Broadsheet

This is the first post in a series discussing the basic contours of life – birth, marriage, labor, subsistence, death – of pre-modern peasants and their families. Prior to the industrial revolution, peasant farmers of varying types made up the overwhelming majority of people in settled societies (the sort with cities and writing). And when I say overwhelming, I mean overwhelming: we generally estimate these societies to have consisted of upwards of 80% peasant farmers, often as high as 90 or even 95%. Yet when we talk about these periods, we are often focused on aristocrats, priests, knights, warriors, kings and literate bureaucrats, the sort of folks who write to us or on smiths, masons and artists, the sort of folk whose work sometimes survives for us to see. But this series is going to be about what life was like for the great majority of people who lived in small farming households.

We’re actually doing two things in this series. First, of course, we’ll be discussing what we know about the patterns of life for peasant households. But we’re also laying out a method. The tricky thing with discussing peasants, after all, is that they generally do note write to us (not being literate) and the writers we do have from the past are generally uninterested in them. This is a mix of snobbery – aristocrats rarely actually care very much how the ‘other half’ (again, the other 95%) live – but also a product of familiarity: it was simply unnecessary to describe what life for the peasantry was like because everyone could see it and most people were living it. But that can actually make investigating the lives of these farming folks quite hard, because their lives are almost never described to us as such. Functionally no one in antiquity or the middle ages is writing a biography of a small peasant farmer who remained a peasant farmer their whole life.¹ But the result is that I generally cannot tell you the story of a specific ancient or medieval small peasant farmer.

What we can do, however is uncover the lives of these peasant households through modeling. Because we mostly do have enough scattered evidence to chart the basic contours, as very simply mathematical models, of what it was like to live in these households: when one married, the work one did, the household size, and so on. So while I cannot pick a poor small farmer from antiquity and tell you their story, I can, in a sense, tell you the story of every small farmer in the aggregate, modeling our best guess at what a typical small farming household would look like.

So that’s what we’re going to do here. This week we’re going to introduce our basic building blocks, households and villages, and talk about their shape and particularly their size. Then next week (hopefully), we’ll get into marriage, birth and mortality patterns to talk about why they are the size they are. Then, ideally, the week after that, we’ll talk about labor and survival for these households: how they produce enough to survive, generation to generation and what ‘survival’ means. And throughout, we’ll get a sense of both what a ‘typical’ peasant household might look and work like, and also the tools historians use to answer those questions.

But first, a necessary caveat: I am a specialist on the Roman economy and so my ‘default’ is to use estimates and data from the Roman Republic and Roman Empire (mostly the latter). I have some grounding in modeling other ancient and medieval economies in the broader Mediterranean, where the staple crops are wheat and barley (which matters). So the models we’re going to set up are going to be most applicable in that space: towards the end of antiquity in the Mediterranean. They’ll also be pretty applicable to the European/Mediterranean Middle Ages and some parts – particularly mortality patterns – are going to apply universally to all pre-modern agrarian societies. I’ll try to be clear as we move what elements of the model are which are more broadly universal and which are very context sensitive (meaning they differ place-to-place or period-to-period) and to the degree I can say, how they vary. But our ‘anchor point’ is going to be the Romans, operating in the (broadly defined) iron age, at the tail end of antiquity.

But first, if you like what you are reading, please share it and if you really like it, you can support this project on Patreon! While I do teach as the academic equivalent of a tenant farmer, tilling the Big Man’s classes, this project is my little plot of freeheld land which enables me to keep working as a writers and scholar. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on Twitter and Bluesky and (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social) for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I have largely shifted over to Bluesky (I maintain some de minimis presence on Twitter), given that it has become a much better place for historical discussion than Twitter.

From the British Museum (1850,0713.103), a print of a village scene – a festive dance – in Holland in 1748. I want to include as many of these sorts of images as I can because our instinct is to think about ‘peasants’ and ‘villages’ as dirty and muddy and brown but these are people who like to be clean and look nice and have festivals where they play music and dance.

(Bibliography Note: The standard first-stop reading for a general overview of the structures of pre-modern society is P. Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World (1989), although it is somewhat older and does not engage in the sort of statistical modeling here. Agricultural modeling here follows P. Erdkamp, The Grain Market in the Roman Empire: A Social, Political and Economic Study (2005), N. Rosenstein, Rome at War: Farms, Families, and Death in the Middle Republic (2004). Note also M. Bloch, La Société Féodale (1940; available trans. Manyon, 1962) and E.L.R. Ladurie, Les Paysans de Languedoc (1966; available trans. J. Day, 1976) and T.W. Gallant, Risk and Survival in Ancient Greece: Reconstructing the Rural Domestic Economy (1991). Demographic modeling follows B. Frier, “Demography,” CAH² XI (2000); note also W. Scheidel, Death on the Nile (2001), R. Bagnall and B. Frier, The Demography of Roman Egypt (1994) for Egyptian demographic data as well as R.P. Saller, Patriarchy, property and death in the Roman Family (1994) for the same in Italy. Additional bibliography on farming, textiles and demography are available in the previous blog posts that focused on them.)

Building Blocks

We want to begin by thinking about the basic constituent units of pre-modern agrarian societies. But before we launch in, I want to note that we are, somewhat unavoidably starting in the middle here. Household, farm and village sizes are, of course, products of patterns of marriage, births, deaths and the economic underpinnings of farming life, which we’re going to discuss, but not yet. But those patterns also depend on the sizes of households and farms and so on; the thing wraps around on itself and we have to start somewhere. We’re starting here, with the size of households and their landholdings for two reasons: first, it is conceptually simpler to do so than to start with the demography that produces these households, because that demography is easier to explain through ‘model’ families of a given size.

But second, this is where our evidence generally starts as well. After all, our sources do not generally record demographic or economic statistics.² Instead, what we have to work with are usually surviving records – often fragmentary – which often give us a single snapshot of a community in a moment of time. Another key source of evidence is funerary evidence – records of death, tombstones, other dedications – which also offer us not a complete history of a family but a snapshot of it in a single (quite sad) moment in time. We have to work backwards, as we’ll see in the next several posts, from those ‘snapshots’ to a complete model of a society ‘in motion.’ So even though the snapshot is a product of the processes we’re going to discuss, we’re going to start with the snapshot and the snapshot starts with households.

We are used to thinking about this question in terms of individuals, but this is a modern framework, both culturally and economically. As a cultural notion, modern societies tend to be quite a bit more individualistic than pre-modern societies, for reasons that, I suspect, are going to become clear as we go. But for economic reasons, while an individual in a modern society can hold a job, pay their bills and generally live ‘on their own,’ effectively no peasant farmer can run their farm alone.

Instead, the initial basic unit of society in the pre-modern, pre-industrial world was the household, which almost always functioned as both a social unit (these folks lived together) and an economic unit, which pooled resources and labor collectively. We tend to associate households with nuclear families (a parent-pair and their children) and indeed the most common sort of pre-modern households generally have a nuclear family at their core, but that is hardly the only form and even nuclear-family-based households often have ‘add-ons’ – (from the children’s sense) grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins and also in many of these societies various forms of non-free dependent laborers, which is to say slaves.

We’ll get back to the structure of households in just a moment, but before we do, we need to establish the next key unit: a group of households makes a village. Modern folks, especially Americans, often think of ‘farms’ in the form of a homestead: a single isolated farming household (often on quite a bit of land) generally well away from other households or settlements. But pre-modern communities are almost never organized this way. Instead, a number of households nucleates together to form a village, a small farming settlement; villages tend to be anywhere from ten to a few dozen households in size. In some societies, land is understood to be really held by the village, but certainly in the broader Mediterranean it was more common for land associated with the village to be mostly owned by the household (with some ‘common’ areas held by the village). However even where land is privately held, the village often is understood to have some collective claims on the land, sometimes formally defined, sometimes informally defined. After all, the village exists precisely because the single farming household isn’t really a sustainable social or economic unit on its own. As we’ve discussed before, pre-modern farmers rely on close relationships between households to survive, which – combined with these being relatively less individualistic societies – tends to mean that the members of a village broadly understand themselves to have a right to be in each other’s business to a meaningful degree.

From the British Museum (Sheepshanks.4784), an etching of a village scene, 1640.

We’ll come back to the village in a moment when we talk about land holdings, but let’s first return to our households.

The Structure of a Household

Now, I keep saying household rather than ‘family,’ because pre-modern households tend to be rather more complex than our idealized image of a modern ‘nuclear’ (two parents and their children) family, although to be fair, modern households are also often more complex than that idealized image. The instinct we tend to have about past households is that of a complete ‘stem’ household – multiple generations, in their entirety, living together – often leading to the assumption of very large households in the pre-modern period. In practice, some of the assumptions there are right, but many of the conclusions are wrong and it is best to rebuild our assumptions about these households from scratch.

When we say ‘household,’ we want to be clear that we mean an economic unit that almost always includes a core family, but may include individuals beyond that family: enslaved laborers, longer-term hired workers, lodgers, distant kin and so on. It is important, as an aside, to be really careful about words that feel like ‘family’ in ancient languages: Latin familia means ‘household,’ not family and includes those enslaved dependents, as does Greek oikos (‘house’). The household is the unit of people generally living together which in these societies generally functions as a single economic unit (that is, household members do not – generally legally do not – have an independent economic existence from each other).

Needless to say the household is not understood as a collection of equals, but exists in a hierarchy. The Romans actually define this hierarchy legally: the pater familias – the ‘father of the family’ (defined as a male with no living male, male-line ancestors)³ exerted full legal authority over all members of the household, including adults. The women and children of the household were under the direction of the mater familias (herself under the legal control of the pater familias, recall), generally the wife of the pater familias, who exerted non-legal, customary but very real authority over them. The mater familias also had charge over enslaved household staff. Enslaved workers were in turn subordinate to all of the free members of the household (which, for societies where outside laborers might be free wage-laborers, this is generally where they fit too: the bottom rung). Other societies might define the hierarchy in the household more or less clearly (for societies with written laws, it is generally legally defined and enforceable in court) but the hierarchy and its basic pattern tend to be quite similar across cultures.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/Les_Tr%C3%A8s_Riches_Heures_du_duc_de_Berry_f%C3%A9vrier.jpg — Via Wikipedia, an illuminated page (f.2v) from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, a book of hours (1412-1416). We see a peasant farmhouse with two men and a woman warming themselves by a fire, while several more work outside. A small village is visible in the distance not too far away. These manuscript illustrations are also valuable reminders that peasant dress and life was not endlessly drab: note the **bright colors** of much of the clothing. People liked to look nice!

That said actual households can often be complex in their structure when we see them in the evidence and the reason for this is that the household represents the uneasy collision of two systems which are, in the moral vision of these societies, supposed to align, but which often don’t.⁴ Generally speaking, the ideal these societies have is for the claim to the farmland that makes up the economic basis of the household and the biological family that makes up its core to be co-extensive (a Venn-diagram that makes a single circle, in a sense). What is supposed to happen is that a father is supposed to have enough land to divide between his (male) heirs – the Romans call this inherited property patrimonium – who in turn pass this on to the next generation and so on. But of course in practice the biological family might not line up well with the property: you might have a farm too small to split, with more than one heir, resulting in the pater familias‘ sibling being in the household. Or you might have a household without enough labor to farm all of the land, so more distant relatives might move in.

These complex households are created by a relatively simple but important interaction: in a society where there is very limited wage labor and so life without land is very hard, families are extremely reluctant to kick any familiar member or relation off of the farm. As a result there is a strong desire to keep family members inside the household, leading to complex structures. This is going, as we’ll see, to result in families that are often awkwardly large as units of labor for the farms they have (that is, they’re long on people and short on land), but they don’t ‘right-size’ to the farmland because they’re unwilling to exposed beloved relatives to poverty and starvation unless they absolutely have to.

The normal formation pattern for these sorts of complex households is that children who marry don’t immediately move out (move to where? there’s only the one farm and very few opportunities outside of it), creating a complex family of elderly parents, their adult children (and spouses) and their children’s children. As those parents pass away, we might end with the head of household’s brothers remaining (because where else would they go) sometimes termed a frérèche. As we’ll see when we get to mortality, the frequency of death in these societies may also layer these complex households with multiple marriages even in non-divorce cultures and you might also have a situation where, say, the children of the head of household’s deceased brother are present. And then on top of this as noted, you might have enslaved laborers or various kinds of lodgers or in-dwellers: distant kin, hired hands, and so on.

Now the instinct is to then assume that these households must generally be enormous, because they are so complex and main thus contain multiple linked nuclear families (“and didn’t everyone have a ton of kids back then?” – we’ll get back to this). In practice these households are larger than typical modern households, but by a lot less than you think and also the statistics here can be deceptive in terms of what they actually mean.

From the British Museum (1850,0713.101), a Flemish peasant farmhouse. When we talk about households, we can think as much about the **place** as the people. Note also how these village farmhouses are both living spaces and working spaces (and note you can see the core of this village just behind, with the top of the church steeple poking above the trees).

We can jump to the ‘topline’ figures and then spend a bunch of time explaining them. Households in pre-modern societies vary wildly in size, but the average size tends to live in a reasonably small range, varying roughly around four to five-and-change persons⁵ (compared to the average household size in the United States for a family is 3.14; globally the average is 4.9).⁶ That said, while the average is reasonably consistent between societies, within a society we can find households in a very wide range of sizes, from single-person households (typically the result of the deaths of other household members, rather than fission) to very large, complex households with 10 or more members.

However that topline figure can be deceptive in a few ways.

The first is that it is a snapshot which is going to catch households in a range of different stages of their existence, which plays with our perceptions in odd ways. The big problem is that when I say “the average household has five members” what folks tend to hear is “the average household peaked in size at five members” but that is, of course, not what we have said. We have said that in our snapshot of a single moment in time the average household has four or five members – across many households at various states of growth and contraction!

To get a sense of what I mean, we’re going to dive a bit into the figures for Roman Egypt offered by Bagnall and Frier, op. cit., which reflect data on around 300 households (of which they have complete census returns for about half). Fully 16.2% of the households in their set were solitary – a single family member living without kin.⁷ Obviously those households exert significant downward pressure on the average. Our very modern instinct is to interpret these households as bachelors and spinsters, a household that began as and remained solitary – we mentally project out their current state outside of the snapshot. But that is very unlikely to have been the story of these households, if for no other reason than – and we’ll get to this later in the series – nuptiality (the rate at which individuals get married)⁸ was extremely high; in Roman Egypt the marriage rate was likely in excess of 95%.⁹ Instead, these solitary households typically represent individuals who are the last survivor of what was once a larger household. So for instance, a man who married (this works the same if we flip the genders of the survivor, I should note), had three daughters and no sons might – his wife having passed and his daughters married – show up as a solitary ‘family’ of one – but obvious his experience of life was not as a solitary householder, but as the member of a family of (at least) five. For a lot of folks, their intuition is this man’s ‘household number’ is ‘five’ not ‘one,’ but of course it is one in the snapshot.

In short, what we’re running into is the distinction between average household size and average completed household size, which is the term I’ve seen used to mean, in essence, peak household size. Now average completed family size, just mathematically under the mortality conditions we see in antiquity, is going to be right around five, too. It can’t actually be much different: much lower and population shrinks, but it can’t push much higher under the conditions of such high mortality.¹⁰ But as we’ve noted, a lot of these households include non-kin residents (slaves, hired hands, etc.) or near-kin outside of the core family. So an average completed household size would necessarily be larger, but more difficult to calculate and I haven’t seen a solid estimate for it. Going by what I have seen, I’d take a stab around 6 to 8 for the average completed household size: multiple family households tend to be as common or more common than conjugal (husband+wife+children only) households in the data¹¹ and they typically mean a mean household size roughly double that of conjugal families.¹²

At the other end, breaking our intuitive sense of what “an average household size of five” means is the other side of mortality: extremely high child mortality. When I say “an average household size of five,” we moderns think in terms of a family tree. But this is a snapshot! As we’ll see, a core family of, say, four (with perhaps one non-family household member) might be a single married pair and two (living) children, but their family tree likely includes roughly two deceased children who never lived to adulthood (along with, moving up a level, two deceased siblings), who, being deceased, are not counted in the snapshot. Equally, children who will be born are also not counted in the snapshot. So we’re not measuring households at their maximum size (how we tend to think about it, in my experience) but their size at the moment of measurement in our sources.

The second way that the ‘average’ household size is a bit deceptive is that it’s an average per household not per person. But precisely because households larger than average are larger than average more people will tend to live in them. So for instance, Bagnall and Frier (op. cit., 67-9) note the average household size in their census data from Roman Egypt is roughly 5, but this is in a data-set where 40% of the people live in multiple-family-households (that is a household with at least two conjugal couples) – 50% in the villages! as these complex families seem more common in the countryside than in town – with a mean size of almost 10 persons, so a smaller number of larger households contain a disproportionate amount of the people. The average household size is five, but at any given moment in time, most of the people are living in households somewhat larger than this.

Now I want to be clear how those large households form, because they are not generally jumbo-sized families, but rather multiple families in a single household. As various scholars have noted,¹³ a single family household of only co-resident kin under conditions of pre-modern mortality – again, we’ll discuss this later – simply isn’t going to ever have an average size much above 5. (Grand)parents don’t live long enough, too many children die young and so on, forcing the average back down. So when we’re talking about larger households – which do exist! – we’re talking either about households with non-near-kin residents (slaves, workers, etc.) or we’re talking about two families (that is, two married pairs with their children) bolted together in a single household. Which is exactly what we see in Bagnall and Frier, op. cit.‘s data: the big households are almost invariably multiple-family households.

If we want to ask not “what is the average household size” but rather “what size household is the average person living in” (a less useful statistic for demographers, but more useful to get a sense of the society) we get a higher number. Going back to Bagnall and Frier’s dataset, by my math, if we weight households by the number of household members (note: household, not family, so we’re counting slaves, etc.) we end up with the average person living in a household of roughly 6.5 people, which may provide a better sense of what a ‘typical’ peasant household looks like. This is why, by the by, when asked “how large were their households” despite the statistical household average being ‘five,’ I often answer with a range of around five to seven, which tends to capture what people are actually trying to grasp, which is how large a household is the average person in or how large is the average completed household.

Via Wikipedia, another illuminated page (f.9v) from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, a book of hours (1412-1416), showing a large idealized castle and peasants in the fields arund it. Once again, note that even working in the fields, the peasants are dressed relatively smartly, with well-fitted and colorful clothing. The portrayal is idealizing, of course, but not inaccurate to medieval peasant clothing!

As we’re going to see when we get into it, even that figure conceals a lot of variability, particularly in mortality, but for now, “around five to seven” will have to do.

If that’s the size of the household, how large is their peasant farm?

Landholdings

Small.

We’ve actually done this exercise before, but we can lay out pretty quickly a set of examples. Note that we’re trying here to capture a specific kind of farm: the peasant farm. So we’re going to exclude examples of land allotments designed as estates (where the owner isn’t expected to be doing any farming).

Although farms as small as 1 iugera (0.623 acres) are reported in our sources, our evidence suggests the typical size for Roman smallholding farms was around 5-10 iugera (3.12-6.23 acres).¹⁴ The derivation of heredium, which means both ‘a hereditary farm’ and a unit of two iugera, suggests it was imagined at some point as something like the ‘minimum viable farm’ at c. 1.25 acres. The archetypal figure for pre-Han Northern China (also a wheat farming region at this point) was 100 mu (4.764 acres).¹⁵ Land allotments for native Egyptian infantrymen (machimoi) in Ptolemaic Egypt, intended to be worked by those soldiers, were in units of 5, 7 or 10 arouras (roughly 3.4, 4.8 or 6.8 acres).¹⁶ Somewhat larger, Gallant notes of Classical Greek colonial foundations that four to six hectares (9.8-14.83 acres) were considered typical in colonial foundations.¹⁷

Finally, in a survey of land holdings in Saint-Thibery (Languedoc, France) in 1460 AD, the land was astonishingly concentrated. Measured in setérée (1/5th to 1/4th of a hectare (0.49-0.62 acres), an inexact unit of measurement), out of 189 households and 4,500 setérée of land, 100 households (out of 189) on farms of less than 20 setérée (12 acres or so; the setérée appears to be an inexact unit of measurement); 75 of those were on less than 10 setérée (about 6 acres), with neither figure counting the 33 households on 1 setérée (~0.6 acre) or less.¹⁸ Another 24 households were between 20 and 40 setérées (12-24 acres). So the great bulk of households were on very small lots indeed and almost certainly relied substantially on working the often much larger holdings of a handful of wealthier households.¹⁹

Maps from W. Lee, “Pylos Regional Archaeological Project, Part IV: Change and the Human Landscape in a Modern Greek Village in Messenia” *Hesperia* 70.1 (2001): 49-98. The paths are connecting fields (especially orchards in this region) along with linking up to other local villages. The intensity of the roads in the NE of the map is because this is where most of Maryeli’s village territory is (check out the cited article for a map of the boundaries between Maryeli and neighboring villages). Note how the complexity of the paths signals the non-regular field divisions.

This is, as we’ve noted before, the other side of the “no one is going to leave their beloved family members to starve unless they have to:” if a peasant household has multiple heirs and it could divide the landholdings down to provide more of them the ability to form households and survive, it does. But the result is that over time, peasant holdings tend to fractionalize down to the smallest possible farm capable of supporting a household. Land quality, household size and what qualified as a ‘respectable’ amount of production (in terms of surviving and also aquiring non-agricultural goods) varied, but that pressure to fractionalize leads household sizes to broadly cluster in that 3-8 acre range (we’ll talk about what the households on even smaller plots are doing later in the series too). Of course that is a fairly big range in the sense that an 8 acre farm is twice the size of a 4 acre farm, so the range here is relatively wide. But one fact worth noting here is that this is a lot less land than the households we discussed above can generally work.

This land was almost never in a single large parcel the way we imagine a modern homestead. Instead, you will recall, these farming households, each with their 3-8 acres (often with a few rich peasants with larger farms and perhaps a nearby aristocrat with a massive estate), are nucleated into a village which is surrounded by farmland (as well as land not suitable or cleared for farming). If all of your household’s farmland was in one spot it was vulnerable to catastrophic failure, from pests, weather, warfare or what have you. So for farmers aiming not to maximize profits but to minimize risk (because in a bad year, you starve), the imperative is to spread out land holdings. In some cases this distribution might be handled by the leading figures of a village (the patriarchs of the most important families, generally), in order cases it was simply a product of who owned what. But the net impact was generally the same: rather than owning a single large plot of land, the peasant household owns (or otherwise has claim to) a lot of small parcels of land, often in small strips, spread over different ‘microclimates’ around the village. You can see an idealized image of just how fragmented the farm holdings were below:

Via Wikipedia, the plan for a ‘typical’ medieval manor. There’s a lot going on here (and this is a big farm with tenants, rather than a village with free-holding farmers, though note the village in the bottom center – that’s where the actual farm workers live), but what I want to focus on are the many small, narrow plots of land which would have been allotted to different families, so that each family had a little chunk of each ‘zone’ of the farmland.

Of course there were in these communities always larger landholders. These might be proper aristocrats with estates of hundreds of acres, often with entire villages contained within their landholdings. The gap between even a very poor aristocrat and your typical peasant was vast and unbridgeable. I am always put in mind here of the Bennets from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), who are a relatively ‘poor’ family in the landed gentry (the sub-aristocracy, as it were) – nevertheless, Mr. Bennet’s estate (Longbourn) is large enough to include a village (also called Longbourn) from which he is in his rights to refuse Mr. Wickham entry. In short, even a relatively modest just-below-the-aristocracy-proper estate was large enough to include an entire village inside of it. We’ll not deal too much with these Big Men here – they get enough attention in any case – save as a source of employment for our peasants.

The other group to note, of course, are ‘rich peasants’ – landholders who are still peasants in the sense that they are engaged in the work of farming their land but who hold significantly more land than the labor available to a single family unit or household is going to be able to farm. These fellows show up very clearly in the Saint-Thibery data: in 1460 there were 27 households with between 30 and 60 setérées (18-36 acres) and 9 households with 100-250 setérées (60-150 acres). The latter group are our gentleman farmers, medieval proto-Bennets who function as employers for the smallest farmers who lack land, but the former group with those mid-sized holdings are our ‘rich peasants’ – not so wealthy to be entirely detached from the world of farming but still possessing substantially more resources than their neighbors. This is the sort of stratum in a Greek polis might have composed the bulk of the hoplite class or in the Roman Republic the ‘first class’ of infantry: not rich enough for a horse, but wealthy enough to afford expensive heavy armor. Naturally, these households are also going to wield disproportionate political power in the village.

A Peasant Community

Having all of that laid out, we can put it together to think through what a ‘model’ pre-modern peasant farming community looks like. Our peasants do not, for the most part, live in a town, but rather live in a village, which may in turn ‘orbit’ a larger settlement like a town. Villages range substantially in size, from very small settlements that might be only a dozen households to large villages of around 100 households (Saint-Thibery, discussed above, was a very large village of 189 households, in part because it had a substantial abbey in it (dating from the 8th century), which preserved the records used to discuss it). ‘Typical’ village size is trickier, but the mean seems to be around 30-60 households or so.²⁰

As noted above, the mean size of our households is around 4-5, so our 30-60 household village has anywhere from 120 to 300 people in it. A disproportionate number of those individuals are going to live in larger households, around 6 or 7 people, as noted above, but equally there are going to be a handful of small households consisting of widows or widowers. Those houses aren’t going to be stretched out at random, but rather nucleated into a core settlement, with farmland radiating out from the village core. I should note, nearly everyone in a village of this size is going to be a peasant farmer – settlements this small aren’t going to have many, if any, specialist craftworkers or something like their own mill.²¹ A tavern or public house is somewhat more likely, but if there is, there will only be one. For specialist craftwork – metalwork, for instance – a peasant may have to go to another village or into town, or else rely on itinerant craftworkers (though as we’ll see, these households can produce most of what they need themselves).

Land holdings in the village are unlikely to be equal, though the precise breakdown of land holding patterns are going to vary a lot from one society to the next and in a lot of cases we simply cannot observe this clearly. I can’t speak to an ‘average’ or even ‘typical’ distribution, but something like what we see in Saint-Thibery might be broadly normal ‘rule of thirds,’ – about a third of the land controlled by large, potentially absentee landlords (aristocracy, gentry, church – the ‘big men‘) who we might understand as outside of the core ‘population’ of the village, another third controlled by a handful of wealthy peasant households who might represent about a fifth of the households and the remaining third owned by the meaning four-fifths of the peasant households.²² That is going to very naturally play into the hierarchy of relationships in the village, both the presence of the ‘big men’ – who are generally distant and ‘outside’ the village, often literally – but also the ‘rich peasants,’ who will be the leading voices of village politics by dint of their greater resources.

But most of the population of the village are not ‘rich peasants,’ but just regular peasants, whose landholdings are far more humble, on the order of 3-8 acres, with some households on even less than this. As we’ll see, many of those households are going to need to reach beyond their meager landholdings, something that the larger landholders – rich peasants and aristocrats alike – absolutely rely on.

Finally, we have the households themselves, with most of the people living in households of around 5-7 persons, most of whom will be kin, but many households will have a non-kin member or two (again, hired hands, enslaved laborers, very distant kin lodging, unrelated lodgers, etc.). Each household in turn functions largely as a single economic unit: one pantry or larder, one set of property, one house, rather than separate pools of resources. As we’ll see, households are not only hierarchical, but specialize labor based on gender and age (that is, men, women and children do different sorts of necessary work; everyone works).

So that is our baseline: a collection of a few dozen households of around 5-7 individuals each, most on very small plots of land to form our village. Next week we’ll look at how this reality is shaped by fertility and mortality patterns, which is to say birth and death.

An early version of the US Senate budget bill which passed last week included a provision to sell off between 2 and 3 million acres of federal land in western states, ostensibly to be used for homebuilding. Due to widespread public opposition, the proposal was removed prior to the bill being passed, but it sparked a nationwide conversation about federal land ownership and whether it makes sense to sell off federal land. Conservation-minded folks on the right and the left were strongly opposed to any sort of large-scale land sale, arguing that federal lands should be protected for environmental and/or recreational purposes. Others argued that much of this land has little recreational or environmental value, some of this land is located near dense population centers, and we should consider selling parcels like these rather than demanding a blanket moratorium.

I wanted to better understand issues of federal land ownership, so I spent the last week mapping land and population data in the western US. For federal land ownership data, I used the PAD-US database maintained by the US Geological Survey. For topography data, I used Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data from OpenTopography.com. For population data, I used the US Census, including census tract shapefiles. By mapping this data, I got a detailed look at the extent and nature of federal land ownership, and to what degree areas of high housing demand could benefit from opening up federal lands for development.

I found that only a small number of major cities (notably Las Vegas, and to some extent Phoenix, Boise, and Tucson) could take advantage of opening up unprotected federal land for development. Most large cities in western states are adjacent to large tracts of federal land, but most of this land is unsuitable for development, either because it’s mountainous or because it’s a protected area such as a National Forest or Wildlife Refuge. Millions of acres of federal land actually are practical to develop, including some abutting population centers, so it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to open up some of it — but I also don't expect such development to substantially increase housing availability in western states because most of it is not near large population centers with high housing demand.

Note: It’s surprisingly difficult to get precise figures for federal land ownership. Only a few scattered government reports list overall land ownership figures; and they’re often out of date, incomplete, or in conflict with each other. This 2018 CRS report on federal land ownership notes that “figures understate federal lands in each state and the total in the United States” because only lands managed by five major federal agencies are included. This GAO report says the federal government owned 724 million acres in 1990, but this one gives a figure closer to 620 million (the latter is almost certainly correct, but it makes things hard when reports like this conflict). Agencies will often manage land that isn’t federally owned but is still protected from development (2.6 million acres of private land exist within National Parks) or share management over acreage with another agency (both the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management manage Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument). Different categories of federal land often overlap (the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument overlaps with the Angeles and San Bernardino National Forests), which can make it tricky to extract federal land area values from GIS datasets like PAD-US. All this is to say that all figures provided for land areas below should be regarded as approximate.

Federal land ownership

The federal government is the largest landowner in the US. Of the 2.26 billion acres of US land area, the US government owns ~615 million acres, or ~27%. The state of Alaska makes up over ⅓ of federal land at around 220 million acres. Of the remainder, ~350 million acres is concentrated in 11 western states, where the government collectively owns ~45% of the land.

Federal land, via Wikipedia. Note that this includes Indian reservations, which are often excluded in other contexts.

Most federal land is administered by a small number of federal agencies:

244 million acres, 177 million of which are in western states, are under the purview of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Some BLM land is protected for conservation, but much of it is available for things like livestock grazing, coal mining, and oil and gas (and geothermal) drilling.
193 million acres of National Forest (and National Grassland), 133 million of which are in western states, are managed by the US Forest Service.
89 million acres of wildlife refuges, wilderness areas, and other protected lands are administered by the Fish and Wildlife Service. Most of this land (~76 million acres) is in Alaska.
80 million acres of National Parks are managed by the National Park Service. As with the Fish and Wildlife Service, most of this land (52 million acres) is in Alaska. Seven of the 10 biggest National Parks are in Alaska, with the largest (Wrangell-St. Elias, 13.2 million acres) being bigger than “Yellowstone National Park, Yosemite National Park, and Switzerland combined.”
8.8 million acres are owned by the Department of Defense.

For most of its history, the policy of the US government was to sell off, donate, or otherwise dispose of federal land holdings so they could be used for productive purposes. Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, the geographic area of the US steadily grew through land purchases and conquests, from 568 million acres in 1790 to 2.3 billion acres in 1867. Most of this land — 1.8 billion acres worth — was at one point owned by the federal government, but by 1990 roughly 1.2 billion of acres of it had been transferred to state or private hands:

360 million acres were given to states
287 million acres were given freely to homesteaders
94 million acres were given to railroads
40 million acres were given to Alaska natives
And 400 million acres were sold, given away, or otherwise disposed of

However, in 1976, the government’s policy towards land disposal officially changed with the passage of the Federal Land Policy Management Act. The act repealed previous homestead acts used to give federal land to homesteaders (along with thousands of other land laws), declared that “it is the policy of the United States that the public lands be retained in Federal ownership,” and tasked the Bureau of Land Management with administering public lands. Since then, outside of a transfer of roughly 100 million acres of federal land to Alaska and Alaska natives in the 1980s, the land area owned by the federal government has remained roughly constant.

Making use of federal lands

Outside of Alaska, most federal land is in western states, making up nearly half of total western state land area. And as I noted in a previous essay, western states are burdened with very high housing costs compared to the country as a whole. On its face, then, selling some of this federal land and using it to build more homes, or for development more generally, isn’t an obviously crazy idea.

There are several challenges with selling off federal land for housing or development. First, most of this federal land isn’t anywhere near where the demand for housing is. The map below shows all federal land in western states in green, and federal land that’s more than 20 miles from a population center (defined as a census tract with population density greater than 100 per square kilometers)1 in purple. We can see that most federal land — roughly 250 million of 350 million acres, over 70% — is very far from any sort of population center, and thus from most housing demand.

Federal land map. Purple areas are farther than 20 miles from a census tract with more than 100 people per square kilometer. Green areas are within 20 miles. This map doesn’t include Indian reservations and some military bases. It includes some state and privately owned land that is federally managed and/or protected.

The second challenge is that most federally owned land in western states is earmarked for conservation or otherwise ineligble for sale.

26.5 million acres of federal land in western states are National Parks, Wildlife Refuges, Wilderness Areas, and similar tracts administered by the National Park service and the Fish and Wildlife Service and are protected from development.
Over 13 million acres of BLM land is National Monuments, conservation areas, and other tracts that are likewise protected.
141 million acres of federal land in western states are protected National Forest and Grassland, administered by the Forest Service. While these areas do allow some extractive uses, such as logging, they’re ineligible for sale outside of a few narrow exceptions.

Altogether ~209 million acres of federal land in western states (~60% of all federal land) are protected from development in some way.2

Map of all federal land (dark green) and areas ineligible for development (light green).

Changes to the law could allow protected areas to be sold, but in practice this is politically difficult, if not impossible — the recent Senate land sale proposal originally included areas of National Forest (comparatively less protected than things like National Parks and National Monuments) as eligible for sale, but later versions of the land sale proposal dropped this due to widespread opposition.

A third barrier to selling off federal land for private development is that much of the federal land in western states is mountainous and impractical for development. The map below shows areas in western states where the ground slope exceeds 20%. Altogether ~85 million acres of federal land in western states is too steep for practical development.

Red areas indicate ground slope greater than 20%.

In practice many cities that appear to be hemmed in by federal land (and thus seem like they would benefit from opening it up for development) are actually just surrounded by mountains. Selling off the land wouldn’t change the practicalities of building on it.

Below, for instance, is Salt Lake City. You can see that its eastern edge butts up against federal land (green), and that it’s also blocked from expanding by lakes and wetlands to the north and to the south, and by the Bingham Canyon Mine and Camp Williams to the southwest. Salt Lake City also has expensive housing: census tracts where the ratio of median home value to median household income is greater than five are shown in yellow. Just looking at this map, it might seem like it would make sense to open up some of this federal land to housing development and give the city more room to expand.

But a topographic map (or, you know, an actual picture of Salt Lake City) reveals that this federal land is highly mountainous, making it impractical for development even if the federal government did sell off the land.

Salt Lake City. Federal land is in green, land where ground slope is greater than 20% (both federal and non-federal) is in red.

Similarly, Los Angeles is hemmed in by mountainous federal land to its north:

The area around Lake Tahoe is similarly surrounded by mountainous federal land.

If the vast majority of federal land in western states is impractical to develop on, how much is actually practical to sell off for private development?After subtracting protected areas, land far from population centers, and land that’s too mountainous to develop, you’re left with ~26 million acres, or less than 8% of total federal land area, suitable for private development in western states. This is shown below in purple:

Federal land that’s not protected from development, that’s within 20 miles of a population center, and has an average ground slope less than 20%.

While 26 million acres is small proportionately, it’s still very large in absolute terms: greater than the land area of Austria (20.7 million acres), Switzerland (10.2 million acres), Iceland (25.4 million acres), or Ireland (20.8 million acres). And while much of this land doesn’t seem particularly urgent to open up for development (the area around Powell, Wyoming isn’t exactly a burgeoning metropolis in need of expansion), some areas seem more promising.

Federal land eligible for development (unprotected, near a population center, and on slope < 20%) near Powell, Wyoming. Developable federal land is in purple, other federal land is in green.

The most obvious candidate is Las Vegas, which is hemmed in on all sides by federal land. Much of this is protected: the Desert National Wildlife Refuge to the north, Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area to the west, the Rainbow Gardens and River Mountains Areas of Critical Environmental Concern to the east, and the Sloan Canyon National Conservation Area to the south.

Las Vegas. Federally-owned land is in green, developable land (not mountainous, near a population center, not in a protected category) is in purple. Census tracts with high housing costs are in yellow.

But not all the land around Las Vegas is protected. In some cases, you have dense development across the street from completely empty federally-owned desert. It’s not unreasonable to think this land would be better used for home construction.

Northeast corner of Las Vegas. The land north of E. Centennial is desert owned by the federal government, and thus hasn’t been developed.

Grand Junction, Colorado similarly has expensive housing, and is hemmed in by federal land on all sides. Some of this is protected and/or mountainous, but not all of it.

Farms near Grand Junction, Colorado. Area north/east of the curvy road is empty, undeveloped federal land.

Boise, Idaho is another city with expensive housing, and places where development is abutting empty, unprotected federal land.

As is Redmond, Oregon.

The eastern edge of Redmond, Oregon. The land surrounding Eagle Crest community is empty, unprotected federal land.

Reno, Nevada has a huge tract of empty federal land right in the middle of the city.

North Reno, Nevada. The empty area in the middle is unprotected federal land.

Conclusion

While almost half the land in western states is federally owned, the vast majority of this land is impractical for development purposes. It’s either too far from population centers, protected for conservation and/or recreational purposes, or unsuitable for development due to its terrain. But in absolute terms, a small fraction of hundreds of millions of acres is still a lot of land. It’s not hard to find cities in the western states that have high housing costs, and are abutting empty, unprotected federal land. This isn’t land that’s National Parks, or monuments, or National forests, or wildlife refuges, or protected wilderness. It’s just empty, unused acreage. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to sell some of it off to make better use of it.

However, I don’t expect that such land sales would have a major impact on housing costs in western states. Although there’s some developable federal land near population centers, little of it is located near major western cities. The image below shows federal land around the 20 largest metro areas in western states, which together have ~70% of western state population. Of these, only Las Vegas, Boise, Tucson, and Phoenix have developable federal land adjacent to the city. (And really only Las Vegas combines large, developable federal tracts near the city with little available land elsewhere in a way that I expect could have a substantial impact on housing prices.) While most large western cities (16 of the 20 largest) do have federal land adjacent to them, it’s mostly mountainous and/or protected from development.

(Click image below to enlarge.)

20 largest metro areas in western states, showing federal land (green) and developable federal land (purple). Note that for some cities (notably Portland and Phoenix) this overestimates the area that’s developable due to the way ground slope areas were generated. The purple areas northwest of Porland, and the two tracts west and south-east of Phoenix are probably too hilly for development. Note that this map flags some privately owned but federally managed lands as “federal”.

So while it seems worthwhile to consider selling some parcels of federal land near population centers, most major cities wouldn’t benefit from this all that much.

87% of the population in western states lives in a census tract at least this dense.

Federal lands flagged as ineligible for development: