How to calculate a village's population size

Question

I have the two largest towns of this smallish Kingdom's populations, but the first place the protags of my story are going to encounter is going to be village or hamlet sized. Most of the resources I am coming across seem to focus on the big cities, which is nice, but not needed for another few chapters. (Also, MDME seems to give very high population numbers ...)

Stuff I have already come across: Medieval Demographics Made Easy (and the donjon calculator); Worldbuilding Mega Tutorial; Notes on Medieval Population Geography

Some particular notes about this particular country is that it is the home to Fairies and their longer lifespan (and also been around for about 2000 years, maybe, max), but I am probably going to need this answered again once the protags come across a human (Been around longer but shorter lifespans compared to the Fairies.) based kingdom and some of it's villages.

My World Anvil Entry for the Fairy Kingdom

Update: The Village in question is situated in between two rivers with a mountain range to the north. This village is the northernmost village on this side of the kingdom, but it's not against the mountain range itself. The region is somewhere in the temperate zone. Fairly Straight north of the capitol of the tiny kingdom. One of the youngest villages, Tiny lake to the south where the two rivers meet. Closest village is southeast. Capitol is also a port. The entire kingdom is set in a forest. The equivalent of an Earth element Deity resides in the capitol.

The village's story purpose is more of a first encounter for the protagonists who have lived in said mountains their entire lives.

Answer 1

Thanks for the extra info, FangirlShadow, and I apologize that you're not receiving better support.

A town is a larger and more complex place, which includes structural achievements like castles and walls, but you're asking after a young village, which will be small.

Any community in a fantasy medieval setting has or may have...

1. Government (including law enforcement and taxation)
2. Trade/Crafts (skilled people such as blacksmiths, farriers, etc.)
3. Trade/Merchants (supporting city activities)
4. Trade/Commerce (supporting import/export)
5. Artistry
6. Entertainment
7. Education (possibly, fantasy stories often follow the apprenticeship model)
8. Religion
9. Banking/Financing (possibly, it depends if there's monetary currency or if you're using barter)

So, working with this and what you've told us...

• You said your capitol had something akin to an Earth Element Diety residing within it. Let's assume there's a process of worship, which always means a basic bureaucracy. A village could be expected to have a priest or adherent of that worship. Though he/she might double with another task (e.g., they might also be a fisherman), such people were often local counselors and leaders. So, population +1. We'll say no family, either an older person or celibacy.

• Two close rivers mean fishing as a staple industry. This means we can use supporting specialized trades like net manufacturing and repair. Fishing as an export was easier than other proteins because they were easily smoked for preservation. (You can jerk red meat, too, it's just easier with fish.) So if you want an export, you can export fish, and that means supporting workers for preservation, packing, transport, and security (hungry people and hungry animals). This sounds bigger than it really is. How many is based on other rolls, but with a small village, let's say 10 fishermen + families, another 15+families for all the supporting trades and commerce. An estimate of the average family size in medieval England is 3.5 people. So, population = +87.

• There are basic needs in any village: entertainment (often just a pub, but it can be more), blacksmiths, thatchers and carpenters. (Larger towns need masons and a host of other things.) And, of course, their families. Let's say two each for population +28.

• You have a diety living in the capitol, which would suggest a reasonably well formed bureaucracy, meaning taxes and law. Your village will need a leader and sheriff for law and order. Our village is getting a bit large and there's those wild animals to consider, so the sheriff has two deputies. Population +14. (BTW, it's true that not everyone has a family, but the average statistic does well for giving us a starting point.

• I mentioned before hunters and farmers. Agriculture was well established at any point during Medieval Europe's years. As the northernmost village you'll likely favor hunting over farming (more settled areas tend to have an element of being over-hunted). We don't need a lot of farmers because a square kilometer can support approximately 2,000 people. However, I'm a bit wary of that answer because it assumes a top caloric output and medieval farming was rarely that efficient and it does depend on your climate (length of growing season) and the quality of your soil. Let's assume your village can achieve half that. So far we have 130 people in your village, suggesting we need .13 square km (130,000 square meters), but that was just the people. You also have horses, goats, cows, dogs, cats, sheep, pigs, chickens, and who knows what domesticated critters needed for everything from food sources (e.g. milk and bacon) to lowering your blood pressure (pets). There's also the need for a little future planning, so you want some excess that's stored against the proverbial not-rainy day (drought). Animals often outnumber humans by many:1, but it's a village. Let's assume 3:1. So our "population" for the purposes of calculating supporting farmland is closer to 400 for about two-fifths of a square kilometer or about 49 acres. About a person per acre or 49 farmers/work-hands and another 10 for supporting activities + families. Population +206, but now you need more farmland. let's avoid the calculus. Population +300 to support the community's people and animals.

Total basic population: 430 people.

From this point you can adjust the size of your village to suit the needs of your story. The largest population variable is your group of farmers, just remember that as you adjust that count, your other counts need to adjust with it. Cut your farming in half and the rest of the town must cut in half, too, or there won't be enough food to feed everyone.

Note

There were medieval villages as small as a couple of dozen people all the way up to formal cities with tens of thousands (the population of London in 1200 is estimated to be 20,000-25,000). Remember that Europe was feudal, so there really weren't many (if any) independent villages, towns, or cities. There would have been a manor with a knight or other peer to whom everyone was basically answerable. But when you got away from the central manor and into the land controlled by the manor, those villages were on average 250-300 people in size, so my estimate isn't far off (bit on the high side).

Answer 2

I'm going to break with worldbuilding tradition here and say it doesn't matter. Find the purpose of the city/village/location and populate it accordingly. Ta daa! Done.

Except you're not done, you need to make sure that every thread you pull on connects to something. So if it's a hamlet there's PROBABLY not going to be a bank there. If the protagonist needs to visit a bank they have to go somewhere else. Maybe it's the distant city of Poombah (no relation) which is a thriving port city, which also means it's on a trade route, which means it's not just a native population, but there are also itinerants, which means higher crime, which means a legal system designed to mitigate it and guards to enforce it, which means a local governor, which means taxes, which means unhappy citizens who will move away because the burden is too high, which means the population is continually in flux.

In nearly every case, the population of a city isn't as important to a protagonist as all of those other factors in addition to size and population density, which are all up to you.

If you DO run into a general population question, like how large a military can this city/country field, it's also up to you but you have to have a reason for it. The size of the army is important to the story. If you need to put 30,000 soldiers on the battlefield, you have to assume at least 60% of the population is at home, and that's if it's a desperate struggle and you're shoving every able body you can find into a boiled leather shirt and handing them a sharp stick. Maybe 5-10% of any given population in a hostile area would be directly involved in the military. During peacetime, that number would be closer to 2-3%. But you know what else? That's also up to you because it will depend on the local culture - do they value military prowess? Are they nationalists who are proud to fight? Or are they conscripts who do it only reluctantly? Are they warmongers looking for an excuse to die in glorious battle?

Realizing I didn't really answer the original question very well except to say "it depends" ... a small village would probably max out between 1,000 and 2,500 if there's a residential area with outlying farms.

Answer 3

Since people seem to be having trouble reading the entirety of my previous answer, let me paraphrase.

The population of a city is less important to a protagonist than population density, access to goods or resources, or local government.

The actual population would require access to a number of factors that are decided on and weighted by story and plot, so no calculator or formula is going to provide you with an easy answer. The simple (and in my opinion lazy) answer is anything between 30 and 150 people per square mile, and that number is nuanced by the reasons people have for being in that location. See the mention above on what's important to the protagonist because they're also important to everyone else in it.

It will also depend on an endless number of mitigating factors - for example, does the region have access to people with the skills to construct buildings higher than 3 stories?

If you want to use real-world metrics to define your fantasy world, then a medieval hamlet, defined as a small settlement, would be anything between 1,000 and 2,500 people. The same location in the early renaissance would be considerably smaller (depending on the exact region) since the Black Plague cut the population of Europe as a whole by 1/3.

Pull a string, see what it tugs on, make a decision, pin it down.