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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 4294350" data-attributes="member: 30001">Ok, now that I'm home I can actually skim through the library - I'm looking at "Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages" by Christopher Dyer.  The first thing that I notice in the chapter on Peasant Living Standards is that all three of his sample peasants own animals - even the poor cottar in his third example has a pet cow that the family uses for cheese.  The size of tenant holdings for a sample court roll is given on page 119 - 23% of free and 26% of serfs have 30 acres or more of land - those are at the top of the scale.  About half of free and 30% of serfs have under 8 acres.  However, later pages go on to describe one historian's speculation (for which he outlines the evidence, but I haven't read the details) that the poorest peasants were working (leasing?) land in other manors and villages.So for ease of calculation I would say that 1/3 of peasants have 5 acres, 1/3 peasants have 15 acres, and 1/3 peasants have 30 acres.Later on there is a chart showing the number of animals per tax-payer/tenant.  4 categories:  horses/oxen, cattle, sheep, and pigs.  There are four different regions given, I don't know if these are all roughly near each other or not.  The average for horses in oxen is lowest at 1.0 for one of the regions, and sheep are the most numerous animal with 6.2 being the minimum for one of the regions, where the average is 2.35 for oxen/horses.As I've hinted at, I've ingested more of the conclusion from these things rather than having the figures in my head.  The mirror image argument of the "romantic" accusations (which I've also seen) is that some historians from an earlier time had a political agenda in wanting to present the middle ages as backwards and barbaric as possible, in order to discredit the aristocracy and the Catholic church due to more contemporary political issues.  So either side can describe less-than-honorable motives for the other, that's why I choose to look to the data and reasoning and try to avoid the generalizations where possible.On that subject, the two best known "urban legends" (or are they?) regarding the Middle Ages are the "jus prima nocte" (sp?) thing and the "spices used to disguise the taste of rotting meat" story.  Both legends can be possibly attributed to the sort of "bias" described in the earlier paragraph.  Wiki describes the objections to the first - and what I've read there matches what I've read in other places.  So what you understandably describe as repulsive may in fact just be a slur invented by opponents of the aristocracy in later periods - but there are some interesting lines of reasoning on that subject.  In any case, I hope this helps flesh out some ideas of a plausible demographic for a campaign - granted I just spent a few minutes flipping through on of my books so that's hardly scientific.  There's a section in the book on the "urban economy", when I get a chance I'll read it and see if it matches what you're describing for Venice.  Who knows, Venice could have been very hard on it's lower class - the idea that a peasant escaped from serfdom in the countryside to find himself a wage-slave in the city has a certain familiar ring to it.</blockquote>

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