How many villages in a kingdom?

[Scarey Nerd]

I'm working on a redesign of my core kingdom where most campaigns at least start, and I was trying to look up a sort of average number of villages for a kingdom of any size so I could get an idea of how many to populate my (relatively small) kingdom with. However, when looking up that sort of thing, most kingdoms in Faerun etc only have cities and towns listed, with no real indication of how many villages there would be.

Do you guys have any advice/knowledge/links? If it helps, the kingdom has 3 cities and 7 towns, and each one is usually no more than a couple of weeks walking from any other city/town.

[Stan]

It requires lots of assumptions on population density and urban/rural split.

You could assume that the population is 90% rural (it may be more urban in a higher magic world), take the population of known cities and towns, multiply by 9, then divide by your preferred median village size, say 500 or 1000.


Another way is to take the land area that is populated and not urban, and assume a village for about every 20 square miles. Depending on the land quality, climate, and tech/magic, the population density for the country as a whole might be 10-150 per square mile. Unless the population is nomadic, the vast majority of people in a low tech world will live in villages.

Or, you could just give a ball park like 10 villages to support a town and 50 to support a city.

[Ninja_Prawn]

Search Google for 'medieval demographics made easy'. It's pretty much the gold standard for this sort of thing. It'll help you calculate overall Kingdom population, population density, average village size, etc. Obviously some maths skills are needed, since you'll be working backwards from cities you've already established.

[ThePurple]

Do you guys have any advice/knowledge/links? If it helps, the kingdom has 3 cities and 7 towns, and each one is usually no more than a couple of weeks walking from any other city/town.

As a rule of thumb, in reasonably pacified/civilized areas, you can place population centers roughly 1 day apart (1 day of whatever the most common travel type is; in Europe, it's basically every 20 miles, since that's about what you can expect out of a pedestrian; in the western US, it's significantly more thanks to horses/wagons, and later cars, being the prevalent form of travel when those places were settled). In more primitive/chaotic regions, that rule of thumb is going to be cast aside pretty quickly though. The space in between population centers is generally going to be pastoral and/or farmland (or relatively unpopulated areas like massive forests).

Cities, towns, and villages all follow the same rule of thumb about placement, though you're not liable to see cities next to each other or towns near cities (you might have a couple of towns within a day's travel of each other, though they'd need a reason for it, like one being on a river and the other on an overland trade route).

[Max_Killjoy]

I wonder how different eras would differ... the city states of early Mesopotamia, the iron age city states of Greece, etc.

[Aedilred]

It also depends how precise you want to be about the definition of "village". In (parts of?) France, for instance, a village is, strictly speaking, a sub-town settlement that has a church. If it doesn't have a church, it's a hamlet. (The distinction between a village and a town is usually that a town has a market). A lot of the rural population is likely to be made up of manors, hamlets, thorps, monasteries and farmsteads that aren't strictly speaking villages. Indeed, even the villages themselves may not be the clustered group of twenty or so houses that we're used to, but a linked group of individual houses or farms within a couple of miles of a church. If you have enough land to be self-sufficient, the main reason to park all your houses next to each other and have a long walk to the fields in the morning is for security, and if the rule of law is reasonably enforced, getting attacked by outlaws is unlikely. Other reasons might include access to a mill or bread oven, but that would factor into the same calculations: whether it's worth building and maintaining your own, trekking to the local one, or living close to one. Many villages in our middle ages grew out of Roman villas which were essentially country houses (indeed, "village" appears to derive from "villa").

I suspect that demographic patterns at a rural level remained relatively consistent across most of pre-modern history, with occasional fluctuations to account for collapses in law enforcement, plagues and famines, and so on. Before the invention of rail, the rate at which people could move about (and move goods about) had remained relatively consistent since the start of civilisation, and so things would naturally tend to settle into a pattern where optimum use was being made of the available land, with settlements spaced between them. The emergence of large cities and towns would have a dramatic effect on the local area but probably only a relatively minor one further afield. An exception might be under certain systems where huge areas of land fell under the sway of a relatively highly centralised authority. This was rare for obvious administrative reasons but did happen in, for instance, Rome. This enabled land use in a rather more efficient (though less popular) way; huge estates operated by slaves or other indentured workers, probably bearing more in common with an American antebellum slave plantation than a rural medieval community.

[sktarq]

Also village size and density would vary widely within a nation. Mostly depending on food or trade good density. Pastoral communities tend to range wider and higher security tends to favor an even population density vs walled villages with people hiking a few miles to less secure fields. Also water sources tend to concentrate villages.

Also the 20 Sq Miles per village number is pretty loose. And basically translates to a 4.5 Mile (7.2 km) radius of influence.

Also many peoples tried to create uninhabited regions surrounding their communities (mostly for defensive and resettlement option reasons). This was often a point of pride for them.m Now depending on how big the nation is (as boarder region generally grows slower that total area) and how well integrated the nation is. From its constituent parts this could have a substantial effect on your population distributions

[Zale]

I once found a very interesting article (http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm)that does some math about this.

I thought it was very informative.

[Mechalich]

Medieval Demographics Made Easy is pretty much the gold standard for this sort of thing, with a few caveats. One, it represents a method to calculate feudal European population densities not other continents. Differences in crop base make the calculations considerably different for medieval Americas or Asian settings. Two, it is not meant to represent high-magic worlds that may have effectively transcended their environmental constraints and be functioning by an entirely different developmental calculus. Standard 3.X D&D is by definition high magic and is going to involve some weird variations (the only D&D setting that even remotely simulates a world functioning according to D&D rules is Dark Sun).

[Knaight]

Before the invention of rail, the rate at which people could move about (and move goods about) had remained relatively consistent since the start of civilisation...

There's some big caveats to this. Particularly good road systems increased overland trade routes pretty dramatically, and then there's changes in ship building for both river trade and trade across oceans and seas, both of which are also very significant. Rail was a pretty dramatic overland increase, but it wasn't the only one.

[Waffle_Iron]

I'm not aware of 'medieval demographic made easy', but an important concept to keep in mind after determining locations of your major cities, is to place mid sized cities at their midpoint, and to keep most farmable land as being farmed.

If there is a real world analog for a city that you want, the population in 1200 ad was roughly 5-6 percent of the modern day pop. If the city existed then, certain exclusions apply, ymmv, etc.

Use the Zipf distribution to determine population counts from there.
The population numbers in the DMG are only appropriate if you plan on having every village and city currently being at war with dragons, trolls, and Mind Flayers concurrently.

[Aedilred]

There's some big caveats to this. Particularly good road systems increased overland trade routes pretty dramatically, and then there's changes in ship building for both river trade and trade across oceans and seas, both of which are also very significant. Rail was a pretty dramatic overland increase, but it wasn't the only one.

You're not wrong, but I suspect their effect on actual population distribution was relatively small, and it's still fairly easy to compare such things across history. Roman roads remained pretty much unsurpassed in Europe at least until the industrial revolution. What's more as far as settlement distribution goes the really relevant measure is how far an individual can travel in a day, and while road quality does make a difference to that it's not an enormous one: the real benefits will be felt over longer-distance travel. The existence of roads as opposed to not having any likely made a significant difference to travel times, but then having roads at all is one of the things I'd identify as one of the hallmarks of civilisation in the first place.

Waterborne transport made a huge difference to trade, but it was more relevant for bulk transport than on a more personal/family level. So its impact on population was probably felt much more at the city level than in rural areas. And cities are kind of weird and unpredictable when it comes to pre-modern demographics anyway. In rural areas I suspect the principal result of improvements in road and canal/river transport (seaborne transport is only really relevant along the coast, of course) was that villages and towns became slightly larger, as they were able to support more people, rather than seeing a wholesale redistribution of settlements.

[Knaight]

You're not wrong, but I suspect their effect on actual population distribution was relatively small, and it's still fairly easy to compare such things across history. Roman roads remained pretty much unsurpassed in Europe at least until the industrial revolution. What's more as far as settlement distribution goes the really relevant measure is how far an individual can travel in a day, and while road quality does make a difference to that it's not an enormous one: the real benefits will be felt over longer-distance travel. The existence of roads as opposed to not having any likely made a significant difference to travel times, but then having roads at all is one of the things I'd identify as one of the hallmarks of civilisation in the first place.
The roman roads would be one of the examples of exceptionally good road systems that made a big difference, although it's not the only one. Take the silk road, a lot of which was along actual road ways, where the quality in both Europe (compliments of Rome) and China were pretty big deals for that trade route. As for the effects on population distribution, it's worth observing that there are a lot of rural communities that were deliberately situated near old roads, and that's before getting into the effect they had on city distributions. There's also the whole phenomenon of bigger villages (as distinct from individual homesteads) building up around market sites, and market sites emerging based on how easily they are accessed. Roads and canals are a significant factor there.


Waterborne transport made a huge difference to trade, but it was more relevant for bulk transport than on a more personal/family level. So its impact on population was probably felt much more at the city level than in rural areas. And cities are kind of weird and unpredictable when it comes to pre-modern demographics anyway. In rural areas I suspect the principal result of improvements in road and canal/river transport (seaborne transport is only really relevant along the coast, of course) was that villages and towns became slightly larger, as they were able to support more people, rather than seeing a wholesale redistribution of settlements.
That it was a bigger deal at the city level is undisputed, but I'd argue that there is still some effect even at a rural community level. It's a lot less dramatic than it is with frontiers that have railways, but that's not saying much.

[sktarq]

A high quality road can have huge consequences but is not guaranteed to. A HQ road from settled area to settled area (or settlement target area) that tranverses large lightly settled areas can basicay becme the centre of settlement within the transversed region. This will create a sieres of rest stop/trade camp/miitary bases that act as connecters for the lcal region. This effect showed up clearly on parts of the silk and spice road but also parts of the transsaharan trade (in the Aghar esp) and the settlement of the American west/great Plains. The effect was also already present and was magnifieed by rail lines which can obscure the roads effect in places like the US or siberia.

[Tvtyrant]

Taking the Cevennes of France, for an example.

The Cevennes are a remote and impoverished part of France, made up of several mountain valleys. Each valley was built with a single village near the most productive land, surrounded by successively smaller settlements of people as the land gets more marginal (ie higher elevation). The village had a population of some 300, the closest hamlets had populations of fifty, and the remote settlements 10-20.

Success was defined by generations, as farmers who were successful in marginal areas would move to farms that were more successful. Their children would then have more access to learning additional trades such as a blacksmith or potter, which would allow them to move into the village in the third generation. Those most successful in the village moved out of the valley, while those who failed would move onto more marginal lands.

There were many mountain valleys set up this way, which were quite capable of military revolt (see Wars of Religion, Camisard rebellion, Etc). The village-system produced very little that could be sold into the international market, redistributing and consuming almost all of their own surplus.

[Lycanthrope13]

I'm just gonna do a walkthrough of how I laid out one of the main kingdoms in my setting. It's a pretty standard feudal medieval society. Three major cities, two coastal, and one inland. I figured 20 miles to be a day's journey by foot, and a day's sailing (with the current) is twice that. City 1 is at the fork in the river, City 2 is 60 miles downstream, on the coast, and City 3 is 40 miles up the coast from that. There are 3 main highways, Coastal, River, and Overland which connect the cities. There's also the Forest Road which runs straight through City 1, north and south, to the neighboring kingdoms. Large towns occur at 20 mile intervals along these highways. From each town (and the cities), I drew a circle with a 10 mile radius. At the edges of these circles, I randomly placed 3 villages for each town. That way the villagers could realistically be to town and back in a day. Then I moved on to outposts. These are very small, remote settlements that I randomly placed on the blank space of the map for filler, generally 2-3 days from a town or city.