Worminghall Map Scale

[Blind Mapmaker]

I'm going to GM a Worminghall campaign some time later this year and I started creating my own campaign map in Campaign Cartographer based on the maps presented in the book. I didn't look too closely at the population numbers involved at first, but when placing individual houses and roads I started wondering. If you draw the city according to the scale given and apply normal medieval city spacing, there's likely space for a huge number of buildings in the city - likely more than 2000.

Now I know a thing or two about medieval cities, but mainly development, organisation and laws, not architecture and layout. So I went over to have a look at The Domesday Book: Medieval Demographics Made Easy to get something for comparison. There a large town with 8000 inhabitants has occupies an area of about 0.54 km². This sounds about right if you compare it to towns like Rothenburg ob der Tauber (5500 inhabitants, 0.49 km²), although it is a bit on the densely-settled side.

Now Worminghall (excluding the tail) is about 2.6 km from the High Gate to that turn in the southern wall (disregarding the eastern portion of the south wall that is a bit farther) and about 1.6 km from the Welsh Gate to the river. That turns out to be roughly 4.16 km² or more than eight times the size of Rothenburg. The Domesday Book gives 2.7 km² for a large city with 40,000 inhabitants.

Now, I'm wondering whether I'm missing anything. From the descriptions in the book I've thought Worminghall was a pretty cramped city and didn't have exceptionally many wide open spaces. Obviously you need decent markets, docks and temporary stables for livestock, but even if you give a quarter of the city over to these pursuits that leaves the cities three times bigger than what you'd assume. Are there any fundamental differences between English cities and continental ones that could account for this?

I'm sorry if this is a bit on the nitpicky side, but things like these really drive me up the wall. And excuse my use of metric units, I really can't visualise anything using imperial units. Anyway, I'd be really thankful for any pointers. Even if it's only to point out fundamental problems with my computations. I'm really stumped.

[whswhs]

The basic answer is that I didn't have an information source for population densities in medieval towns or cities, so I picked a population density range from the list in GURPS Supers. However, there are a couple of compensatory factors:

* The densely built up area is the old city, inside the old walls. It has well over half the population, including close to 100% of the students.

* The area inside the walls is not level. Much of it is sloping; some parts, especially inside the old walls, is fairly steeply sloping, and not suitable to build houses on. Note for example that one of the student residences in the high town is the Cliff House, on the Cliffside Road. Its outer windows have a lovely view down into the low town

If this still gives a lower density than you find believable, please feel free to adjust the scale. The network relationships are more important than the metric ones.

Bill Stoddard

[Blind Mapmaker]

Thanks for the quick reply. The steep hillsides are something I had not considered much (that's what I get for hiding the contour layers). That should get rid of some of the excess population. I guess the area within the new walls is quite a bit less densely settled then?

That still doesn't give nice numbers, but I can always go with 20,000 Worminghallians living within the walls. That should also give the players more areas to explore as the campaign goes on. As far as I can tell the old town alone would be able to house about 10,000 in most medieval towns - even with the whole area between Cliffside Road and Weavers' Road gone.

You are dead on with social relations being more important than metric ones. I just couldn't shake the feeling I was missing an elaborate reason for why the city is that big and such things always chafe.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker

Thanks for the quick reply. The steep hillsides are something I had not considered much (that's what I get for hiding the contour layers). That should get rid of some of the excess population. I guess the area within the new walls is quite a bit less densely settled then?

Yes. When the Welsh wars heated up, the Abbot talked the King into subsidizing running walls around the old city's faubourgs (1275-1278, per the timeline). Note the main marketplace just outside the western gate of the old city. The newly enclosed area also included a couple of religious foundations with their own walls, not shown on the map.

The Tail, on the other hand, doesn't have walls and never did; it was protected from Welsh raid by the Severn. And its population isn't part of the stated population of Worminghall. Nor does owning property there confer any voting rights.

Bill Stoddard

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker

So I went over to have a look at The Domesday Book: Medieval Demographics Made Easy to get something for comparison.

That's probably part of your problem. The precise sources of the numbers are unclear, but the impression I've gotten is that the original S. John Ross article leans heavily on surveys of late Medieval Paris, which was a rather wealthy and densely populated place. Anything derived from that will give you something which resembles that atypical example. Its answers are plausible, but far from authoritative or even typical. That calculator doesn't take into account a wide range of variation in urban population density. To take an example near and dear to my heart, Justinian's Constantinople had something like double the population of Alexius Comnenus's, but had essentially the same footprint. Justinian's city had towering apartment blocks, while Alexius's had 2-3 story homes, holding far fewer people on the same area.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker

That still doesn't give nice numbers, but I can always go with 20,000 Worminghallians living within the walls. That should also give the players more areas to explore as the campaign goes on. As far as I can tell the old town alone would be able to house about 10,000 in most medieval towns - even with the whole area between Cliffside Road and Weavers' Road gone.

Increasing the town's population by a factor of 2.5 is not a good idea if you want your campaign to be high in historicity.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Increasing the town's population by a factor of 2.5 is not a good idea if you want your campaign to be high in historicity.

That's why I recommended changing the scale. Decreasing the distances by 25% is equivalent to increasing the population density by a factor of 1.73; decreasing them by a third to a factor of 2.25.

Bill Stoddad

[Blind Mapmaker]

Thanks for giving me more information on where the Domesday Book numbers come from. With that name I would have thought it was based on English data. The main thing is not that this generator gives other numbers, though.

I noticed the problem when I started drawing buildings of reasonable sizes close to each other. I have about 150 of them in the little triangle between Northgate Road and the actual North Gate and I'm not even finished. That does seem a bit much. I know quite a few walled cities that still have relatively intact medieval centres (Rothenburg, Wimpfen etc.) and I haven't noticed any huge open areas beside a couple of squares for markets etc. Buildings were certainly built close together even if they had some sort of back courtyard (not all did).

If you take numbers from Google Maps and Wikipedia just to get rough population density for Rothenburg the Domesday Book website does not seem that far off (though it gives a slightly smaller area for that population). The old city centre of York isn't that much bigger. The same is true for the other towns with a recognizably medieval centre, which I personally know.

My problem is not really working with these numbers, but the fact that I'll have more than 3,000 houses on my map of the city. And that's without filling the whole of the Old Town and keeping the houses in the New Town pretty far apart. I'm sure you'll agree that an average of 4-5 residents per building (3 would mean every building is a home, which is, of course, nonsense) is a bit on the low side for a town in which lodging is at a premium.

Bill's comments have certainly helped, but I still find myself hard-pressed to work with the population given. If you could give me any pointers what I should do, I would be very grateful.

Currently I'm using houses between 6 and 15 m wide and between 12 and 35 m long with a few outliers above that. I cut down the major roads to about 20 m wide (they were 40 m on the maps, but I think that exaggeration was for readability). I added numerous little alleys and back courtyards, but not for each and every house. I'm going to add a dozen or so larger squares too. I guess I could leave a cordon along all the city walls, but from what I've seen those were almost always built right up to. I assume most houses are at least ground floor and upper floor, with quite a few adding a second upper floor.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by whswhs

That's why I recommended changing the scale. Decreasing the distances by 25% is equivalent to increasing the population density by a factor of 1.73; decreasing them by a third to a factor of 2.25.

Or just mostly ignoring the issue. It's not as if the population density of the town is extremely low, as I understand it (e.g. neighbours having to shout from house to house to communicate). Just having a significant amount of the area within the town wall be unbuildable, as you suggest, is good, and would also have been my own suggested solution. Although of cours at some point, but possibly centuries into the future, economic forces may make it so valuable to live inside the town walls that manpower will be devoted to make some of the unbuildable areas buildable.

But in a medieval context, at least prior to the Black Death (I'm not enough of an economic, to put it mildly, to understand well what exactly the Plague did to medieval Europe), a town of 20k people is very, very different from one of 8k people. England could have many dozens such small towns. For all I know the town Worminghall is in is fictional, but if so it's fairly okay to drop in a normal-sized town as long as it is in a reasonable place. But 20k people starts to look a lot like a city. Where does it get its food from?

Also, why would you put a boarding school in a city? Food is more expensive in cities than in towns, because the food gets transported in from longer distances. IIRC GURPS Fantasy has something to say about that too, but Sagatafl's rule of thumb is that food is 50% more expensive in a town than in a rural area, and 100% more expensive in a city. This has the obvious consequence that institutions will be located in towns rather than in cities, unless they derive significant benefits from being in cities. And a boarding school doesn't. At least not from the point of the view of the responsible adults paying the cost of living of the students (I'm sure the students themselves would love the greater variety of opportunities, and the slightly greater degree of anonymity, in a city).

This largely holds true for medieval universities. Rome didn't have one. Instead Bologna did. That's such a tiny town, I don't even know where in Italy it is located. Same with London: No university, instead they did their scholarly stuff in Cambridge and Oxford (London actually has a Druidic university in my Ärth setting, but that's as a distinctly town-sized settlement). Then again, Paris did have a university, as far as I know (although I'm rarely too clear on mid and late medieval stuff).

[Blind Mapmaker]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Increasing the town's population by a factor of 2.5 is not a good idea if you want your campaign to be high in historicity.

I'm quite aware of that, but the campaign is not set in stone and we might still go for a fantasy setting. Cities there are generally a bit bigger. I just wouldn't want to mess with the cramped, walled city atmosphere. That's my main problem at the moment. It doesn't have to be realistic with regard to England and Wales, but it should make sense internally.

Maybe Bill is right and I should just adjust the scale. I just hate to lose the streets I've already done.

By the way, I just found out that the Severn is about 150 m wide in the map. Doesn't that seem a bit excessive, too?