# Gender ratio in ye olde medievale times **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [August 18, 2016, 10:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gender-ratio-in-ye-olde-medievale-times/763163 "2016-08-18T10:51:06Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Mr.Kobayashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/4af34b/32.png) [@Mr.Kobayashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Kobayashi)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2016, 10:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gender-ratio-in-ye-olde-medievale-times/763163/1 "2016-08-18T10:51:06Z")
Just started Barbara Tuchman’s _Distant Mirror, The Calamitous Fourteenth Century_, in the intro she mentions how tricky it is to find reliable accounts of things like casualties in a battle, numbers in an army, even the whole population of a country. She also mentions there’s conflicting views on the human sex ratio, stating that there could be a lot more women than men since men went off to war and got killed, or that there could have been a lot more men around than women because of the number of women who died in childbirth. Do we have any educated guesses which way it would’ve been if we could travel back to the fourteenth century - are we going to see noticeably more men or women? ---
**Author:** ![bob\_2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bob_2/32/3341_2.png) [@bob\_2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bob_2)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2016, 12:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gender-ratio-in-ye-olde-medievale-times/763163/2 "2016-08-18T12:57:23Z")
The big cause of death in the 14th century was The Black Death. This did not discriminate by gender so the huge reduction in population was evenly distributed. > [@](#): > > In the period 1347 to 1350 the Black Death killed a quarter of the population in Europe, over 25 million people, and another 25 million in Asia and Africa.[15] Mortality was even higher in cities such as Florence, Venice and Paris where more than half succumbed to the plague. A second major epidemic occurred in 1361, the pestis secunda, in which 10 to 20% of Europe’s population died.13 Other virulent infectious disease epidemics with high mortalities occurred during this time such as smallpox, infantile diarrhoea and dysentery. By 1430, Europe’s population was lower than it had been in 1290 and would not recover the pre-pandemic level until the 16th century.13, 21 > [The History of Plague – Part 1. The Three Great Pandemics - JMVH](http://jmvh.org/article/the-history-of-plague-part-1-the-three-great-pandemics/) ---
**Author:** ![yellowjacketcoder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/4bbf92/32.png) [@yellowjacketcoder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yellowjacketcoder)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2016, 12:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gender-ratio-in-ye-olde-medievale-times/763163/3 "2016-08-18T12:58:35Z")
There is [some evidence](http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org/content/19/1/218.2.full) that sex ratios at birth are not always 50/50, but can adjust after a major population change like a war that kills many of the men. If that’s true, then the overall ratio may get out of whack for a short time but will return to an even ratio as the birth ratio adjusts for the imbalance. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2016, 2:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gender-ratio-in-ye-olde-medievale-times/763163/4 "2016-08-18T14:27:23Z")
First - be aware that _A Distant Mirro_r isn’t really highly regarded as a work of mediaeval scholarship. Secondly - don’t discount [sex-selective infanticide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide#Middle_Ages) as a factor Thirdly, AFAIK, most [current](http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9242014) thinking is that the ratios were highly skewed towards men in the late MA. ---
**Author:** ![cwthree](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/9de0a6/32.png) [@cwthree](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cwthree)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2016, 8:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gender-ratio-in-ye-olde-medievale-times/763163/5 "2016-08-18T20:47:29Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > Secondly - don’t discount [sex-selective infanticide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide#Middle_Ages) as a factor Even more likely, and more insidious, than frank infanticide is the deliberate under-feeding of female children. Where men/boys are regarded as more valuable than women/girls, it’s not uncommon for poor families to feed male children at the expense of female children. Chronic under-nutrition sets girls up for a host of life-shortening risk factors: susceptibility to disease, reduced ability to recover from illness or injury, and skeletal issues that greatly increase the likelihood of death/disability resulting from childbirth. ---
**Author:** ![OldGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/3bc359/32.png) [@OldGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OldGuy)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2016, 2:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gender-ratio-in-ye-olde-medievale-times/763163/6 "2016-08-19T02:11:17Z")
> [@yellowjacketcoder](#): > > There is [some evidence](http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org/content/19/1/218.2.full) that sex ratios at birth are not always 50/50, but can adjust after a major population change like a war that kills many of the men. If that’s true, then the overall ratio may get out of whack for a short time but will return to an even ratio as the birth ratio adjusts for the imbalance. One would think that any “excess” of boys produced after a war would be too young to be replacements for the men killed in the war in terms of being fathers. ---
**Author:** ![watchwolf49](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/e9c0ed/32.png) [@watchwolf49](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/watchwolf49)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2016, 2:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gender-ratio-in-ye-olde-medievale-times/763163/7 "2016-08-19T02:20:52Z")
> [@OldGuy](#): > > One would think that any “excess” of boys produced after a war would be too young to be replacements for the men killed in the war in terms of being fathers. War was basically continuous … the English and French fought for a hundred years at one point … good thing humans can breed like rabbits … ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2016, 4:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gender-ratio-in-ye-olde-medievale-times/763163/8 "2016-08-19T04:26:27Z")
> [@watchwolf49](#): > > War was basically continuous … the English and French fought for a hundred years at one point … good thing humans can breed like rabbits … That war actually lasted 116 years, but wasn’t continuous. There were a number of truces and other breaks in the fighting. Although come to think of it, some of the breaks were actually more dangerous for non-combatants. The mercenary soldiers that fought in the war were released from service then and often turned to brigandage. ---
**Author:** ![Sangahyando](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f14d63/32.png) [@Sangahyando](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sangahyando)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2016, 12:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gender-ratio-in-ye-olde-medievale-times/763163/9 "2016-08-19T12:00:39Z")
> [@watchwolf49](#): > > War was basically continuous … the English and French fought for a hundred years at one point … good thing humans can breed like rabbits … The breeding-like-rabbits often indeed happening in wartime. There comes to mind the rough-soldier character in Charles Reade’s novel _The Cloister and the Hearth_, reflecting that men of his trade are not really all that efficient as regards the thinning-out of enemies: “…even in war, we beget two people for every one that we slay”. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2016, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gender-ratio-in-ye-olde-medievale-times/763163/10 "2016-08-19T15:01:36Z")
One thing to keep in mind is that warfare back then wasn’t quite the large-scale affair that it has been since the 16th-17th century. For example, at Crecy, the English army of roughly 10-12000 met the French army of roughly 30000. These were the entire armies, not just a little part. And some 2400-2500 men were killed in the battle on both sides combined. Probably quite a bit more than that had died and would die from disease, but overall, it was a very small number of men that went to fight in France from England out of a total population of somewhere between 3 and 5 million people, and a smaller proportion died. The big killers from warfare back then were probably more due to military depredations of civilian areas- starvation, murders, disease, etc… and that probably impacted women and children more than fighting aged men. I doubt that there was any significant pressure on one gender vs. the other- death in battle was probably offset by death during childbirth overall. ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2016, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gender-ratio-in-ye-olde-medievale-times/763163/11 "2016-08-19T21:00:11Z")
The first Census in Norway that recorded all persons (not just head of households, for example) was in 1801. 420923 Males 458052 Females 878975 Total 52% Female. While 1801 is hardly medieval times, the general conditions of war depletion, baby abandonment, health care (esp. death in childbirth) shouldn’t be too far off what it was a few hundred years earlier. (Barring the usual infamous periods of protracted war.)\ [For 1901: 1086867 Males 1156128 Females 2242995 Total 51.5% Female. Not much change. After the Napoleonic Wars, fairly quiet. Some improvement in medicine.] These numbers might in fact be most dominated by women living longer than men if they live to middle age and are past the hazards of youth.