So, I've been working on building the city around which a future campaign will be built. For context it's analogous to 800-1100AD British Isles in technology and structure. So, castles yes, gunpowder, constructs and artificers, no.

I was trying to work out population and what professions people might be engaged in. I've always kind of meant to, but never really gotten around to it. So, with rough guesses, informed by a good study and research of history (for example in Cornwall in the 1100s did you know that 33 people were employed to cut peat? The domesday book is awesome!) I've got a list of occupations and rough numbers of those employed. 

So, if this is useful to any other DMs out there creating their own worlds, the idea was that if I base it on a population of 1000 people (yes that would've been a city at the time) it would be scaleable up to larger cities in future. Note of caution this makes assumptions based off historical factoids. I assume for example that the average commoner grew their own veg alongside foraging for herbs and other foods (this did happen in real life as even bread was food for people with money) alongside keeping egg laying birds most likely. I also assume too that barter is the main economy for those with little to no coin. I further assume that commoners and indeed everyone have basic skills within family units like whittling to create wood cutlery, or brewing of beer (incidentally big brewing operations really didn't get to the British isles until fairly late as hops aren't native. Instead people would brew at home and open their house to sell beer when it was ready - there's an awesome history hit video on it!). Finally, I assume that the 'jobs' I name check are supported by general labourers who would help at times when such help was required (for farms this would be ploughing and harvesting, the rest of the growing time would require far fewer people) so the people who occupy said jobs year round are able to direct or teach apprentices etc as required. 

Grain Farmers - 250 people mainly grains
Shepards - 8 Shepards for four herds of approximately 500 sheep each (in England and Wales sheep outnumbered humans by over a hundred times at their peak this is oddly realistic!)
Cattle Herders - 4 herdspeople for 2 herds of 50 cows.
Flax Farmers - 2 farmer for 5 acres of flax (mainly for linen production)
Beekeepers - 10 beekeepers with ten hives per keeper

Gold, Silver and Copper Miners - 5 year round miners - It is usual and common apparently for these metals to be discovered together. 
Zinc and Lead Miners - 5 miners - again these minerals generally are found with each other.
Tin Miners - 5 miners
Flint Miners - 5 miners
Coal Miners - 5 miners
Stone - 5 quarry people
Iron Miners - 5 miners
Clay cutters - 5 workers

Forestry/Land Management - 2 stewards
Treecutters - 4 people felling trees
Woodcutters - 4 people cutting the trees into lumber etc
Peat cutters - 4 people (for production of charcoal btw)
Straw collector - 4 people (for thatch)
Shearer - 2 sheep shearers
Fishers - 10 fishers

Miller - 10 people
Spinners of Yarn (Wool) - 4
Linen Combing/Spinning - 4
Tanners - 10
Smelters - 8
Charcoal Burners - 8
Basic Bakers - 10 (for basic bread only)
Butchers - 10 (that works out to 1 for every 100 people)
Fishmonger - 5

Luxury Baker - 2 (cakes, fancy breads etc)
Weaver (Wool) - 4
Weaver (Linen) - 2
Leatherworker - 10
Thatcher/Roofer - 1 (the average thatched roof *could* last around 10 years, the average thatcher could get through enough houses to be consistantly employed based on 200-250 roofs)
Toolmakers - 4
Cooper - 2 (traditional coopers could average about 10 barrels a week or 520 a year and often barrels were repurposed over and over)
Basket Maker - 4
Potter - 4 (creating ceramics like vases, mugs, plates etc)
Felter - 2 (making felt)
Dyer - 2 (making dyes for sale, as opposed to people making basic dyes which would have been a common knowledge once)
Carpenter - 10 (I assume here too that commoners are responsible for building their own homes so we're talking furniture, containers, tools, etc)
Blacksmith - 10

Coachbuilder - 1 (for carts, wagons, wheelbarrows etc)
Locksmith - 1
Shoemaker - 2 (a good shoemaker could apparently turn 1 pair every 1-2 days so approx 170-350 pairs a year!)
Hatmaker - 1 (mainly for people of means)
Alewife - 20 (as I mentioned people would brew at home leaving their wives at home to sell the ales they made it's partly how we get the term public house)
Brewers - 5 (for the lazy, nobles, or those with money one big brewing house maybe?)
Farriers - 5 (looking after horses)
Ropemaker - 5 (total guess here)
Saddler - 2
Tailor - 2 (again for those with means and money, buying cheap cloth and making your own clothes would have been a thing in this context I think)

Town Guard - 20 guards to keep the peace in the town
Guard Sergents - 4 each responsible for 5 guards
Guard Captain - 1
Guard Armourer - 1
Guard Weaponsmith - 1
Castle Guard - 40 (Henry VII was said to have a personal guard of 50-60 archers, Buckingham Palace even today is only around 40 from what I can find).
Castle Guard Sergeants - 2
Castle Guard Commander - 1

Fur Trapper/Trader - 2
Jeweller - 2
Tax Collector - 2
Hunt Masters - 2
Vintners - 2
Mint - 5 (people minting coin - total guess)
Councillors - 6 people advising the ruler
Herbalist - 2 (one in town, one in castle)
Physician - 1 (for the rich)
Clergy - 5 if monotheistic (30 if polytheistic)
Alchemist - 2 (one in city, one in castle)
Inn Keeper - 1
Scribe - 2
Cartographer - 1
Glassblower - 1
Minstrels - 5
Sailors - 10

That puts us at a grand total of 658 people employed. If we assume that children start working around the age of 12, then let'ssay 150 of the 1000 population are children. Let's assume everyone else works until they die or are unable to that leaves 192 people who are general laborers, or apprentices picking up work wherever they can.

What do you think? Am I missing any obvious professions? Do the numbers feel right - I'll never get them 100% accurate of course, but to me, with the context it feels right.

This is the sort of worldbuilding that really only matters to us DMs, but I find that going through these processes helps me come up with quests and ideas that would naturally appear in the world

There's two problems. First is that you don't have enough farmers unless you assume there are a bunch of them nearby who don't show up on the city's rolls, pre-industrial-revolution 90% of the population was farmers. Second is not enough specialization, for things like miners and sailors you generally either have none or lots, and a lot of businesses are simply going to be absent in a town of a thousand.

Another problem you have is that in pre-industrial times, most farms were not single crop farms like that. The overwhelming majority of farmers were subsistence farmers who grew a little of a lot of stuff to feed themselves and the surplus went to the landowners. Did farms grow predominantly one type of crop? Sure, because it’s what the land was suited to, but even then they all still had a variety of crops too. So when adding in the additional farmers that Pantagruel666 suggests, you might want to think about crop diversity as well.

A classic (if imperfect) resource on this is the late S John Ross's Medieval Demographics Made Easy.

AD&D World builders guide....   Just sayin...

Also in reference to the title of thread there is no such thing as too much  there is only  its complete or it needs a whole lot more work

Quote from Pantagruel666 >>

There's two problems. First is that you don't have enough farmers unless you assume there are a bunch of them nearby who don't show up on the city's rolls, pre-industrial-revolution 90% of the population was farmers. Second is not enough specialization, for things like miners and sailors you generally either have none or lots, and a lot of businesses are simply going to be absent in a town of a thousand.

 
Okay, so I appreciate the feedback on farmers, but a 1 farmer to 4 occupant of the city is actually enough. If you've ever actually grown vegatables, or grown up in and around a european style rural area you'll know what's involved in farming and can extropolate out the less productive but also less labour intensive (over the course of the year) methods. As an example, there are two times during the time period I'm using as a baseline inspiration when large numbers of workers are necessary to maintain a grain farm. The first is when ploughing the fields as you had a team of two working the oxen and the plough, followed by maybe two people sowing seed. This would be at a rate of around an acre a day. Fertiliser wasn't spread anywhere as near, but even assuming it was a small team could have looked after that at a more rapid speed than ploughing/sowing. It is then at harvest time where the whole village, town, or settlement of people would head into the fields to help gather, bundle, and prepare the harvest with threshing and the like. So limited periods where high personnel were required. Historians have a wild array of estimates as to the productivity of such farming systems claiming everything from a 4 seed gained for every 1 seed planted to 12 seed gained to every 1 seed planted. That's more than enough for the wealthy and people of means. Likewise for the allotment owner I'm aware of current estimates having the figures at around 35 metric tonnes of food able to be grown from one allotment. Even if we assume people of that era were 1/10th as effective as today we're still talking around 3.5 tonnes per hectare. This though creates an incompatibility with figures from Domesday book which has around 8 million acres which was producing food sufficient to feed 1.5 million people. Today humans are estimated to consume around 35 tonnes of food per lifetime, back then it would likely have been a far lower average. Each acre of Anglo Saxon farm is estimated to have produced on the order of 8 bushels of grain as an average. That's roughly 25kg in a bushel that's 200 million kg for the entire of the 1.5million population or 133kg per person. 

Point is that on food, I've done my research and the one 365 days a year farmer would be roughly enough to handle production for every four occupants assuming, as I highlight, in the analogous historical period I was shooting for the vast majority of people would have been growing their own peas, and other such veg in addition to foraging for everything from Nettle to Dandilion and even the odd birds egg. Grain and meat cultivation was a suppliment to the diet that few could afford and even fewer would think of having regularly. 

As to showing up on city rolls, that's way later in history than the time period I'm using as a baseline. 800-1100 ad the closest we have is the domesday and tithe records and they aren't an immaculate picture. Then there is the need to understand how people would have been recorded. In fact in Domesday many specialists like Millers, Swineherds and the like were recorded as Villains, Boarders and Cottars. That figure was indeed only 70% of the population and we're not 100% if the figures of those social classes include women or not!

I could go on and if you're interested in research links or journal articles I could supply them by the barrow load - suffice to say I have an evidence base for this - it just requires stepping outside a modern industrialised mindset.


As to specialisation, yeah they were very much an after thought. I know that bogiron was a think that was scavanged during the period and that could be done by remarkably few knowledgeable individual. As to actual mines as we think of them today...I have to wonder if the five employed within the city environs would be joined by other workers from nearby towns and villages. The only real mines I'm aware of for the period are Grimes Graves, Forest of Dean, and the Great Orme but I've not found any evidence of numbers of workers. So my assumption was a few specialists directing general brute force unskilled labour - after all, they've only got to swing a pickaxe of some form. Likewise sailors, it was an after thought and you're right it's one that needs further though. I may ensure that the city is not coastal and ditch the sailors altogether. 

You're 100% correct on not every occupation being present. However, this is kinda of a master list to be able to pick and choose from. Though I will say cities traditionally weren't defined by population. It was a fuzzy communally understood term that didn't have exact requirements. Even today in the UK, a city has to be made a city by the monarch and the process is kinda ill defined with lowest population being St. David's in Wales which is like 1,800 people.

Either way, some refinement is needed.

Quote from Pantagruel666 >>

A classic (if imperfect) resource on this is the late S John Ross's Medieval Demographics Made Easy.

 
That's WAY later in time than we're looking at in the context I've provided here and frankly, is contradicted by quite a few bits of other research. It's part of why I did this from scratch assembling the research as I went. 

As to Iamsposta's comment, again the English systems at the time would have been on a three-crop rotation system (The Alleged Transformation from Two-Field to Three-Field Systems in Medieval England on JSTOR). So, yes the farm fields would be growing single crops. Many homes would indeed have had small gardens growing peas, beans, and other such crops (Medieval Gardens 500 - 1500 – Medieval Histories) to feed themselves in addition to this.

Again - I went WAY deep on the research for the food production here. The numbers are good when it's put together.

Based on there being Fishers-10, Fishmongers-5 Sailors-10 I'm assuming this is near the water, and the mention of it being "analogous to 800-1100AD British Isles..." 

So if it is near the water, is it a port, is it on the ocean? on a Large lake, a large river. Any of these will add another layer. At the very least if its on an ocean port or lake large enough for serious fishing, you are going to need boat builders, and net makers/repairers, the net makers can probably be counted in the rope makers. But ship builders would be separate from the other carpenters and wagon/cart builders. 

Also if it is an ocean/port I would say that 10 sailors is a very low number. 

other specific things would be dock masters/harbor master, general dock laborers might be counted in  "general laborers" 

Also, depending on the setting there may need to be more bureaucrats and/or aristocrats (useless people who leach off everyone else).

Is the 1 inn keeper based on something historical?