Building a village [Archive] - Wizards Community

Building a village [Archive] - Wizards Community

Post/Author/DateTime Post
VampyresThrenody
03-30-08, 12:55 PM For Simulationists Only:
The Medieval Demographics made Easy is a great tool and really helps design an area on a large scale basis. However, I have a village I need to extrapolate. With the various calculators its easy to figure out what type and how many shops should be in the town, but what do I do with the rest of the populace?

With a population of 750 I have a handful of shops and craftsmen but no idea what to do with the rest of the majority. Obviously a small proportion can be allocated to simple workers (i.e. 1 mason company but with 5-6 masons) and then there's a proportion that can be allocated for food resource management such as farming/hunting and applicable grocers if the farmers do not live in the town. But that still gives me a great amount of leftover.

I suppose some would be retired, housewives/husbands and children too young to work. However, I need some ideas as to what to do with the rest.
Admiral_Lourve
03-30-08, 01:41 PM Its not to uncommon for a large part of the population to be working for one company. Villages don't just set up to have somewhere to live, they form around a job producing site. Some ideas:
A mine of some sort, coal, gem, marble, nickel ect., the produce is being traded to keep the town fed.
A iron mine, the iron is being forged in the village itself in a large foundry for a army.
A castle or fort is being built for a noble.
Fishing or farming. Its not uncommon for whole towns to be doing these jobs.
VampyresThrenody
03-30-08, 07:16 PM Yea based on that and some other aspects of the province I figured about 230 members of the population are working for the Lumber camp nearby with another sizable portion being the wives/children of said workers. It makes it so if the Lumber camp closes then around 400 people out of 750 now have no income.
Etarnon
03-31-08, 02:48 AM if you've got a town of 750 regional, then fully

635 or so of them are farmers, living within a few miles radius, about 100 farms.

figure 115 of the rest are 7 per family, spread out in roughly 15 buildings in the town. the rest are outlying farms, feeding that town, and trading with nearby towns.

If your town is actually 750, then it's got 100 buildings, and 7,500 people stashed in the surrounding farms within 30 mile radius.

so 29 to 30 shops.
aikimiller
03-31-08, 07:40 AM Midevil farming is subsistance farming- the majority of people are going to be farmers.
Orchomenos
03-31-08, 11:33 AM Midevil farming is subsistance farming- the majority of people are going to be farmers.

Indeed. I would say that your mason company would consist of the Master Mason, with perhaps 1-2 apprentice and 5-6 neighboors working on the specific building, or appointed serfs if working on the Lord's property.
GoriceXII
03-31-08, 03:26 PM I strongly recommend going to lythia.com and searching for some of the downloads there. Some that I would recommend would include the articles on things like millers and potters; I would also recommend downloading a few of the more well developed settlements and perhaps patching some of them together to make yours. You could easily insert races other than human for some of the farmers and craftsmen if you wanted to, but I cannot stress enough the value of this resource, which is for Harnmaster but is not stat heavy, enough. I found that I've been able to get literally hundreds of potential ordinary npcs from it, ideas about medieval transport and professions and so on from it.
VampyresThrenody
04-02-08, 04:59 PM Thanks for the Lythia source, checking that out now.

I had planned for the 750 to be the village itself with the surrounding area bringing the whole region up to around 1100-1200.

Etarnon: You quote a need for 1,000 farmers to feed 100 people. Where are you getting this from? It is much different from what I have heard from others (EN world posts). I can't say an opinion one way or the other because I have not done much research personally.
M-bark
04-03-08, 10:53 AM Thanks for the Lythia source, checking that out now.

I had planned for the 750 to be the village itself with the surrounding area bringing the whole region up to around 1100-1200.

Etarnon: You quote a need for 1,000 farmers to feed 100 people. Where are you getting this from? It is much different from what I have heard from others (EN world posts). I can't say an opinion one way or the other because I have not done much research personally.

Well, I am not sure myself, but according to the history teachers I've had the last couple of years (all four of them), usually ten farmer families were able to support an eleventh non-farmer family (such as a landlord and his wife and kids).
VampyresThrenody
04-03-08, 01:45 PM Wow well..I did some research. But I modified the numbers based on some guess work. According to English history one could expect a peasant farmer to get around 4 times the seed grown in grain from a crop. So say they plant 108 liters they could get about 400 liters of grain. (this is increasing base numbers ever so slightly to take into account crop rotation and irrigation)

Okay so that's 400 liters of grain per acre. Hold that thought. Let's also say that an average farmer in Westier has 24-30 acres (exact numbers from research) to make things easy lets use 27 as the average for the farmers. Keep in mind that 1,000 acres is only 4 kilometers squared. This gives us 10,800 liters of grain (wheat grain) per farmer.

It states that an adult can live on subsistance at 500 liters a year. let's say that our people eat 700 in addition to the chickens, vegetables and orchards (it states that the 24-30 acres were purely for grain crop not including the other food). We get an uneven number of 15.4blahblah. Okay so 15 people from one farmer's average food gained. Well we could say the farmer has himself, a wife, one unworkable child, and two sons. That's five people giving us the ability to feed another ten.

So this town could survive on 700 liters of grain +small vegetables and chicken with only 75 farmers. If I plan for 100 I think we're pretty much set especially not including the fact that out of that 750 we could have several hunters and enough money to buy food from the nearby halfling docks.
Ahiru
04-03-08, 02:27 PM So this town could survive on 700 liters of grain +small vegetables and chicken with only 75 farmers. If I plan for 100 I think we're pretty much set especially not including the fact that out of that 750 we could have several hunters and enough money to buy food from the nearby halfling docks.

I don't know (didn't care to check) if your method of calculation or your reference numbers are incorrect. Either way there are probably many considerations you haven't taken into account. Throughout medieval history there has been around 9 farming peasants for every 1 nonpeasent, city dweller. Villages were made up of these peasent families. But even then, most peasants were starving. Villages would be located close to trade centers. Few craftfolk and merchants would settle in a farming village, it would be inconvinient, and they wouldn't want to associate too much with people below their social standing.

A "village" of 750 people is quite large, but even then only a tiny minority will not belong to farming households. It should at least have a blacksmith and some kind of religious establishment, I think. Of course, the farther away the village is located from a trade center, the more craftsfolk it will need.

And of course there are exceptions, like villages mainly focusing on foresting or mining, or isolated villages that have to be totally self sufficient, but the vast majority of medieval villages were inhabited by farmers. That being said, this is fantsy, so you are free to make up any sort of wonder crop, and rule that one farmer feeds 10 people, if that is what you want.
VampyresThrenody
04-03-08, 02:51 PM I was using two different articles I found online. Sure, maybe they were pure B.S. but really who writes a 5 page article online about medieval English agriculture for fun? (Hmm on second thought, don't answer that)

However I keep looking for something that says this mysterious 10 or 9 farmers to feed one other family but I can't find it. I suppose this could be based on alot of factors not prevalent to our more 'enlivened' village town. We have no high obscene levels of taxes and good soil as opposed to poor soil(that is found in many areas of England, for example). But even without taking that into account the only thing I found was from the National Beef Association stated that in 1960 a single farmer could feed 25 people on a pure beef diet (It's what's for dinner.)

I mean it obviously seems like common sense to have these thousands of farmers for even a small town. But I never rely on common sense because it sometimes ends up to very uncommon or senseless. Oh well...whatever I suppose. No matter how much information I looked up or stated its probable most would simply rely on their common sense instead. I mean you can only get so simulationist before having ever village made up of dirty, brutish people who are about as interesting as a tick on the leg.
Ahiru
04-03-08, 03:18 PM ...On the other hand, those who profited from this labor felt superior to those who labored. The literate and privileged were quite willing to debase and denigrate the majority of Europe's population (about 90 percent), who fed them...

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Images+of+the+Medieval+Peasant-a068660122

The foundation of the Medieval economy was agriculture. Throughout Europe, 80-90 percent of the population struggled to coax a living, and perhaps a surplus, out of the soil. It wasn't easy, but using a wide variety of techniques it was done and often with marked success. While crops varied somewhat depending on the climate and soil quality, England and France saw mostly wheat, barley, peas and oats being grown, along with vegetables, vinyards and fruit orchards.

http://www.hyw.com/books/history/Agricult.htm

At the time of Domesday Book, more than 90 per cent of the English population (of about two million) lived in the countryside. Even with the vast mass of the population engaged in agriculture, almost all the cultivable land had to be farmed because output was so low - about four times the amount of seed sown. (To feed one person for a year on wheat required about two acres of land - today's yields would produce the same from 1/3 of an acre.)

http://history.wisc.edu/sommerville/123/123%2013%20Society.htm

A great transformation occurred around 1000 AD, when commoners began to move out of small city clusters and into the countryside. The exodus from the cities meant that within decades, 90 percent of medieval public worked in agriculture.

http://library.thinkquest.org/C005446/Food/English/middle_ages.html

The turning seasons marked the fundamental rhythm of their lives. The time of year determined what they did, the length of the working day and what they ate. The vast majority of people - between 80 and 90 per cent of the population - were directly involved in agriculture. There was no rapid transportation and there were few ways of preserving food. Even the medieval urbanite was more in tune with the yearly cycle than we in the developed countries will ever really understand.

http://www.witheridge-historical-archive.com/medieval-year.htm

But DnD isn't about realism, so as you should choose whatever "model" you think is more interesting for you/your players. Some dig realism, in their games, others don't care for it. But since you asked...
VampyresThrenody
04-03-08, 06:14 PM One word: *hug* Thank you! Why do I fail so badly at finding anything online? lol
I like building realistic-ish worlds although I usually end up disliking them and not using them...sigh
PoorHobo
04-04-08, 02:54 AM IIRC in one of the Eberron books they describe an 80/20 ratio of farmers to non farmers. In Breland I think it was.

Its not hard to rationalize that with the proliferation of minor magical items that agriculture could be improved drastically. Its also not hard to imagine there are minor enchantments not in a book that exist for the express reason of feeding more people.

Also advance agriculture techniques can lend themselves for even further reduction of farmers to non farmers, simple things like proper irrigation, plows, and fertilizer.

While 90% may be an accurate number historicaly it doesn't lend itself to a high fantasy world that has near rennisaince technology and lots of magic.

Meaning pick a percentag of around roughly 30 - 90. The higher the number the less technology and magic known/devoted to farming.

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
VampyresThrenody 03-30-08, 12:55 PM	For Simulationists Only: The Medieval Demographics made Easy is a great tool and really helps design an area on a large scale basis. However, I have a village I need to extrapolate. With the various calculators its easy to figure out what type and how many shops should be in the town, but what do I do with the rest of the populace? With a population of 750 I have a handful of shops and craftsmen but no idea what to do with the rest of the majority. Obviously a small proportion can be allocated to simple workers (i.e. 1 mason company but with 5-6 masons) and then there's a proportion that can be allocated for food resource management such as farming/hunting and applicable grocers if the farmers do not live in the town. But that still gives me a great amount of leftover. I suppose some would be retired, housewives/husbands and children too young to work. However, I need some ideas as to what to do with the rest.
Admiral_Lourve 03-30-08, 01:41 PM	Its not to uncommon for a large part of the population to be working for one company. Villages don't just set up to have somewhere to live, they form around a job producing site. Some ideas: A mine of some sort, coal, gem, marble, nickel ect., the produce is being traded to keep the town fed. A iron mine, the iron is being forged in the village itself in a large foundry for a army. A castle or fort is being built for a noble. Fishing or farming. Its not uncommon for whole towns to be doing these jobs.
VampyresThrenody 03-30-08, 07:16 PM	Yea based on that and some other aspects of the province I figured about 230 members of the population are working for the Lumber camp nearby with another sizable portion being the wives/children of said workers. It makes it so if the Lumber camp closes then around 400 people out of 750 now have no income.
Etarnon 03-31-08, 02:48 AM	if you've got a town of 750 regional, then fully 635 or so of them are farmers, living within a few miles radius, about 100 farms. figure 115 of the rest are 7 per family, spread out in roughly 15 buildings in the town. the rest are outlying farms, feeding that town, and trading with nearby towns. If your town is actually 750, then it's got 100 buildings, and 7,500 people stashed in the surrounding farms within 30 mile radius. so 29 to 30 shops.
aikimiller 03-31-08, 07:40 AM	Midevil farming is subsistance farming- the majority of people are going to be farmers.
Orchomenos 03-31-08, 11:33 AM	Midevil farming is subsistance farming- the majority of people are going to be farmers. Indeed. I would say that your mason company would consist of the Master Mason, with perhaps 1-2 apprentice and 5-6 neighboors working on the specific building, or appointed serfs if working on the Lord's property.
GoriceXII 03-31-08, 03:26 PM	I strongly recommend going to lythia.com and searching for some of the downloads there. Some that I would recommend would include the articles on things like millers and potters; I would also recommend downloading a few of the more well developed settlements and perhaps patching some of them together to make yours. You could easily insert races other than human for some of the farmers and craftsmen if you wanted to, but I cannot stress enough the value of this resource, which is for Harnmaster but is not stat heavy, enough. I found that I've been able to get literally hundreds of potential ordinary npcs from it, ideas about medieval transport and professions and so on from it.
VampyresThrenody 04-02-08, 04:59 PM	Thanks for the Lythia source, checking that out now. I had planned for the 750 to be the village itself with the surrounding area bringing the whole region up to around 1100-1200. Etarnon: You quote a need for 1,000 farmers to feed 100 people. Where are you getting this from? It is much different from what I have heard from others (EN world posts). I can't say an opinion one way or the other because I have not done much research personally.
M-bark 04-03-08, 10:53 AM	Thanks for the Lythia source, checking that out now. I had planned for the 750 to be the village itself with the surrounding area bringing the whole region up to around 1100-1200. Etarnon: You quote a need for 1,000 farmers to feed 100 people. Where are you getting this from? It is much different from what I have heard from others (EN world posts). I can't say an opinion one way or the other because I have not done much research personally. Well, I am not sure myself, but according to the history teachers I've had the last couple of years (all four of them), usually ten farmer families were able to support an eleventh non-farmer family (such as a landlord and his wife and kids).
VampyresThrenody 04-03-08, 01:45 PM	Wow well..I did some research. But I modified the numbers based on some guess work. According to English history one could expect a peasant farmer to get around 4 times the seed grown in grain from a crop. So say they plant 108 liters they could get about 400 liters of grain. (this is increasing base numbers ever so slightly to take into account crop rotation and irrigation) Okay so that's 400 liters of grain per acre. Hold that thought. Let's also say that an average farmer in Westier has 24-30 acres (exact numbers from research) to make things easy lets use 27 as the average for the farmers. Keep in mind that 1,000 acres is only 4 kilometers squared. This gives us 10,800 liters of grain (wheat grain) per farmer. It states that an adult can live on subsistance at 500 liters a year. let's say that our people eat 700 in addition to the chickens, vegetables and orchards (it states that the 24-30 acres were purely for grain crop not including the other food). We get an uneven number of 15.4blahblah. Okay so 15 people from one farmer's average food gained. Well we could say the farmer has himself, a wife, one unworkable child, and two sons. That's five people giving us the ability to feed another ten. So this town could survive on 700 liters of grain +small vegetables and chicken with only 75 farmers. If I plan for 100 I think we're pretty much set especially not including the fact that out of that 750 we could have several hunters and enough money to buy food from the nearby halfling docks.
Ahiru 04-03-08, 02:27 PM	So this town could survive on 700 liters of grain +small vegetables and chicken with only 75 farmers. If I plan for 100 I think we're pretty much set especially not including the fact that out of that 750 we could have several hunters and enough money to buy food from the nearby halfling docks. I don't know (didn't care to check) if your method of calculation or your reference numbers are incorrect. Either way there are probably many considerations you haven't taken into account. Throughout medieval history there has been around 9 farming peasants for every 1 nonpeasent, city dweller. Villages were made up of these peasent families. But even then, most peasants were starving. Villages would be located close to trade centers. Few craftfolk and merchants would settle in a farming village, it would be inconvinient, and they wouldn't want to associate too much with people below their social standing. A "village" of 750 people is quite large, but even then only a tiny minority will not belong to farming households. It should at least have a blacksmith and some kind of religious establishment, I think. Of course, the farther away the village is located from a trade center, the more craftsfolk it will need. And of course there are exceptions, like villages mainly focusing on foresting or mining, or isolated villages that have to be totally self sufficient, but the vast majority of medieval villages were inhabited by farmers. That being said, this is fantsy, so you are free to make up any sort of wonder crop, and rule that one farmer feeds 10 people, if that is what you want.
VampyresThrenody 04-03-08, 02:51 PM	I was using two different articles I found online. Sure, maybe they were pure B.S. but really who writes a 5 page article online about medieval English agriculture for fun? (Hmm on second thought, don't answer that) However I keep looking for something that says this mysterious 10 or 9 farmers to feed one other family but I can't find it. I suppose this could be based on alot of factors not prevalent to our more 'enlivened' village town. We have no high obscene levels of taxes and good soil as opposed to poor soil(that is found in many areas of England, for example). But even without taking that into account the only thing I found was from the National Beef Association stated that in 1960 a single farmer could feed 25 people on a pure beef diet (It's what's for dinner.) I mean it obviously seems like common sense to have these thousands of farmers for even a small town. But I never rely on common sense because it sometimes ends up to very uncommon or senseless. Oh well...whatever I suppose. No matter how much information I looked up or stated its probable most would simply rely on their common sense instead. I mean you can only get so simulationist before having ever village made up of dirty, brutish people who are about as interesting as a tick on the leg.
Ahiru 04-03-08, 03:18 PM	...On the other hand, those who profited from this labor felt superior to those who labored. The literate and privileged were quite willing to debase and denigrate the majority of Europe's population (about 90 percent), who fed them... http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Images+of+the+Medieval+Peasant-a068660122 The foundation of the Medieval economy was agriculture. Throughout Europe, 80-90 percent of the population struggled to coax a living, and perhaps a surplus, out of the soil. It wasn't easy, but using a wide variety of techniques it was done and often with marked success. While crops varied somewhat depending on the climate and soil quality, England and France saw mostly wheat, barley, peas and oats being grown, along with vegetables, vinyards and fruit orchards. http://www.hyw.com/books/history/Agricult.htm At the time of Domesday Book, more than 90 per cent of the English population (of about two million) lived in the countryside. Even with the vast mass of the population engaged in agriculture, almost all the cultivable land had to be farmed because output was so low - about four times the amount of seed sown. (To feed one person for a year on wheat required about two acres of land - today's yields would produce the same from 1/3 of an acre.) http://history.wisc.edu/sommerville/123/123%2013%20Society.htm A great transformation occurred around 1000 AD, when commoners began to move out of small city clusters and into the countryside. The exodus from the cities meant that within decades, 90 percent of medieval public worked in agriculture. http://library.thinkquest.org/C005446/Food/English/middle_ages.html The turning seasons marked the fundamental rhythm of their lives. The time of year determined what they did, the length of the working day and what they ate. The vast majority of people - between 80 and 90 per cent of the population - were directly involved in agriculture. There was no rapid transportation and there were few ways of preserving food. Even the medieval urbanite was more in tune with the yearly cycle than we in the developed countries will ever really understand. http://www.witheridge-historical-archive.com/medieval-year.htm But DnD isn't about realism, so as you should choose whatever "model" you think is more interesting for you/your players. Some dig realism, in their games, others don't care for it. But since you asked...
VampyresThrenody 04-03-08, 06:14 PM	One word: hug Thank you! Why do I fail so badly at finding anything online? lol I like building realistic-ish worlds although I usually end up disliking them and not using them...sigh
PoorHobo 04-04-08, 02:54 AM	IIRC in one of the Eberron books they describe an 80/20 ratio of farmers to non farmers. In Breland I think it was. Its not hard to rationalize that with the proliferation of minor magical items that agriculture could be improved drastically. Its also not hard to imagine there are minor enchantments not in a book that exist for the express reason of feeding more people. Also advance agriculture techniques can lend themselves for even further reduction of farmers to non farmers, simple things like proper irrigation, plows, and fertilizer. While 90% may be an accurate number historicaly it doesn't lend itself to a high fantasy world that has near rennisaince technology and lots of magic. Meaning pick a percentag of around roughly 30 - 90. The higher the number the less technology and magic known/devoted to farming.