Evening.
Watching House of Games round Sunjester's this evening, and the answer to one question was the number of households in Birmingham in 1086 was 6 (familes)!
So I started digging town sizes for my RPG. London in 1377 had a population of 14 years plus of about 35,000.
How many buildings is this? Looking at Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_towns_and_cities_in_England_by_historical_population#Late_Medieval_Period) gives Colchester as 10th largest at 4,400. That is a large town. What sort of physical size am I looking at? 500 buildings? What is a TYPICAL town size?
Until the Victorian period and 1920s, most towns remained tiny. The population was far more rural until the agricultural revolution population shifts, which in turn sparked the massive population shifts and the housing booms of the 1700s/the Industrial Revolution.
You need to remember that many poor houses could have several families living there. Density of occupation was also higher due to larger families . Posh houses would have smaller families, but live in staff, which upped numbers.
Until the 1801 census proved otherwise, the general assumption was our population was falling (mostly due to tax avoudance).
Towns would have populations in the 100s or 1000s until the C18th. London did not recover to fill the Roman City of the square mile until the 1500s, then did not physically increase much again until the Victorian era, although the population surged. Westminster was a historically separate city with fields between them. London only hit a population of 1000000 in the late 1700s. Birmingham was a village until the 1600s. (Local examples) Aylesbury only went as far as the inner ring road, Leighton Buzzard was four streets. Shrewsbury was big, as it was surrounded by the river loop, but people would farm inside the town walls.
Try this
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-of-england-millennium
https://www.buildinghistory.org/town-rank.shtml
Example for Shrewsbury(can you tell where I grew up)
https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/3a7ca5_da4ae641a231479d9807ec8008ca89d1.pdf?index=true
'Typical' English mediaeval town size?
Now that's a good question.
You've obviously come across the Poll tax rolls - the over 14 yrs figure - so you'll have an idea of the cities, biggest towns listed in Wikipedia.
The thing is, they aren't typical. They are the obvious, big, discrete, towns. Most English settlements were not towns they were villages, hamlets and collections of cottages around farms that had survived the Norman occupation or had grown up with subinfeudation (tenants granting new subtenancies to parts of demesnes to get cash or new services as feudalism broke up/changed and money replaced direct service .
The Poll tax records are great but are not organised so you can just look at the numbers of tax payers in a 'place' and say the settlement was X number of people. People do, but are the 'places' boroughs and liberties? Are they hundreds? Places move between hundreds from the tax of 1334 to 1377 for example – they haven't physically moved and the boundaries haven't changed but more people/buildings of a sprawling hamlet have probably been erected on one side of an arbitrary line and the assessment recorded differently as a result.
Worth having a quick read of:
https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/wilts/vol4/pp304-313
which outlines the Wiltshire records, as interpreted, not as written, and gives a very broad overview of the problems with using them. Wiltshire has the best preserved records, many other counties have incomplete or no records surviving. Some can be filled out from other centrally held data.
How much land did they cover? The Wiltshire records range from 3 tax payers in Shaw to 3,226 in Salisbury with everything in between. Densities differ wildly – some places sprawl, some are very tightly packed so it isn't even a case of simply taking an 'average' number per building, and average number of buildings per acre and multiplying up.
Macclesfield, Cheshire in the early fifteenth century was c400yards by 400 yards with c600 people in the town. However, 'Macclesfield' can refer to the Borough (above), the Manor/demesne or the Hundred. The latter was a huge area covering a third of Cheshire and population commensurately bigger, but in small towns and vills. Exact figures are not available for 1377 as Cheshire was a County Palatine and technically not part of England and the King's writ (including taxation) did not run there until Henry VIII's time. No poll tax was levied or recorded there.
Typical town? A moderately dense collection of buildings around an original manor or demesne a couple of hundred yards wide by long, a church or chapel, communal buildings – mill, bakehouse (later) guildhall, market place (boroughs). Some ale houses- originally just houses where someone brewed and sold their excess but becoming specialised later. Later streets with planned frontages (burgage plots) to standard sizes (differ by county and region). Originally the fields would be discrete but later as parts were enclosed and/or subinfeudated new farmsteads might grow up separate from the main town. Over time they would grow and developments along tracks and road would join. So you might approach a town through fields and scattered buildings and then hit the main town. Not as many as you may think had walls. Many had ditches and banks. Walls were taxed (murage).
Oh, mediaeval? 1060 or 1520? :D
One thing to remember is that after the Black Death population density droped considerably. 30-50% dead. It finished the fuedal system off.
A nice book to have a look at, if you can find a copy is:
Nicholson, Graham & Fawcett, Jane; The Village in History; Weidenfeld & Nicholson; 1988.
Covers the development of the English village from around the Norman Conquest up to just before the Great War, looking at the way the land was farmed and how the village and building design changed as the way people lived altered.
It's just under 200 pages and well illustrated, which means it's bit of a broad brush approach given that it's covering 900 years of change.
I realise there is no such thing as an average, but I'll have one in mind to work around - about 6-7 (4-9 extended range). I know that population is given as Poll tax payers, which is those 14 years or older, and the information I have indicates that about a third of the population is thought to have been under 14, so where records give 60, the total people will be about 90, giving 10 to 25 houses. Most people will live 'Above the shop' if they are a smith, shop keeper etc, so no extra buildings.
Average population is 30-70, so 6 to 15 buildings.
Interesting stuff.
The impact of the Black Death was significant:
The figure of 23,000 tax paying citizens (in 1377 - excluding the poor, underage and the suburbs, as the actual City of London - within the walls - is actually very small) and reflects a sharp decline from London's pre-plague peak of c.80,000 to 100,000* residents around 1300. The next biggest city in England at that time (1377) was York, with c.12,000 tax payers.
* this figure had been remarkably stable for almost a centuary. I quote a series of well regarded academic city population numbers, in my book on the Khmer, but even Cairo, Constantinople or Bagdad were only c.250,000 in the late C13th. This was when both the northern & southern Song chinese capitals each were just under 1million, whilst Angkor is now recognised as the most populus conurbation on the plant at that time with at least 1 million plus. But Angkor was spread over 100+ square kilometers, and the royal palace (Angkor Thom) at it's heart probably had an adult population of c.44,000 max.
The impact of the Black Death in China was (in some cases) worse than in Western Europe. With some southern chinese port cities experiancing an over 90% fatality rate. Where as, in the case of Angkor, the impact seems to have been negliagable (not even a mention in the inscriptions, unlike a later small pox epidemic, spread by an invading Siamese army). So population desity appears to have been a very significant factor contributing to deaths. A decline from c.80,000 to 23,000 reflects that.
Yeah, I'm torn on whether my Fantasy Europe had a "black death" event. It is smaller than our Europe, probably; I'm not massively worried about actual size at the mo, characters travel at the speed of plot.