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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clavis" data-source="post: 3875305" data-attributes="member: 31898">From what I remember of world history, I'd say:1) As high as 50% (Shogunate Japan) to as low as 5% (Dark Ages Europe with basically only the clergy literate). Historically, few societies bothered to educate non-noble women at all.2) Pre-modern societies were anywhere from 80-90% farmers, because pre-modern agriculture is very ineffeciant. That's one of the big demographic facts overlooked by people who make up fantasy maps. Create a city of 50,000, and you need about 400,000 farmers in nearby villages to support it. Imports can make up some of the food supply, but not all. There simply can't be any isolated cities without the farms to support them.3) Once again, about 80-90% peasant farmers.4) Japan apparently got as high as 10% Samurai at one point, but that was out of the norm. Figure 1-5% nobility for a European-type setting.5) Figure about 50-100 people per total square mile, but population will be very concentrated in certain areas, with large areas practically wilderness. People will NOT be living in spread-out isolated homesteads. In cities and towns, density would be about 30,000 - 40,000 per square mile. If that seems like people would be living on top of each other with little to no privacy, that's just how it was. Town buildings would usually not have any space between them at all, and streets were as narrow as 5' wide.Anyway that's about figures I can remember. There's an excellent discussion of medieval European demographics, with an eye to RPGs, at: <a href="http://www.io.com/~sjohn/demog.htm" target="_blank">http://www.io.com/~sjohn/demog.htm</a></blockquote>

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