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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Banshee16" data-source="post: 4919704" data-attributes="member: 7883">Most of the posts I've seen on this topic don't seem to have addressed death rates.With no birth control, birth rates will be way higher, but so will infant death.Yes, there are clerics, but those powerful enough to Remove Disease even once a day will be relatively rare.  It requires a lvl 5 caster.  Take a typical village of maybe 400 people, and the chances of having a level 5 cleric are not assured.  Even if there is one, it's likely only one, and she can only cast the spell once per day.So, if there's a bad flu, it could kill dozens of people while she can only save one a day.Because travel is generally limited to walking or horseback, people might only be able to go 30 miles or so to the next village...so if there's a bad illness, a lot of people could die before help gets there.Even if we look at Teleport, it requires a lvl 9 Wizard.  So is it likely that the messenger will find one in the next village?  Or might it be 3 or 4 days of walking before the messenger gets to help (assuming he isn't waylaid by bandits).  Even if he gets help, the Wizard at lvl 9 can only bring 1, maybe 2 people with him.On top of disease, there are other factors like murder.  I'm reading a book about risk management at the moment, and one figure they mention is that the homicide rate in medieval england was 14 times higher than it is in the U.S......which itself has the highest homicide rate in the western world.If most victims of murder tend to be young (as today) and less wealthy (as today), then they're possibly being killed before they can contribute to population growth.Then, a fantasy world has got nasty monsters that tend to munch on the peasantry, in ways in excess of what peasants on Earth had to worry about.I found a Wikipedia article which mentions that the growth rate among the poor was essentially zero for a long time......they were taxed heavily enough they couldn't afford big families, and their health was poor enough that they died in sufficient numbers to offset any growth by birth.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_demography" target="_blank">Medieval demography - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</a>Altogether, I'm willing to bet that growth rates would be very, very small, even in a fantasy world with access to magical healing.Banshee</blockquote>

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