WorldBuilding:Medieval Demographics Made Easy

MDME (Medieval Demographics Made Easy) is a very popular pencil and paper nation generator created by S. John Ross. It can be found here.

Components
MDME has a few core components: a size to population calculator; a city and town list generator; a town business generator; and some aditional notes on castles, city size, law enforcement, universities, and llivestock. It can (and typically is for the purposes of online generators) split into two parts: a kingdom generator and a settlememt generator.

History
Acording to Ross it was originally pitched to Dragon (then the house magazine for Dungeons & Dragons) in 1993 who turned it down. It was then pitched to Pyramid who never replied. It was then sold to The Familiar (based on chronology this would have been the profesional magazine) who accepted and then vanished (this must have been in 1996-1997 acording to Board Game Geek). It was then sold again to Shadis who in turn closed before publication (which must have been in 98/99). Finally in 1999 it was published on The Blue Room, Ross's blog.

The Blue Room was originally hosted by Illuminati Online where MDME was first archived by The Wayback Machine. It was subsequently moved to Pair (first archive, last archive). Ross then recieved a further request for it from another magazine which he turned down. The details of this differ between the web page and the PDF. The PDF states that the magazine was called Knights of The Dinner Table and he turned it down because of the previous record with publishing it. The web page doesn't name the magazine (though it is presumably the same request) and gives the reason as the magazine wanting either the entire copyright as opposed to simply an exclusive right to publish in serial. Such a grant would nececiate removing the web page so Ross declined.

In 2018 Ross closed The Blue Room, shortly afterwards he announced that the rules would be converted into a PDF and sent to some friends to host on their websites under are licence that allowed it to be freely shared. The most popular of these is that hosted by Gamming Balistic. A list of mirrors is provided at the bottom of this page and on Take On Rules. The original version can be found on the Wayback Machine.

Generators
Endorsed


 * QZIL 's Kingdom Generator
 * RPG Library 's Doomsday Book
 * Lucid Pheonix Game 's Population / Demographics Calculators

Unendorsed


 * Donjon 's Medieveal Demographics Calculator
 * The Hyperlinked SRD (a.k.a. d20srd.org)
 * Welsh Piper 's Medieval Demographics Online

Criticisms

 * Bob Traynor's 2013 Medieval Demographics Done RIGHT part 1 and part 2
 * Lyman Stone's 2016 Notes on Medieval Population Geography

Medieval Demographics Made Easy has come in for some criticisms over the years. Generally speaking these criticisms are sometimes overblown varients of fairly minor errors, often based upon using different sources and assumptions.

Medieval Demographics Done RIGHT
Bob Traynor's criticism seems largely to revolve around definitions. He argues against MDME's 180 people per square mile of farmland saying that the number "you'll take getting a quarter of it" (45 people per square mile) and "If you can manage a third of that number for much of Europe, most of the time, you're doing quite well" (60 pop/mi2) while "Under ideal conditions" (emphasis his) "you can manage over twice that" (360 pop/mi2) citing Northern Itally. MDME relies very little upon the farmland using it as mostly a side note but numbers this low impact mean that MDME's population density range for the entire nation including wilderness (30 to 120 pop/mi2) is impossible (see the my research section for my thoughts on this). Traynor doesn't seem to provide a source for his criticism of the farmland number.

The numbers of universities will obviously vary wildly by culture and time and it is somewhat disapointing the MDME doesn't take this into account. In the early middle ages the answer will be zero or close to zero. It is interesting that Traynor cites 1500s Italy as the example with no context as his first example of university counts and then criticises MDME for using Paris for its Business list (we'll come to that in the moment) as it was "the most populous city in Europe" when MDME explicitly says that it is a large city. Also notably Ross and Taynor disagree on where universities will be found. Taynor says they are a must have for any capital city while Ross says that they are rare in large cities. As a Brit my knowledge agrees more with Ross, London would not get a university until the 1800s.

Of the universities in Scotland mentioned, all were formed after 1400 with the third (Aberdeen) forming in the Tudor period (typically considered post medieval) and after Columbus's voyage to America! At the same time England only had 2, though there was breifly a university in Northampton and other universities (e.g. Bath) can trace their origins back to colleges founded in the late medieval era. (Interestingly a college was founded in Durham in the 17th century to compete with the universities though this is well after the medieval period).

Traynor also criticises MDME for defining cities as having more than 8,000 people and smaller settlements as a town. The destinction here is made for the sake of creating more settlements in the 1,000 to 8,000 category than in the 8,000+ category in societies where long distance trade is common. Unless Traynor has evidence that long distance trade genuinely only increases the number of towns settlements under 5,000 this is a nitpick over definitions.

The criticism that Traynor makes that seems to have stuck best is that he claims that the source for MDME's Business lists (Life In A Medieval City by Joseph and Frances Gies) misunderstood the work of Hercule Géraud. What the misunderstanding is not entirely clear to me and seems to vary by who's talking about it. My understanding of Traynor's version is that Géraud was counting the number of people who's surname matched their job (or in other words the number of cases of nominative determinism). Traynor also says that the work of Géraud and the Gieses is inacurate. I have no reason to doubt his word on it.

Medieval Demographics Done Better
On the 23rd of January 2020 a now deleted reddit account posted a spreadsheet to the RPG, DnD, DungeonsAndDragons, and Worldbuilding subreddits and was then crossposted to r/Koibu. A month later it was also posted to the ProFantasy Forum. The first two (which are identical) dub MDME "a prime example" of calculators being "horribly, terribly wrong". It largely cites Traynor's blog post, which as we've seen has some mild criticisms of MDME and argues against the Business list and not particularly "horribly, terribly wrong" (even the Business list is probably off by and order of magnitude at most).

MDDB starts with an introductory note, reiterating the author's dislike of MDME (saying it contains "enourmous mistakes", "near-totally inaccurate in terms of scholarship", and gives results that are "wildly out-of-place" - criticism I'd usually reserve for stuff like finding out a village just so happens to have a market for rare jewlery or every single one a complex deffensive structure). It then says that it will repeat Traynor's blog post. This is followed by a reiteration of the main points of Traynor's blog post but not an actual quote of it. This is followed by Traynor's sources and then a set of other sources.

These are generally for some extra calculators that have been stuck on, the Overland Travel Calculator is from AD&D 1e. A list of castles has been taken from Shadiversity. I trust Shad and I have no thoughts of AD&D 1e. The teired settlement calculator (which is supposed to tell you how large a settlement can grow) has been taken from this minecraft forum thread, and seems somewhat implausible. Certainly the desires for cities are contraditory (e.g. a good source of stone as well as flat land) but I find it hard to imagine that every big city must have ticked atleast one set of contradictory requirements.

It also cites Cumberland Game’s Fief (produced by the same people as MDME) and the Doomsday Book generator based on MDME (apparently this is ironic, but I don't get how). It isn't clear what either of them is used for. Doomsday Book might be used to assert that villages with orchards are called hamlets, a claim MDME makes, but is against the modern English meaning of the word as a settlement too small to have a church.

The generator calculates settlement counts in a very different way to MDME with no reason given except presumably to make it easier for a spreadsheet. Each type of settlement has a fixed percentage of the population (88% for villages, 7% in towns, 2% in cities, and 1% in big cities leaving 2% isolated or itinerant) and a fixed size (450 for villages, 3000 for towns, 9000 for cities, and 15000 for big cities). These fixed sizes not only lead to less interesting nations but do not have any justification in the sources. Furthermore, the text does say that the upper limit from MDME for towns is too high. As I say, this is a nitpick. But inspite of this MDDB 's fixed town size is higher than the size stated as an average by MDME. The 450 for villages is also larger than MDME says it should be.

Besides the ocational mentions on Reddit, the spreadsheet doesn't seem to have attracted much attention. Indeed a google search for the blog it was based on turns up more results.

France
MDME lists historical density values for France, Germany, and England as 100 pop/mi2 90 pop/mi2 and 40 pop/mi2 respectively. As France is the most desnse it has attracted the most attention so I feel it reasonable to list some scholarly estimates for its population desnity. Note: as we are talking about the maximum reasonable density, where a source has listed the population on a number of years I have only used the highest.

Pre-Modern European Economy (2009)
I've decided to restructure this and provide a table per source, showing over all the years. This one is from Paolo Malanima. (2009). Pre-Modern European Economy: One Thousand Years (10th-19th centuries). Boston: Brill, p.16.

Mirrors

 * Donjon

To be included

 * ENERGY AND POPULATION IN EUROPE
 * Historically Accurate Medieval Demographics for World Builders and Fantasy Writers
 * Population and Density in Late Medieval Europe?
 * Population Density in Fifteenth Century France and the Low Countries