Interesting article about Medieval population studies as it applies to imagined worlds

[Aquilonian]

The following article by an expert in population studies contains very useful info for anyone wishing to imagine a plausible Medieval-type world. It contains links to two further articles critiquing the very implausible human geography of Westeros (Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire). The author is not actually slagging GRR Martin's books, just objecting to people banging on about how realistic they are. There's a lot about the practicalities of raising, supplying and deploying medieval armies which I hadn't thought of despite being quite interested in medieval history.

Notes on Medieval Population Geography

It’s Kind of Hard to Make It Easy

medium.com

 

[Valtharius]

Lyman Stone! I've interacted with him on Twitter. Cool dude.

 

[Dave]

This makes no difference to what he says, but it is very difficult to estimate the population because quite a lot of people went unrecorded. There were large numbers of people outside towns who lived very transient lives and didn't contribute economically. Others will only appear in records as baptisms, marriages and burials, sometimes as apprentices, and then again sometimes not at all. You can do family reconstructions to pin point every individual from births, deaths and marriages and then reconstruct up to total populations from that, but it is a time consuming process.

If you are very interested in this subject then I have "The Population History of England 1541 -1871, a reconstruction" by EA WRIGLEY and RS SCHOFIELD (1981) and although that is after the Medieval period, this is exactly what they did. It is a very wordy and statistical book, but Wrigley's earlier work was a reconstruction on a village in the North East where I grew up, and is an easier read.

I hadn't thought about what Lyman Stone says regarding migrations due to famine or war though. As far as I am aware, that didn't create any notable population level uplifts into Great Britain, but in your imaginary worlds it could be really important. I agree with him that population level down-shifts would be far more common for all kinds of reasons such as War, Famine, Disease - visits by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

 

[paranoid marvin]

When reading fantasy it's probably not a good idea to dwell too long on such thoughts.

 

[sknox]

Just a small codicil to Dave's post. While it is nearly impossible to count all individuals (even in modern times!), that's not the useful record. More common was to record hearths--another way of saying households, though that gets problematic too. Which led to a whole generation and more of historians discussing (that's what we call arguing) average number of people per hearth. Average family size.

We do have nearly random sources that let us look at population more deeply. Domesday Book is a famous one, but the catasto of Florence in 1424 is another, worked by David Herlihy and his students. Scattered early parish registers. In short, there are some small caches that let us test the broader guesses about population against specific data. So those guesses are a bit more reliable than mere deductive guesses. This is why estimates at the end of the Middle Ages are, broadly speaking, more reliable than earlier estimates.