The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century by Ian Mortimer

Redesdale, which were once well populated, have been largely abandoned. The massive parish of Simonburn, measuring thirty-three miles by fourteen and covering more than 150,000 acres, is so sparsely populated that its tithes are insufficient to maintain a single priest. No royaltax collectors go there. No one goes there. Battles take place from time to time, and you will find the odd obstinate crofter eking out a living from a smallholding hidden in a valley, but sometimes you can ride for a whole day in this region and see no one. It is simply not worth building a home in a land where there is a strong likelihood that your crops with be burnt, your animals stolen, and you and your family assaulted and killed by the invading Scots. It is certainly a far cry from the villages and small towns in the Midlands and the south, where young children can be found playing in the dust of the street.

2
The People
    No one can tell you exactly how many people there are in fourteenth-century England. Estimates tend to be around 5 million in 1300 (give or take half a million) and around 2.5 million in 1400 (give or take a quarter of a million) 1 . The one thing that everyone agrees on is that there are far fewer people at the end of the century than at the start: about half as many. The total population shrinks by 9 to 10 percent between 1315 and 1325, by 30 to 40 percent in the Great Plague of 1348–49, and by a further 15 to 25 percent over the rest of the century. Large numbers of children cannot quickly reverse these losses. As you will have seen from the effects on the landscape, it is a traumatic experience for the whole of society. Not until the 1630s will the population get back to 5 million again, and not until the 1740s will it reach 5.5 million.
    How long do these people live? It depends on where you are and what sort of wealth you enjoy. Yeomen in Worcestershire in the first half of the fourteenth century can, at the age of twenty, look forward to an average of twenty-eight years more life; and their successors in the second half can expect another thirty-two years. 2 This does not sound too bad: a lifespan of fifty years, more or less. However, this bald figure means that half of all adults die before they reach fifty. And these are the
prosperous
members of Worcestershire society. Poor peasants in the same area can expect to live for five or six years less. And all these figures are for those who have already reached the age of twenty: half the population will die before this age. Life expectancy at birth can be as low as eighteen, as at the Yorkshire village of Wharram Percy.
    For this reason the majority of medieval people are relatively young. Between 35 and 40 percent of those you will meet are underfifteen. At the other end of the age spectrum, just 5 percent of fourteenth-century people are aged over sixty-five. There are many more youths and far fewer old people. The contrast is most striking when you consider the median age. If you were to line up every modern English person in age order, the man or woman in the middle would be thirty-eight. If you were to do the same in the fourteenth century, the median would be twenty-one. Half the entire population is aged twenty-one or less. 3
    This preponderance of young people leads to social differences in every community and field of activity. The average man or woman in the medieval street has seventeen years’ less experience to draw on in every aspect of his or her lives. He or she has many fewer elders to ask for advice. When you consider that societies with youthful populations are more violent, tend to be supportive of slavery, and see nothing wrong in holding brutal combats in which men fight to the death for the sake of entertainment, you realize that society has changed fundamentally. The Middle Ages are not comparable with ancient Rome, but the medieval understanding of a bondman’s servitude is not very far removed from slavery, and the enthusiasm for watching