WorldBuilding:Medieval Demographics Made Easy

MDME (Medieval Demographics Made Easy) is a very popular pencil and paper nation generator.

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 town generator

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.

Bob Traynor
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.

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 Gies' is inacurate.

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.