Tag Archives: height

11/14/12

Life in the Middle Ages not so Bad :)

We have a view of life in the Middle Ages as “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”, thanks to the quote from Thomas Hobbes.  However, he wasn’t talking about life in the Middle Ages, though somehow that’s what his quote has become to mean. Instead, he is talking about a fictive moment in human history before the development of formal society, which he viewed as the natural state of humanity. He saw it as a “warre of every man against every man”.

The cultures of Great Britain have maintained a formal society for thousands of years, and even then, as an anthropologist, what Hobbes might have called ‘primitive societies’ often had a strong social order and a way of life which was very far from his war of every man against every man.

The majority of medieval people were ‘poor’ by our standards, certainly, but as you can see from posts about such things as ‘mob ball’, while brutal could certainly apply, and short, there was fun to be had.

Furthermore, “Economists at the University of Warwick found that per capita income in England during the late Middle Ages was likely around $1,000 in 1990 dollars.”  http://lifeinc.todayshow.com/_news/2010/12/21/5669977-medieval-brits-may-have-had-it-better-than-poorest-today

This makes the people of that era better off than many people living in many countries in the world today.   This article is also in keeping with the analysis of height in the Middle Ages (I blogged about that here).  In the Middle Ages (meaning post-Roman Britain) the average height of individuals was not being so different than the height of an average person today.  Height is an indicator of nutrition and social welfare.  Smaller people are generally less well fed.

The paper, BRITISH ECONOMIC GROWTH, 1270-1870, states:  ” . . . a large share of the English population were already in a position during the late Middle Ages to afford what Allen calls the “respectable lifestyle”, with a more varied diet including meat, dairy produce and ale, as well as the less highly processed grain products that comprised the bulk of the bare bones subsistence diet.”

The document is full of fascinating charts, one of which shows population in England over the period discussed:

English population, 1250-1700

population (millions) Total population Year Total population
1250 4.23 1400 2.08
1290 4.75 1450 1.90
1300 4.73 1490 2.14
1315 4.69 1560 3.02
1348 4.81 1600 4.11
1351 2.60 1650 5.31
1377 2.50 1700 5.20

 

Note the sad drop-off starting 1351 after/during the Black Death.  The population doesn’t recover until after 1600.

This second chart shows population growth rates:

Growth rates of population (% per annum) 10-year averages
1270-1300 0.27 1270/79 – 1300/09 0.23
1300-1348 0.04 1300/09 – 1340/48 -0.02
1348-1400 -1.60 1340/48 – 1400/09 -1.33
1400-1450 -0.18 1400/09 – 1450/59 -0.14
1450-1490 0.29 1450/59 – 1480/89 0.29
1490-1560 0.55 1480/89 – 1553/59 0.54
1560-1600 0.60 1553/59 – 1600/09 0.67
1600-1650 0.51 1600/09 – 1650/59 0.45
1650-1700 -0.04 1650/59 – 1691/1700 -0.08
1270-1700 0.04 1270/79 – 1691/1700 0.04

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/academic/broadberry/wp/britishgdplongrun8a.pdf

To compare, the population growth of the United States, from the 2010 census was .097 or 9.7%.  As a side note, this not to be confused with the birth rate–which was the lowest in a century in 2009 at .0135.  The US population growth is fueled by immigration, which was not the case in medieval England.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/27/us-birth-rate-sets-record_n_697131.html  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40764172/ns/us_news-life/

06/20/10

Height in the Middle Ages

According to the report, “Mean Body Weight, Height, and Body Mass Index (BMI) 1960-2002: United States,” from the CDC (Center for Disease Control), the average height of a man aged 20-74 years increased from just over 5’ 8” in 1960 to 5’ 9 ½” in 2002.  At the same time, the average height for women increased from slightly over 5’ 3” in 1960 to 5’ 4” in 2002.

If you visit houses built in the 18th century, however, door frames were much lower than they are now.  The obvious assumption, then, is that people were much shorter then, than they are now.  And they were.   But according to Richard Steckel, a professor at the Ohio State, it hasn’t been a steady change over time.  From his research, the average height of people who lived in the 9-11th centuries was comparable to ours today.  It then declined slightly during the 12th through 16th centuries, and hit an all-time low during the 17th and 18th centuries–when those doorframes were made.

By the 1700s, Northern European men had lost an average of 2.5 inches of height compared to the Dark Ages, a loss that was not fully recovered until the first half of the 20th century.

He came to this conclusion by analyzing height data from skeletons excavated from burial sites in northern Europe dating from the ninth to the 19th centuries.

The real question is . . . Why?

It has to do with health, primarily.  According to  Steckel, height is an indicator of overall health and economic well-being.  From the study of human growth, “average height reflects the overall health of a population-its diet, wealth, quality of housing, levels of pollution, disease, and stress-particularly for infants and adolescents.”

Over the last 50 years, according to statistics kept by the Japanese Ministry of Education, the average height of Japanese 11-year-olds has increased by more than 5 1/2 inches. The height of girls, who grow faster at that age, meanwhile, has increased even more.  This is attributed to general better health, less disease, and the doubling of protein intake by the average Japanese person since 1960.  http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/01/world/tokyo-journal-the-japanese-it-seems-are-outgrowing-japan.html

Further, “The Dutch are currently tallest, measuring about two inches taller than Americans,” Steckel states. “Why? They have very high income levels, they have perhaps the best pre-natal and post-natal care in the world, and they have a relatively equal distribution of income.”

Height research conducted with European populations appears similar to American studies. A study of nearly 10,000 5-to-11-year-old English and Scottish children found a clear connection between a child’s height and whether the father had a job. In each social class group, children with unemployed fathers were shorter.

http://www.oberlin.edu/alummag/oamcurrent/oam_may99/tall.html

People reached heights comparable to ours during the Dark Ages because, despite our  lack of information about those years (thus, the term, ‘dark’), people were healthier in terms of food quantity and quality of life then they were later.  The 17th and 18th centuries were the beginning of the industrial revolution.  If you think about the squalor and poverty of London, for example, in the 1800s, that conclusion is not at all surprising.

Thus, a man born in the Middle Ages would have been equally likely to reach the height of 6 feet as a child born in Wales today.