Building a medieval village, or, being overly detailed and ridiculous

[WarKitty]

Okay, that makes sense. Very well thunk-out.

My other comment would have been about the village homes inside the bailey, but you've accounted for that as well--they're using the keep for cover (and stables) and rebuilt their homes in its shadow.

Yeah, the whole feel is supposed to be that it was at one point a thriving town with a healthy cottage industry - the locating made it perfect for tanning and there were skilled leatherworkers who sold fancy carved and dyed products at high prices.

Actually, if you have a couple of girls who are seven or eight, they'll be helping take care of the toddlers. This relieves some of the childcare burden from the mothers and lets them focus on their own work, which is a real benefit.

Yeah I'm kind of balancing things out by also not counting them against the workforce. Figure at the busiest times one old woman and a couple of little girls can pretty much manage smaller kids.

Interesting age distribution; I'm assuming the past few years have been reasonably good. The all-female nature of the elderly rings very true, and not just on account of warfare.

Reasonably good; there's still a big theft problem but they've gotten pretty good at managing things.

A strong fighting man could shoulder the harness for a plow himself, plus manage a lot of the other hard physical labor as you've pointed out. Just because someone is trained in fighting doesn't mean they can't contribute on the farm--and if they're mainly in the village anyway, rather than off campaigning, they'll likely be engaged on a daily basis.

Also, unless they were raised by noble families, many fighting men probably grew up on farms anyway, and were conscripted for one local war or another. They'll more than likely know their way around a patch of peas from childhood.

Yeah that was my idea - some of the fighter types might be more than capable of contributing and knowing stuff, but they'd still be happy to have someone tell them when to get the winter rye out. Plus with a village that size it's just more efficient to share a lot of work. Plus with the sex ratios tilted a bit, a strong young man could very well come in and work for a while, hoping that he could find a young woman with a good field in her dowry.

[veti]

It is also said that a person can, on the top end 'work' between 1 and 2 acres with hand tools. 2 acres per person with hand tools should be outright exhausting, so thats another easy way to think about limits. A person with hand tools for the most part is physically unable to work more than 2 acres without tech.

That - assumes no co-operation between people, which seems unnecessarily pessimistic.

The reason an acre is the size it is, is because in medieval times that was reckoned to be the amount of land that one person, with one draft animal, could plough in a day. That remained a pretty good reckoning well into industrial times. Hence the 1865 formula "forty acres and a mule".

Without a draft animal, of course, it's a lot harder. But if you can get a couple of strong mates in to do the work of a ploughhorse, you should be able to work considerably more than two acres in a season, even with iron-age technology.

If the core village has a belt of farmland around it, about two miles in radius ('cuz you've gotta walk all the way out there, work the land, then walk back in the evening...), then the total land available for farming would be in the region of 12 square miles, or 7680 acres. That's way more than people could actually work - but then, only a fraction of that land will be suitable anyway. Even if only one-tenth of the land is fertile and farmable, there would be almost nine acres per person (including non-working population). Call it 15-20 acres per able-bodied adult. In that case, they could actually be eating pretty well, and I'll stop worrying about the poor bandits...

I made a map!

Nice. Two questions:
1. Where's the mill? And the smithy? Those are going to be important focal points.

2. A wall, really? Who built it, and why? (When would the villagers have had time to build such a thing? And why bother, when there's a castle right next door to take refuge in when threatened?)

[WarKitty]

That - assumes no co-operation between people, which seems unnecessarily pessimistic.

The reason an acre is the size it is, is because in medieval times that was reckoned to be the amount of land that one person, with one draft animal, could plough in a day. That remained a pretty good reckoning well into industrial times. Hence the 1865 formula "forty acres and a mule".

Without a draft animal, of course, it's a lot harder. But if you can get a couple of strong mates in to do the work of a ploughhorse, you should be able to work considerably more than two acres in a season, even with iron-age technology.

If the core village has a belt of farmland around it, about two miles in radius ('cuz you've gotta walk all the way out there, work the land, then walk back in the evening...), then the total land available for farming would be in the region of 12 square miles, or 7680 acres. That's way more than people could actually work - but then, only a fraction of that land will be suitable anyway. Even if only one-tenth of the land is fertile and farmable, there would be almost nine acres per person (including non-working population). Call it 15-20 acres per able-bodied adult. In that case, they could actually be eating pretty well, and I'll stop worrying about the poor bandits...



Nice. Two questions:
1. Where's the mill? And the smithy? Those are going to be important focal points.

2. A wall, really? Who built it, and why? (When would the villagers have had time to build such a thing? And why bother, when there's a castle right next door to take refuge in when threatened?)

Smithy is where the smithy color block is. Mill is the purple block by the river that isn't labelled

And as I mentioned a few posts back, there's the problem that the castle isn't in that great a shape, not to mention doesn't protect your stuff. A wall's the thing you want if you're dealing with low-level bandits who are more interested in waltzing off with whatever's easiest to take than anything else. It's not solid enough to take on an attacking army, but it's at least enough to make it harder to get in and out of the village without being noticed and to deal with attackers lacking siege equipment.

Not to mention, this being a fantasy world after all, there's a good chance of other things being out there.

[veti]

Smithy is where the smithy color block is. Mill is the purple block by the river that isn't labelled

And as I mentioned a few posts back, there's the problem that the castle isn't in that great a shape, not to mention doesn't protect your stuff. A wall's the thing you want if you're dealing with low-level bandits who are more interested in waltzing off with whatever's easiest to take than anything else. It's not solid enough to take on an attacking army, but it's at least enough to make it harder to get in and out of the village without being noticed and to deal with attackers lacking siege equipment.

Not to mention, this being a fantasy world after all, there's a good chance of other things being out there.

Oops, didn't notice the smithy label, sorry.

I'm guessing, then, the wall is just a palisade, or possibly earthworks, optionally with a ditch outside to make it harder to scale from that side.

Are there visible remnants of other buildings, outside the wall, left over from more prosperous days? Or have they all been razed and/or cannibalised for building materials?

[Wardog]

Even presuming a collective where 90 people all went to work on one of their 90 football fields per day, each field is only going to be taken care of once every 3 months... So factoring in things like 'grazing rotation' is built into the estimate already.

In medieval England at least, farming was done communally, but it wasn't a case of "everyone has one big field each, and everyone works each field in turn". It was done by having a two or three (depending on the system) great big fields, that were sub-divided into lots of small plots, with each household owning several plots spread each field (so everyone got a mix of good and bad land). Each field would be planted with one crop, and everyone would work together on that field.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_field_system

A big portion of the produce would have to be paid to the lord of the manor as tax - and the serfs were also obliged to spend a number of days working on their lords land rather than their own. So if your village doesn't have a lord, then you will either need a lot less land to support it, or have much wealthier peasants with the same amount of land. (Which may be why the bandits are interested in them).



Speaking of bandits, the situation described sounds a bit like a much longer-running version of the "Anarchy" that afflicted England during the "reign" of "King" Stephen and "Empress" Matilda. In which case the bandits and the lords/former lords may well be the same thing.

When the traitors saw that Stephen was a good-humoured, kindly, and easy-going man who inflicted no punishment, then they committed all manner of horrible crimes…For every great man built him castles and held them against the king; and they filled the whole land with these castles. They sorely burdened the unhappy people of the country with forced labour on the castles; and when the castles were built, they filled them up with devils and wicked men. By night and by day they seized those whom they believed to have any wealth, whether they were men or women; and in order to get their gold and silver, they put them into prison and tortured them with unspeakable tortures... And men said openly that Christ and His saints slept.

The Laud (Peterborough) Chronicle, annal for 1137.

[Palanan]

And the last phrase from that quote serves as the title for a historical novel on just that period. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but Sharon Kay Penman is one of my favorite historical novelists, and it could really help set the wider tone.

Also of note, the Cadfael novels are set during that same time, and they give a sense of how life continued despite the terrifying uncertainties of the time, from the perspective of one small town and monastery. The books are quietly wonderful on their own, and each one is a quick and delightful read.