Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 6062946" data-attributes="member: 27160">I misspoke in one important respect, sorry - that should be ~40 acres of agricultural land. Only a part of that would be arable. And the figure didn't change all that much - even though productivity went up - from 1300 to 1850 (see <a href="http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:3212cb9a-35d9-43aa-b5c0-02e4d1e58bd0" target="_blank">paper here</a>). Note that this is how much the family can work, not how much they need to survive - they could theoretically survive on a much smaller plot if it was all good arable land.The same paper as above estimates the split overall from manor estates as follows:- Labour - 49%- Land and church - 39%- Capital (i.e. repair and replacement) - 12%I round these off to 50/40/10 as a guideline. The lord is typically responsible for the capital, or at least most of it, but provides it with labour and materials supplied by the peasants as part of their annual obligation, hence it's a part of the "tax".As a very general guide, if 1 sp per day is an "unskilled labourer" "wage", then you might assume that a day's work cultivating or similar "unskilled" work generates 2 sp of "goods in kind". Of these, the worker keeps 1 sp worth and 1 sp worth is split between the landlord, the church(es) and the cost of "domain upkeep" (the latter being ~0.2 to 0.25 sp per day worked on the domain). I say "domain" rather than "demesne", here, because it would cover all of the estate, not just the demesne lands, the produce of which goes to the landlord even though they are worked by the peasants (this being the most usual form of "tax").In towns, the same 2 sp per day of value will be generated, but taxes work differently. Town taxes are mostly property and sales taxes, so they will generally be levied via rent for dwellings and prices in the marketplace. All assuming a "pseudo-medieval europe" setup, of course, but similar basic limitations will apply to whatever milieu you choose, even if the specifics are different.The 10% export figure comes from the ratio of rural to urban population; a rural population exports only what the townsfolk need in the way of rural product, so the population ratio is a fair gauge of export %. Town populations were roughly 5% to 15% of the total population throughout the ancient and medieval period - thus medieval agriculture can support roughly one townsman per 7-19 rural population. In other words, 5-15% of the produced food and other agricultural goods goes to feed and supply the town population, who are estimated at 5-15% of the population total.</blockquote>

Verification