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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clavis" data-source="post: 3960689" data-attributes="member: 31898">"Blobs of Light" pretty much sums up what real medieval settlement patterns were like. It's hard for modern Americans, used to private lives, sprawling suburbs and isolated homes, to really understand how medieval people actually lived. Medieval settlement patterns were dictated by 3 facts:1) Pre-modern agriculture is extremely inefficient.2) Pre-modern forms of transportation are very slow3) Pre-modern forms of food preservation were often unreliable.#1 means that pre-modern societies needed to have 8-9 farmers for every farmer. That means a small town of 1000 needs about 8000 farmers to support it. A city of 20,000 needs about 160,000 framers to support it.#2 & #3 mean that most of the farmers needed to support a town or stronghold need to live within half a day or 1 day's journey by oxcart. That's about 5-10 miles, at most 15. A small town of 1000 would be surrounded by about 12-18 villages of approximately 500 people each, all very close to each other and the town. And the town itself would be very small in area, and very densely populated. Ancient people never lived far away from each other if they could help it; a preference for living far apart is makes Americans aberrant historically. Entire medieval families would live in a single room, where they carried on all biological functions with little or no regard for the modern concept of privacy.What all of the above created was a settlement pattern where a central town or stronghold would be surrounded by nothing but farming villages for miles around it. The other side of this was that because people clustered so closely together, the areas off the roads and between population clusters was essentially wilderness. A traveler was either in very settled land, or dangerously unsettled land. There were no suburbs.A small overall population supporting lots of fighter-types is impossible. If a stronghold is guarded by 100 men, it means there are at least 800 nearby farmers to support them.</blockquote>

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