Yeah, I thought life was hard but sustainable mostly, turns out one was always at risk of extinction:
Medieval villagers were often living on the edge of subsistence. Agricultural surpluses were skimmed by the church and the feudal lords. Bad harvests, banditry, warfare and disease might decimate a village community at any time. For this very reason, the demography of many European villages remained relatively stable between the twelfth and the eighteenth century.
If I remember Devereaux, the village itself was set up to minimise that risk first and foremost, at the expense of optimisation for max yields. So, every year was around subsistence, never much above, but also never much lower.
Pretty insightful. Key takeaways:
Yeah, I thought life was hard but sustainable mostly, turns out one was always at risk of extinction:
If I remember Devereaux, the village itself was set up to minimise that risk first and foremost, at the expense of optimisation for max yields. So, every year was around subsistence, never much above, but also never much lower.
Hm… wasn’t there like a 33% dip back in the fourteenth, not counting subsequent migration to the cities and whatnot…?
I don’t know, we need a medievalist here
Well, there was that little thing called the black death, if I recall correctly…
Ah, yeah, there was, that’s not how most of the time went, though