Monday, July 25, 2011
Medieval Demographics, a question
Where can I find a population distribution of different ages for medieval societies? For example data that looks like age 60-65 is 1.3%, age 55-60 is 6.3%. In some of the projects I am working I am detailing entire villages and it would help to have a baseline to work from.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
10 comments:
I don't know of anything off the top of my head that has it laid out like that. If you have access to a large academic library, you might be able to find a journal article that looks at a specific town or village. Also you might try searching for the subjects "Europe -- Population -- History", "England -- Population -- History", "Demography -- History", or keyword search "medieval demography" and see if you can find what you are looking for. Those searches turned up "England's Population: A History since the Domesday Survey" a 2003 book which might also have a bibliography that you can mine.
For specific information I would agree with Patrick. I remember coming across information in history journals when I was an undergraduate, but that was 20 years ago.
I did find some information by searching Google with the following search string "medieval life expectancy":
http://www.hyw.com/books/history/Fertilit.htm
Wikipedia's entry on Medieval demography has several citations that may lead you to other sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_demography
A search of Google Scholar may turn up some results as well:
http://scholar.google.ca/
I have a graph from "An Economic History of Medieval Europe" that may help you roughly estimate what you're looking for.
E-mail me at josephbrowning@gmail.com and I'll send it your way.
I was talking with a friend of mine who happens to be Medievalist at SLU, he said Josiah Cox Russel did a book years and would probably be a good place to begin.
Try looking in Google books for his works
basically, you are asking for the impossible. Historian have made guesses about demographics that acraheologists have pretty mcuh torn to shreds. You really have to look at very specific cases and time periods. The kind of data you are looking for can only be gotten (with any amount of accuracy) through cemetary data and it will very greatly deepend on location and circumstance.
@DHBoggs they get their data from graveyard studies. They can determined what age a person died at and based on records and carbon dating when they died. They get a death rate and from that estimate what the population make up was.
I will post more details but it looks like today's third world population pyramids. The main difference is that infant mortality rate for 0 to 5 years was way worse.
Way worse for medieval societies.
It's based on 3E but there is this
"Total population, size, classification, and business distributions are based on "Medieval Demographics Made Easy" by S. John Ross.
The optional D&D notations including wealth, power centers, and racial demographics are based on the Dungeon Master's Guide, version 3.0"
http://www.lucidphoenix.com/dnd/demo/business.asp?poptype=set&pop=0
Cannot help with that one, but I am going to take advantage of the topic to say that the "Medieval Demographics Made Easy" link in the right frame is not working any more :(
I second John Ross's creation
http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm
And I also say check out Fief and Town
http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/fief.htm
Post a Comment