I ask because I recently visited a museum, and I saw a fewinteresting things:
-a man’s pair of brocaded shoes from the 1700’s-they were probably a size 7
-the local grave yard has graves from the 1600’s-and the mounds appear very short
-I saw a hearse from ca.1800-it appears to have been designed to cary very short coffins
I read once that George Washington was considered a giant-and he was 6’1" tall. Have we increased in size over the last 2-300 years? Or have humans always been about the same sizes? 
Yes they were. In Europe you can see lots of armour, even stuff belonging to famous figures…and they were little dudes.
I read reviews of The Last Samurai that said that Tom Cruise wasn’t physically impressive enough to be believable as a Samurai. The Samurai armour I have seen would make it unbelievable for anyone bigger than Cruise to wear it.
Don’t have a cite at the moment, but it’s my understanding that folks were not a whole lot smaller than they are today. Things like narrow doors, low ceilings, shorter beds are due more to frugality and limited supplies. When you have to saw all those boards by hand, you don’t use as much lumber. When you’re heating a home with fireplaces, you don’t want to have a huge amount of useless space to heat, etc. Clothing was generally worn tighter and more tailored, so coats, for example, might seem somehat smaller than what one is used to seeing today.
I have looked into this question somewhat and there is surprisingly little information on it. I think people of centuries past may not have had the luxury to record thier measurements for posterity on a regular basis.
I bought a U.S. Army uniform from WWII at a garage sale and it’s much too small for me (5’6"). The wearer could not have exceeded 5’4". This is just one sample though.
I remember watching the 1900 House TV program in which it was mentioned that they could not find a 1900 uniform to fit the big man they had on the show. They mentioned that the average man in service to the U.K. in 1900 was 5’6".
Of course don’t ask could be correct that Japanese people might have been smaller on average than modern Americans, but aren’t modern Japanese a bit smaller on average? European armor generally dates back more than just 200 years, when certainly folks may have been smaller, too.
One of my hometown’s Revolutionary War heros was six feet tall and there’s no mention of him being considered giant.
The standard response from the medical community is that nutrition has driven the increased size of Americans, in general. Not just weight, but also height. I (and probably you, no doubt) have seen news stories in which experts say the average shoe size is waaaay larger than 2-3 generations ago. Ditto height.
What perplexes me is that ample supplies of good food–plenty of protein and complex carbohydrates–along with exercise were abundant for many 19th and 18th century American families. No cites, but remember that America was largely agrarian.
I’ll note, however, that not once have I ever read historical works that talked about 7-foot tall slaves during the ante-bellum period. Look at high school through NBA basketball today. Dietary considerations and stress no doubt explain much of this. If the average American really was shorter in that time period, a 7-footer during the 1850s, slave or no, would certainly be worthy of attention.
This might he a useful reading list (pdf file). Dr Steckel claims that average height has changed less among Americans than that of some other nationalities over the last couple of centuries, but that it has increased.
I lived in a house built in 1908, one thing I remember is that the handles on the doors where very low. About 4" lower than todays standard.
Maybe this was for children? They kept there doors closed to conserve heat and they wanted kids to be able to open doors?
Just a different design convention?
Or, I assumed, and have heard, people where shorter. I’m a big guy, I tend to notice subtil differences more than a ‘normal’ 
person.
from this piece which has some interesting numbers.
A couple of things to mention:
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The low, narrow doors, specially in castles were meant to be a fortification. Imagine a soldier trying to get through the door. He has to bend low, and squeeze through while the enemy is on the other side intent on chopping off his limbs. In other homes, the lack of materials and the effort in creating large doors (as someone already mentioend) probably also played a role.
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Armor is sometimes does not accurately represent the size of the wearer when mounted on museum racks. So a suit might look small, but if you were to place it on a human body, you’d see it would fit a larger man.
Even in the medieval times, there were plenty of tall people, I would wager most would have been among the well fed warrior classes and the aristocracy. The poor probably suffered from malnutrition which may also have played a role.
So I would say that yes, on AVERAGE people were smaller, but tall people did exist and I’d guess weren’t all that rare.
overall size was probably not much different but there would have been fewer people in the upper ranges of height than there are now. Nutrition is generally believed to be the reason for the average height increasing somewhat in modern times.
A few years ago I was visiting the museum at the Custer battlefield. They had uniforms and boots and such on display, and I remember noticing how small they seemed. Then I noticed a sign that said that the average guy in the cavalry was 5 foot 6 inches and weighed about 140 pounds. This does seem to support the contention that folks used to be rather smaller. How big is the average guy today? Bigger than that, I would guess.
I saw a documentary on TV about vikings a few years ago. Apparently they had a comparable calorie intake to people today and that was a thousand years ago. However their diet was not as varied and therefore less healthy in the long run. I can’t find any data on how tall they were, but vikings weren’t exactly known for being small.
A couple of more points:
Typical farm families 200 years ago really didn’t eat all that well. It really was a year to year existence. A very tough life. For a well off family like George Washington’s, the top people would eat well enough, but the servants/slaves and such didn’t. Since the latter made up the overwhelming majority of the population, that brings down the average.
Secondly, we also know more about nutrition now. Before the Irish Potato Famine, many folks in Ireland just ate potatos as their staple. Day after day after day. Since it filled your belly, gave you enough energy to work the next day, etc., that was considered good enough. A horrible diet by today’s standards. Ditto East Asia when polished rice took over.
Another major factor in changing avg. height is hybrid vigor. People were strongly inbred back in the preindustrial-marry-your-3rd-cousin days. This leads to a lot of negative things like poor development. Once people started moving around a lot and marrying genetically different people, a lot of poor quality gene matchups went away. (Note this is a one-time change. Once the gene pool is reasonably well-mixed, further mixing doesn’t change much. I.e., the increase in height due to this will top out.)
BTW: If you go far enough back in skeleton height studies to hunter-gatherer groups, you find that they also had greater height than the farmers that came after them. Agriculture brought steadier, but less nutritional, food.
Here’s a bit of reading discussing the subject with regard to the Japanese:
The Modern Body: Have You Noticed the Changes?
Chapters include:
Height Increase Result of Intermarriage?
Increase in Population Leads to Shorter People?
Japanese Women Increasingly Curvaceous?
Change Due to Sedentary Lifestyle?
The Perils of Eating Whatever One Wants To
Another site, MyNippon, addresses something my father told me years ago, that being that the average height of Japanese has significantly increased since WWII, with the addition of beef to their diet being hypothesized to be a major influence.
There are probably other cites available, but that was the first one I found that supported that old memory, and it includes a discussion of how Japanese women, in the pursuit of stature:
The farmhouse I moved out of two years ago was originally built in the 1750s.
The scale and doors are prefect for a 5 foot 4 inch person.
At six feet I was always banging my noggin on the doorframes, and scraping my head along the ceilings going up staircases.
The idea that this was done out of frugality is kind of silly. The bigger the doorway, the less lumber is involved. Smaller doorwars require more lumber. More space to fill.
I can’t imagine that the people who built this house intentionally set it up to smash their heads. The craftsmanship, thoughtfullness and attentiont o detail that went into the construction was astounding. The fact that it still stands 250 years later oughtta be testament enough to this.
So I’m pretty sure they were a lot shorter.
I work in a musem.
One of the artifacts we have on display is a horse-drawn plow made around 1800. (The human was supposed to walk along behind the plow, guiding it with the handles.) It’s very small, made for someone rather short. As a 5’4" woman, I would have to stoop to be able to use this impliment.
We also have a fine collection of Civil War uniforms. The average size we have were made to fit men who were around 5’4" and about 115 lbs. Some of them are considerably smaller. We have one infantry man’s uniform into which a nine-year-old child of today would probably have trouble fitting.
We have a large civilain clothes collection, ranging in dates from the late 1700s up to the modern day. Whenever we put the clothes from 1900 and earlier on display, we actually have to make new mannequins: the modern-sized ones, (sometimes even the ones made to represent children) are too large for the clothing. (We had a hell of a time with our last exhibit. We eventually ordered foam “bodies” and used a rasp to file them down to a usable size.)
The gloves we have are astonishingly tiny at times. Even accounting for some shrinkage in the leather over time, the hands of the ladies who wore them must have been very small. (I have small hands myself, and there’s no way I could fit into a good portion of the gloves.)
They weren’t shorter at all. And you can prove it.
Some people see the suits of armor in the British museums and Tower and think all men were small. Most British knights were small, so that with armor they would not slow the steed.
But you look at German armor, and many suits are over 6’ including the Red Knight.
The German suits were for the Crusades and more for show on years of travel and encampment than actual battle.
Julius Caesar was tall. Seneca was tall. Some of the Assyrian kings are tall, some of the mummies are tall.
Yeah, but smaller doorways require smaller doors too, so it’s a wash.
The frugality of small doors does factor in if you consider less heat can escape through the smaller opening each time the door is opened.
The reason you often see such small clothes at museums is because they were unusual. Really common sized clothes were passed on from wearer to wearer, until they were destroyed, and therefore aren’t able to be displayed. However, very few men were, say, 5’3", and so after that unusually short man stopped wearing the outfit, it probably would have sat in a trunk for years until a descendent gave it to a museum.
People are taller now than they used to be, due to improved nutrition, but not by that much.