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Thread: Grainstreet, a small village map.

  1. #11

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    Oh, one other thing, historically 20 acres was considered to be required to comfortably feed a family, so it actually required a huge amount of acreage to feed the population. This is another area where fantasy deviates quite significantly from reality. Historically, in medieval times Europe had a population of ~70 million people (it depends on the year) but 95% of them lived in hamlets or villages of 50-200 people. Basically, most of the population was focused on growing food, and that was by far the dominant profession and the dominant use of land. In fantasy settings, the amount of land devoted to farming tends to be dramatically below what would have been required in actuality.

    However, the fantasy genre, whether RPGs or stories, can be seen more as modern life re-imagined as being with lesser technology and (usually) magic, etc. Actual historical accuracy is quite poor, but it's also not really expected for the genre. So if you're going for a fantasy village I'd say your current map is already fine as is. Let me also add that artistically/aesthetically I think you've done an impressive job.

  2. #12
    Guild Master Falconius's Avatar
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    I don't think it took 20 acres to feed a family, that's probably about the upper limit of what a family could farm. Considering they also had to work on their Lords farm as well...

    Worth noting peasants spent a large portion of their lives being hungry.

  3. #13

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    My mistake, it was actually half a virgate (12 to 16 acres) that was considered sufficient to feed a family in most years. As I said, I was going from memory. That's still quite a bit of land though. It's also worth keeping in mind that in the two field system half the land would be fallow, and even in the three field system one third would be. So they're not actually growing food on all of those acres every year (although "fallow" land could still be used for grazing livestock).

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