labor brought lower rents, higher wages, and a drastic reduction in the number of
bondsmen, from about 50 percent to about 10 percent of the rural population.
Perhaps a third of all medieval infants failed to reach the age of six, half of these dying
in the first year. Death tolls for both sexes remained high until the mid-teens. Those who
survived the dangerous childhood diseases gained a basic immunity from the most
common scourges, and most who reached maturity could expect to live until fifty,
although most of those in their forties were decrepit and disease-ridden. Average nuclear-
family size was perhaps only four, because children left the hearth early (seven to twelve
years of age) to become apprentices or domestic servants.
Diet, hygiene, and living standards improved after the waves of plague carried off the
excess population, but for most of the Middle Ages average life expectancy was only
about thirty-four for males and twenty-eight for females. Many more females were
exposed or killed at birth, and the mortality of women in childbirth may have exceeded
that of men in war, hunting, and accidents. The sex ratio was between 6:5 and 4:3. David
Herlihy, who has studied some major demographic documents of the Middle Ages, has
argued that more female than male servants may have eluded the enumerators, but this
factor alone cannot explain the preponderance of males indicated in virtually all surveys
of population in Europe before the 18th century.
Like most slaves, perhaps one-third of the free or freed men could never afford to
marry, as in 19th-century Ireland or the Roman Empire. That fact, along with the sex
ratio, may have encouraged situational homosexuality, while many exclusives joined the
clergy, the celibacy of which held down the population. The newly created orphanages
became charnel houses whose horrors and deprivations few survived.
Except for royalty and aristocracy—whose members often married young, boys of
eighteen to girls of fifteen or younger—most French people seem to have waited to
marry. After plagues or other disasters, when heirs came prematurely into their
inheritances, the marriage ages of even common males plunged. Contrariwise, on the
over-crowded farms before the Black Death, marriages were postponed. Merchants often
waited until they had established their fortunes, or professionals until their careers
flourished. We encounter marriages of a “Mediterranean type” (twenty-four-year-old men
who could afford their own dwelling marrying fourteen- or fifteen-year-old girls),
intermediate between the “European type” that has prevailed in the West since ca. 1500
(men in their late twenties marrying women in their mid-twenties) and the “eastern type”
(males at puberty taking women of about twelve and continuing to live with the groom’s
family).
France had Europe’s largest population from Charlemagne to Napoleon, but its rate of
growth has since been the slowest in Europe.
William A.Percy, Jr.
Boswell, John. The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from
Late Antiquity to the Renaissance. New York: Pantheon, 1988.
Herlihy, David. Medieval Households. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.
Lot, Ferdinand. “L’état des paroisses et des feux de 1328.” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 90
(1929):51–107.
Pirenne, Henri. Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade, trans. F.D.Halsey.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1925.
Russell, Josiah Cox. Medieval Regions and Their Cities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1972.
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