Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX

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Okay, if you make the brambles thick enough to a point where they stop you be their sheer mass, it will work if it is high enough. Bu thorns will be of limited effect there, you will get simlar effect with hedges. How you want to get them grown in a few months, though... well, I guess you could always claim magic.



This is a terrible idea and will get your wall to crumble in a few years, damage by roots is quite a problem, even grass can damage a castle wall given enough time. Earthern wall will fare even worse.






The problem here is the local maximums and minimums - the population desity will not be uniform for a country. Arable lowlands will have more people, tall mountains will have barely any and cities will have high concentrations. Things like gold deposits and major rivers will impact this, as well as stable vs unstable borders and so on and so forth. The more profitable and peaceful the region is, the more population it will usually have.

Spoiler: Major settlements in high medieval Hungary

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You can see the settlements, and therefore population, mostly concentrated in a west to north crescent

Viable how? Self sustaining community has 50 people per 2 ha, with very, very primitive farming (fallow cropping with no fertilizer), as per this article. In that sense, yeah, you need 200 ares for a sustainable farming village, but that village has several farms, probably five or so (10 people per household is sort of a standard rule of thumb), and a portion of them does not look like farms (pasture, maybe, depends on how you fallow crop).

Problem is, you can't easily scale it down, just because the math works out to 4 ares per man doesn't necessarily mean one man can sustain himself off of that amount of land. And 50 people is a very small village, any lower and it will probably disappear by people moving out. Villages are usually in the 100-200 people range.



Assuming this is in a relatively stable region, likely all of it. Farmable areas will be concentrated in the lowlands, with hills reserved for pasture. Habsburg first military survey map from 1700s shows us a village every 5-10 km on a road, with road and therefore village network denser in arable areas and sparse in the hills.

In areas with significant rainfall, not having plant growth in your earthen walls will cause them to erode without question, unless it's rammed earth or adobe/cob (which will hold up fairly well, but will still be affected over very long periods of time). Curtain walls are a whole different thing, but for the sort of earthworks proposed plants should only be beneficial. Deep roots stabilize soil and are generally speaking, a good idea (though earthen dams can be compromised by woody growth, grass is beneficial). Elevated hedgerows, even those faced with stone that will be more vulnerable to damage from growth, have maintenance cycles on the order of over 100 years, as in Cornish and Devon hedges (though these are farm walls meant for soil protection and sectioning off land, they are very much walls).