Contemporary readers may struggle to comprehend the differing scale of life during the medieval centuries. One good illustration is the population size of villages, towns, and cities.

I often stumble across estimates of the approximate populations in many different sources. But remember that any numbers from the medieval period at the least raise issues about regional variance, changes over time, definitional boundaries, and either the lack of or the reliability of specific records.

Yet having some reasonable comparative data helps me with my fictional worldbuilding and plotting. So I’m going to provide some specific examples in this post and add to the post at intervals over time as I encounter more estimates in my future reading.

For context, you can think of population centers as intersections in a web of mutual dependency: a handful or more of hamlets and villages connect to a small market town, and in turn, a group of market towns connect to a larger city, often one with river or ocean access.

The distance between population centers usually would fall between five or ten miles and twenty miles. Large cities typically would be spaced fairly far from each other.

Events like famines, plagues, and wars caused large swings in population. So for the purposes of my project, I generally mirrored my created cities off European population centers between 1350 and 1450 A.D.

Villages (thousands upon thousands of these settlements; typically five or more to every small market town; the villages typically numbered around thirty to ninety households, mostly in a cluster around a manor hall, a church, and, often, a mill, with a few outlying cottages or hamlets (Posten).

Small Market Towns (many below 2,000, most with ~200 to 500 families, England had somewhere around 760 market towns, McKisack and Phythian-Adams)

Danzig, ~2,000 (in 1300); ~10,000 (by 1400); ~20,000 (by 1450, Dollinger)

Shrewsbury, ~4,000 (Phythian-Adams)

Stamford, ~2,500 (in 1377, Phythian-Adams)

Mid-sized Towns/Cities (the boundaries are somewhat fluid, but seats of high clergy and lords were typically cities, with more stores, manufacturing, and trade masters available)

Amsterdam, ~5,000+ (Dollinger)

Boston, Lincolnshire, ~5,750 (in 1377, Phythian-Adams)

Exeter, ~8,000

Frankfort, 8,719 (1440s, Pirenne)

Hildesheim, ~6,000 to 8,000 (1400s, Dollinger)

Salisbury, ~8,000

Stockholm, ~6,000-7,000 (late 1400s, Dollinger)

Wismer, ~8,000 (around 1400, Dollinger)

York, ~8,000

Larger Cities (perhaps one-in-three residents were adult male workers, not all householders)

Bremen, ~17,000 (around 1400, Dollinger)

Bristol, ~10,000

Cologne, ~13,000 (1300s); ~30,000 (in 1400s, Dollinger)

Coventry, ~9,634 (in 1377); ~9,824 (in 1434, Phythian-Adams)

Dortmund, ~10,000 (1300s, Dollinger)

Goslar, ~10,000 (around 1400, copper and lead miners, Dollinger)

Kampen, ~12,000 (around 1400, Dollinger)

London, ~35,000 (in 1377, Knoop and Jones); ~50,000 (by 1500)

Magdeburg, ~20,000 (Dollinger)

Newcastle, ~10,000

Norwich, ~13,000 (late 1400s)

Paris, ~150,000-200,000 (late 1400s?)

Rostock, ~15,000 (around 1400, Dollinger)

Stralsund, ~10,000 (around 1400, Dollinger)

Ypres, 10,732 (1412, Pirenne)