Say, does your gamesystem have a food preservation enchantment? Because without that, food goes bad fast. if you keep your civic food stores dry, protected from vermin, and secure, they’ll keep two to four years without magic. That means wagonloads of food and drink (the twenty-five bushels of grain alone takes up not quite two wagons) each and every day, and if your roads are impassible in winter, you need many more wagons coming through before then. You’ll have to have market squares to hawk that food. The amount of water livestock sucks up as a percentage of their food value is far more than grain or vegetables need.) It takes four tons of water to grow enough cotton for a pair of trousers. The various industries of a large medieval town or city uses roughly ten times that much per capita – for tanners, laundries, fullers, foundries, smiths, numerous others. Cooking and washing use up a good deal more. A human needs about two liters of fresh water a day (or liquid equivalent) in order to survive, more to offset strenuous activity or high temperatures. Throw in vegetables, fruit, cooking oil, herbs.
(This, of course, can form the basis for plots.)Ī town of a thousand people will consume roughly twenty-five bushels of grain, around 800 gallons of wine, tea or beer, about three cattle, and about a hundred smaller livestock. This is easily disruptible by the realm's enemies. If your realm tries anyway to maintain a sizable town away from natural resources (see below), that means you need an equally-sizable logistics train to support it. It's expensive enough, and hard enough on the soldiers, to subsidize a strictly military outpost in a forsaken outback: ask the Romans, the French, the British, or the mid- to late-19th century Americans, for that matter. If there are no resources and no trade, a ruler would have to be mad (and filthy rich) to subsidize a city out in the middle of nowhere, for no good reason whatsoever. If work isn't to be had, folks aren't going to stick around. When all is said and done, the main reason people live in towns - dirty, smelly, crowded, verminous, disease-ridden, dangerous places at medieval tech - is to find work. You’re also not going to get a town of any size far in the outback, away from trade routes or transportation infrastructure, no matter the benefits. The more negative factors there are that deter growth – the site's on an invasion route, a lack of forests for fuel, mountainous or swampy terrain – there must be counterbalancing benefits that make people want to live there (there’s a large gold mine, the location is unusually defensible, the kingdom’s northern border army needs a base, it's the birthplace of the Goddess of Winter and a pilgrimage site) and/or mitigating factors (less need for fuel because the town's on the equator, the local lichen is magically nutritious, the river going through is the only decent water source within 500 miles). †) One of the reasons in colonial America that Boston took off as a major port and Plymouth didn't was that Plymouth's harbor is quite shallow and silts up readily.Ĭonsider also access to building materials, wood for fuel, fresh water, and nearby arable land. Just as an example, how many cities in the United States before the railroad era were NOT founded on a navigable waterway? (Answer below. While a small town can coalesce in a prosperous inland farming district or gather around a castle (indeed, skilled labor is necessary for a castle to be built), larger towns or cities locate on navigable rivers or natural harbors. Any urban area, whether village, town or city, arises out of the need for trade.