/season who could go off and join an army and at least not directly affect/weaken their communities. I wouldn't make this number very high. This is possibly your minimum for who and how much a lord might conscript or hire when he needs to get some soldiers.

Your maximum percentage before the citizenry hit the breaking point is something I'd put no higher than 20%. This is double the usual figure for peasant levies, if I recall correctly, because if we assume say three dependents for every farmer - which is generous - we peg farmers at a quarter of total population and maybe a third of total resource consumption - working men eat more than children or the elderly. Taking out a fifth of our workforce permanently and claiming that they're dead or sold as galley slaves means the rest have to work up to 20% harder, with mitigating help from dependents, over a period of years. Factor in plague, miscarriage from your newly-created stress, religious upheavals, and everything else, and you speak of hard years where NATURE is what can likely break a village even if the landlord's pleased with his taxes. But that 20% is a number one could claim I pulled out of thin air; the more relevant point is that usually peasantry and serfs only balk or rebel against authority when they can no longer make their way, for example when they're being taxed into death by starvation in any of a number of ways and have no other viable choice. And taking too much manpower off the wheat-field might be a form of such taxation, or in the case of freedmen of lethal, unacceptable coercion.
 
nijis said:
France in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars might be a better model to answer your question, as better roads and canals meant that you could move and feed larger armies, and the use of the musket meant that large amounts of untrained troops were more militarily useful.
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I don't think early modern Europe can be compared to medieval Europe, because of the different social and economic structure but also the different scope of warfare. The American frontier would be a much better point of comparison--the proportion of the population that could be mobilised for a "puntivie expedition" against the Indians in a small town built illegally on Indian land would be fairly close to that which a medieval village could mobilise for a conflict between neighbouring lords. Generally speaking, the most important limiting factor in a levy is the scope of the campaign--you can theoretically conscript anyone who can hold a pointy stick and poke the pointy end in the enemy's direction, but the more you mobilise, the sooner you will be forced to disband your levy. A complex and productive economy is another limiting factor--the more the per capita demand for labour is, the more expensive mobilisation becomes. A good example for studying this is the ancient Greek poleis, and you'll note that they were eventually forced to abandon the "everyone is the army" concept and become dependant on mercenaries.
 
Cirdan said:
nijis said:
France in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars might be a better model to answer your question, as better roads and canals meant that you could move and feed larger armies, and the use of the musket meant that large amounts of untrained troops were more militarily useful.
Click to expand...
I don't think early modern Europe can be compared to medieval Europe, because of the different social and economic structure but also the different scope of warfare. The American frontier would be a much better point of comparison--the proportion of the population that could be mobilised for a "puntivie expedition" against the Indians in a small town built illegally on Indian land would be fairly close to that which a medieval village could mobilise for a conflict between neighbouring lords. Generally speaking, the most important limiting factor in a levy is the scope of the campaign--you can theoretically conscript anyone who can hold a pointy stick and poke the pointy end in the enemy's direction, but the more you mobilise, the sooner you will be forced to disband your levy. A complex and productive economy is another limiting factor--the more the per capita demand for labour is, the more expensive mobilisation becomes. A good example for studying this is the ancient Greek poleis, and you'll note that they were eventually forced to abandon the "everyone is the army" concept and become dependant on mercenaries.
Click to expand...

Really good point -- the percentage of troops that can be mobilized decreases dramatically as the length of the campaign increases. A frontier punitive expedition is an excellent model for the upper limit for a farming (as opposed to nomadic or hunter-gatherer) society.

Ash Mantle also has a really good point about farming communities generating excess population who need to seek their fortune elsewhere (as settlers of newly-sewn land, soldiers, outlaws, or city-dwellers, which tended to lose more people to disease than were born there, and thus could absorb a constant supply of rural migrants). That would apply to long-term standing army/professional mercenary numbers, of course. The figure you give of 20 percent sounds like a good guess for a very short term "surge" offensive.

You might get some hard numbers on damage to communities from medieval-style war by looking at modern Africa, in particular southern Sudan. I remember that a raid during the planting season could end up driving the entire village into the bush to look for food. Adults could survive on leaves and roots, but the children tended to die.
 
I think I was actually making clumsy strides towards a 'this will weaken them as much as is permissible in the long term' figure, but thanks.

Is Africa really comparable? On the face of it, seems like they have a different ecosystem (read - diseases and methods of controlling them) and social order and the weapons they use on people tend to change how the injuries play out. A guy who's had some limb damage, for example to joints or muscles, can be useful as a lame worker; someone who's lost a limb in a minefield or had something amputated by virtue of machine gun fire, though...
 
My understanding is that the majority of deaths in southern Sudan in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, came from famine due to the disruption of agriculture by raiding -- raids by cavalry, in many cases. The raiders (or possibly guerrillas) disrupted sewing or harvesting, stole herds, and kidnapped or conscripted some of whom they caught, and hunger (and hunger-related illness) did the rest.

In Bahr al-Ghazal in the 1990s, for example, my understanding was that government-allied militias would be protecting an annual supply train that moved at a few kilometers a day (the tracks needed to be rebuilt every time), and the horsemen would fan out on either side to take what they could from surrounding villages. It all sounded very much like an English chavauchee through France in the Hundred Years War.
 
Ash_Mantle said:
I think I was actually making clumsy strides towards a 'this will weaken them as much as is permissible in the long term' figure, but thanks.
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You means as in terms of how many people can be enlisted into a standing army? The short answer is very, very few. Nowadays, even 1% would be asbolutely enormous. China has less than 0.1% of her population in the military; even Israël, the most heavily militarised society on Earth, only has 2.42% of its population on active duty, and that's in a country with the highest per capita weapons production in the world, where military expenses have the State perpetually on the edge of bankruptcy (a few years back they were shutting down most of their consulates to save money) and moreover, which can only keep afloat due to financial aid from abroad, from the U.S. annual three billion dollars of aid to the collection tins that many Jewish businesses around the world present to their customers.

In the Middle Ages, things would have actually been surprisingly similar. While the cost of each soldier may have dramatically increased since then, so has the surplus generated by each civillian. A medieval society might have been able to keep 1 or 2% of the population at most on a permanent war footing, whether by having a true professional standing army or by rotating portions of a much larger semi-professional force through spells of active duty. In such a context, the yearly recruitment would generally be secondary--to return to my modern examples, Israël (which is at the stable end-phase of the famous "demographic transition" you may have seen in school) could replace her entire active service contingent with raw recruits (i.e. not using reserves at all, only enlisting people as they reach military age) in about eighteen months (or a little less than twice as long if you only count males). Soldiers are easily replaceable; their training, weapons and officer corps are much more difficult to replace.

 
Cirdan said:
Ash_Mantle said:
I think I was actually making clumsy strides towards a 'this will weaken them as much as is permissible in the long term' figure, but thanks.
Click to expand...
You means as in terms of how many people can be enlisted into a standing army?
Click to expand...

If I was to assign a figure for that, I'd go far lower than twenty percent :razz: One man in every five to the standing army? Hell no, not if we assume the agricultural base is mostly centered around wheat, wherein one farmer has something like a ten percent surplus to sell to the city folk after we count an acceptable average of dependents just to make things tolerable/stable.

No, the answer I gave was to the OP's question regarding a loss of able-bodied men for agriculture and other domestic pursuits due to death and defeat of levies on the battlefield. Which means that until there's another levy, material or monetary taxes aren't necessarily likely to be raised just to support the increased number of soldiers because they are all dead or galley slaves someone else has to feed.
 
There's the problem though; Medieval society was feudal rather than an open market. Peasant's couldn't sell the crops they harvested because they didn't belong to them, they were the property of the Lord. Most peasants subsisted on the rights of forage and grazing they held to communal land, and farmed much smaller plots of land mainly used for growing vegetables and keeping small numbers of livestock. It would be a lucky peasant indeed who owned enough land to produce any kind of surplus.
Generally it's the nobility who would suffer in a protracted war before the peasants (barring of course their village being plundered); while the peasants are fighting for their lord they're not harvesting his crops, which means he's not drawing an income from his lands.
 
Wait, I'm weak on history and you're confusing me. I thought that they were taxed on surplus and allowed to eat grain-based products and part of their crops. I wasn't aware that the entirety of production went to the lord o.0 Am I thinking eighteenth century and onward? If so, can you point me towards some sort of short, concise document that explains this **** to me, minus misconceptions? This is suddenly very interesting.
 
Archonsod said:
There's the problem though; Medieval society was feudal rather than an open market. Peasant's couldn't sell the crops they harvested because they didn't belong to them, they were the property of the Lord. Most peasants subsisted on the rights of forage and grazing they held to communal land, and farmed much smaller plots of land mainly used for growing vegetables and keeping small numbers of livestock. It would be a lucky peasant indeed who owned enough land to produce any kind of surplus.
Generally it's the nobility who would suffer in a protracted war before the peasants (barring of course their village being plundered); while the peasants are fighting for their lord they're not harvesting his crops, which means he's not drawing an income from his lands.
Click to expand...
Except that most medieval societies, even in Western Europe, were not entirely feudal. Additionally, in the late 13th century serfdom became economically obsolete, and the dominant form of exploitation of the land by the nobility became sharecropping. What you write is appplicable only to serfs, not to tenant farmers or sharecroppers (who were more common than serfs in Western Europe for most of the Middle Ages).
 
let's see:
the local lord conscripts the father, who dies in the conflict, so the mother, children and the optional grandparent would have to work much more than before to make up for it, because the father was one of the main workers and the lord has not decreased his demands(he might even increase them in order to make up for the resources lost in the campaign).
some time later the lord conscripts, say, the two older of the three sons, leaving the mother, any younger boys and the daughters to toil even more(the grandparent may have passed away in the meantime, both from exhaustion and from grief over their son). The two conscripts likely never return, either dead, captured or decided to try their luck somewhere else as mercs/brigands.
what you're left with is a broken family that ultimately cannot sustain itself, the mother possibly dying of exertion and starvation, some of the young kids dying of the same, the rest dispersed, either going to other areas or falling pray to the much more numerous brigands in the area, though some of the boys might actually become brigands. Brigandage because of famine/heartless lords happened much more than open rebellion.

The example I'm giving is from spanish history, where the nobility was exhausting the populace so much in wars and spending money like crazy, leading to severe crisis(the king couldn't work in his cabinet at night cuz there was no money for candles :shock:). It doesn't happen except for in the worst of circumstances(which, though, happened often enough in medieval Europe), but it's a very real possibility.
oh, and let's not forget - the less workers, the less food, the more work to meet the demands of all the throats AND the lord, the more brigands and the more people to protect the village from them(and from the mercs the lord might have hired), thus the less food, and so on and so forth. not a pretty picture in general.
 
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