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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sir Edgar" data-source="post: 532015" data-attributes="member: 7230">If you are staging this campaign in a medieval-type setting, you'll have to keep in mind that health care was not readily available or nearly as developed as it is today. The infant mortality rate was very high. In some cases, half the children of a couple could die in the first year of life due to sickness, starvation, accident, or other causes. So, couples would have many children as an insurance policy against the likely deaths. Please remember, there was very little in birth control methods at the time and not much education in terms of family planning either.  Also, rural farming families had many children because this provided free labor for their farms. Even today, if you look at agrarian societies in India or Africa, there are often families of 10 or more children living with extended members of the family, too. In fact, you can still find grandparents on both sides, an unmarried aunt, a couple of cousins, and even a friend's child all living under the same rood. The concept of a nuclear family is a recent phenomenon, indeed. Thus, families were often times much larger than they you may expect. In addition, sometime, multiple families would share an inhabitance together. So, it really depends on what the location is (i.e., rural farming village vs. trading city). In a village of 1,500 or so, I would guess to say that there would be as few as a couple hundred houses or even less, which would technically make it a very large village (most likely a small or even large-size town).  For comparison, from what I recall, London had only about 20,000 people living within the immediate area during the early Middle Ages.</blockquote>

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