Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by malloyd

I think most of them are nonsense too. And become more expensive isn't really a factor. With 60% of your economy still there, there's little reason at all to expect nobody to be able to pay for clocks, and none at all to expect them to give up financial instruments.

This is one of the questions where justifying my professional opinion would take more time and work than I have space for in a forum post. The basic problem is that the technologies of travel and trade and overseas war, and the materials and goods and ideas and workers imported, tend to be key to a society's most advanced and specialized technology. So let's look at your example of the British Isles in 1450 suddenly being cut off from the continent.

For raw materials, we already discussed alum (and disagreed about it ... I don't have time to research the question). Without the mines of the Tirol, there would also be problems with gold and silver shortages. Some specialized ores aren't available any more, and even if they can be found the English must invent how to work them since much of that knowledge is in the heads of foreign guildsmasters. On the bright side, there are no more foreign luxuries like silk to buy with silver anyways.

The best armourers are in Flanders, the Germanies, and Lombardy. England can produce plenty of common armour, but new suits for the rich will be inferior to the old, and it has to take work away from other tasks to produce as much armour as it used to consume. When English kings wanted to improve their industry, they imported workers from the Low Countries and the Germanies, but this is no longer possible.

The key developments in gunpowder technology were on the continent, although the English were not bad at gun-founding. Elizabeth's England depended on overseas powder mills and arquebus makers, which was a problem when she got into her Spanish war. Once again, when Elizabeth or Henry VIII wanted to improve their native powder and smallarms industry, they imported workers from Flanders and the Germanies. This is no longer possible, and with only one island chain's wars, buyers, and tinkerers improvements will be even slower. With less and worse armour, the arquebus loses a key advantage over the longbow.

The limitations of gunpowder technology and the end of trade across the North Sea, the Bay of Biscay, and the Mediterranean cut off a lot of exciting developments in shipbuilding, rigging, navigation, and so on. The experts call this a North Sea technology for a reason ... it was developed all around the North Sea and Baltic with developments by individual captains and shipwrights influencing others in different countries.

The collapse of trade and the end of continental wars also devastates port cities like London and the Cinque Ports. With just fishing and coastal trade and pirate-fighting, their population is likely to shrink. England was already rustic, and it gets more so.

A lot of the best cloth mills were in Flanders, so England loses its comparative advantage in wool production and has to weave more of its own cloth. Without any export market, these probably won't be as advanced as the best Flemish mills. Pasture falls out of use, and men who were doing other things turn to weaving.

A lot of the most exciting developments in scholarship are happening in Italy and Flanders. These vanish: no more people like Tito Livio, and no more correspondence with Poggio Bracciolino or authors-turned-spies picking up the latest tricks of the storyteller's trade in Milan. England is on its own culturally, and doesn't have a flood of new classical texts. It will never rediscover the Greek classics, because nobody in England in 1450 can read Greek, because most of the manuscripts are in other countries, and because there are no more enthusiastic Greeks and Italians to encourage English scholars to learn it. Its access to Arabic and Persian literature ends, and the exiled Jews just over the channel and their learning are gone too. Without Italian, Flemish, and Dutch paintings to use as an example art history develops differently. Without wandering master builders from the continent, buildings are less sophisticated.

The printing press was about to be invented. The idea may have reached England, but without a proof-of-concept on the continent (and Flemish paper mills to import from) it may never be developed.

Hopped beer was being developed around this time because it could be shipped from the Germanies to England without spoiling. Without this demand, the English probably stick to small beer brewed on a small scale. (See Richard Unger's Beer in the Middle Ages).

So the result is a poorer Britain without the latest gadgets and cultural innovations. It does not have libraries of tens of thousands of codices, cities of hundreds of thousands of people, large oceangoing ships, and other technologies which characterized the societies which I said that this kingdom could not resemble (I am not using TL jargon here, because I consider it useless for serious discussion).