Food (3.1): Peasants

Now, at last we can deal with the relevant numbers and establish demographics. To be fair, the purpose of the whole FOOD cycle was to find the minimum requirements of area and population and then to drop this topic for a really long time after.

I dropped the blog for a long time due to the personal reasons, but hopefully it’s time to continue now. In the beginning the posts will be shorter, though.

Why peasants matter?

Basically, medieval peasants are often the most generic and boring part of the roleplaying games and books, just sitting in the corner and quietly spending their lives growing food for more interesting people (at least until they start a peasant revolt).

But there is a good reason why peasants seem boring (besides the fact that agriculture is really boring indeed after just a while). Basically, peasants can’t leave his fields for a few days unless he wants to starve in Winter: plowing and fertilizing land, seeding or planting this or that, weeding, harvesting, storing crops… all these things not only need to be done, they need to be done in time. Planting too soon is useless because of freezing, planting too late will severely decrease yields. Harvest is even worse: missing just a few days means your crop will end up on the ground, not in your granary. All the while, a peasant needs to pasture animals and cut wood for

So the question is simple: for a country of population X, how many boring peasants do you need?

Historical demographics

There isn’t that much data on medieval households, but I did find a plenty of interesting sources: a very detailed table on land ownership and households in St. Germain (France), a paper with various agricultural indicators for England, and, finally, a research with demographics and cross-country comparisons.

If you believe the Domesday book, basically the earliest available Medieval census I’ve ever heard of, the urban population is measly 3% or, if you account for missed towns and missed people, much more optimistic 8% in 1100s. Besides tax records like Domesday book, we don’t have much precise data and must resort to vague estimates: unless something very peculiarly happened, nobody counted peasants.

Here, in Table 1 (page 7), Robert Allen provides the estimated demographic structure of several European countries in 1300. For England, 4.4% of the population are considered urban, 19.2% are rural and non-agricultural, and the rest, tremendous 76.4%, are the most generic peasants of Medieval Age.

As the technology and the prosperity grew through the later Middle Ages and early Modern Age (with an occasional war, string of famines, or plague), the non-peasant rural population grew twice, from 19% to 36% in 1800, and equaled the peasant population, and the true urban part of the population metaphorically exploded from 5% to almost 30%. For the context, the modern urban population of the Western countries has grown basically twice since 1800.

Beware that 1300 of Allen’s research (and, arguably, even the 1100s in the Domesday book) is far too good for the typical Middle Ages: for the few previous centruries the weather was particularly good, technology went far up, and the population was at peak, just about to die out in the infamous Black Death, the most violent epidemics of the recorded history.

Also, personally, I think the non-agricultural population in countryside is way overestimated: regardless of their main occupations, most rural and many urban people (obviously, not the downtown dwellers) still had some arable land, garden and livestock, e.g. were at least partially agricultural. Even the highly prized professionals could not live reliably by their craft: medieval were too small and foreign trade was… episodic at best. My own family history hints that industrially-employed urban families still had their fair share of agriculture well into the 20th century.

Where to start?

The 75/20/5 distribution (75% peasants, 20% rural non-peasants, 5% urban dwellers) of 1300 England is a product of relatively prosperous years, High Middle Ages so to speak. You can start here if you want large and wealthy cities, plentiful clergy and aristocracy, wealthy peasants, and brighter, more optimistic stories overall — and the more developed the society is, the smaller the number of peasants gets (it’s 35/35/30 in industrialized 1800 England, and something akin to 8/12/80 in modern-day developed country).

For the more depressing, gloomier and poorer Witcher-like dark fantasy setting, 87/10/3 distribution of the adapted Domesday data or even something more peasant-centric would be more believable.

How different this is in your world?

Basically, it’s a rare occasion where you don’t need to add anything from yourself. The more developed the agriculture in your world is, the more prosperous are the people, the more urban-dominated setting you can choose.

That simple.

The next issue should come quickly and answer the second part of the question: “how much land this hypothetical country needs?”.