This, at least, is an artifact of calvary selection standards. Horse calvary soldiers, especially light calvary, tend to be rather smaller than average. Smaller horsemen are easier on the horses.
Speculation on the surviving small suits of armor: Could they have been made for children of nobility and therefore much more likely to survive to posterity (as oppposed to adult armor which is likely to get used until it’s used all up)?
By that logic, the largest items in the museum represent the largest people of the time?
Years ago, I toured the remains of the city (town? village?) of Pompei, Italy. It was devestated by a volcanic eruption from Mt. Vesuvius, in the year 79 AD. I am 5’ 8’’ tall, and I remember ducking down as I passed through many doorways that were left intact.
As Lissa says, clothes were passed down from generation to generation, taken apart, remade, etc. You can tailor a larger size down to fit an average person, but you can’t tailor a smaller size up to fit an average person.
Keep in mind I’m talking strictly 1300-1500.
Most museum armor you see is actually for display/parades not battle. Thus its considerably lighter and smaller.
You also have to factor in that the nobles would have had the best food available while farmers would be poor off. Nobles would get heavy exercise while farmers would get just as heavy work, but with a poor diet.
On average nobles would be taller than us, and farmers shorter. Not to mention that anyone back then would be far fitter than nearly anyone today.
I have no idea about other periods but low-class buildings, defensive structures, and individual garments are an easy way to be fooled.
What difference does it make that armour was ceremonial? It either fit the wearer or it didn’t. The people who could afford fitted armour were also the ones with the best diet, not peasants.
This is incorrect. I’d wager that there’s a good mix between functional articulated plate armor, and jousting armor (which was MUCH heavier).
I do not see why anyone would go to the effort of creating armor specifically for a parade/show, when a functional piece is not very heavy or that uncomfortable to wear.
I can’t cite the sources, but people were much shorter 300 years ago than today. There has even been a noticeable increase in average height over the last 50 years.
This is pretty much common knowledge among historians.
Couldn’t we get a good idea of how tall people were by the furniture they made? Conserving materials wouldn’t be a big deal when we’re talking about wooden chairs. Would an average sized man now feel comfortable sitting in one from Washington’s time or would it seem too short? What about a kitchen work table? Certainly it would have been built to a height that would comfortable for a woman standing there making bread or cutting meat. Same even goes for that essential to any home 100 or 200 years ago, the cookstove. Have manufacturers increase their height any?
Anyone have any ideas of the height of any of these items?
Yes, people were smaller. A lot of research has been done about this subject, but it’s surprisingly hard to find any cites online (for me at least). Anyway, here is a table from Statistical Yearbook of Norway, dividing conscripts by height between 1910 and 2003. We see a steady increase from average height of 171 cm to almost 180 cm during the period of 1920-1980. This means about 5% change so those early 1900’s people really were smaller. You can also see how Norwegians over 185 cm were real rarity in early decades, consisting only 1,7% of military, while their share in recent years has peaked on almost 25% of the group.
Note that Julius Caesar, Seneca or Assyrian kings don’t represent the average population. They all belonged to higher class, rich and powerful families whose everyday life was dramatically different from regular peasant, or slave. Them having much better and more variable nutrition is a given.
Well, I’ve heards about this for years, and I gather that a little of both sides is true. People are bigger now, but not as much bigger as people think.
What I gather is that people misinterpret, or overinterpret, the signs. Someone’s already mentioned short doors to keep in heat, and I’m sure you’re familiar with this concept from igloos and huts. The hot air is up above, and the entrance is kept low down. Anybody who rides horses can be chosen for small size. Jockeys are generally shorter than average people today, and in fact even tank crews are, although that has nothing to do with the topic. Sorry.
One thing nobody’s mentioned yet (I think) is that people didn’t start sleeping lying down in bed until quite recently. Generally they slept in a half sitting position (you can do it easily in a chair or an airplane, and if you did it every night you’d get used to it.) But anyone who slept lying down would see your bed and think you were shorter than you were.
Anyway, my understanding has come to be that people WERE shorter, but modern observers, knowing that, see it as the only explanation for a lot of things that they have trouble interpreting.
It may also be a matter of better nutrition for pregnant women. Those nine months and a few before are critical in the development of the skeleton and internal organs. I heard that France started a campaign in Napoleon’s time to improve the nutrition of pregnant women, and this affected to overall health and average physique in France, even giving mothers medals. Even now it is not easy to get all the recommended nutrition just with natural foods. The US has specifically enriched commonly eaten foods to see that general nutrition is better than otherwise would be and added some vitamins just to help women who could become or are pregnant. Also we have worke to eliminate exposure to toxins, like lead and mercury among others. Surely this helps build better people.
Well, this is only partially true. The wealthy didn’t need to be so frugal. Unfortunately, 99% of most museums’ collections consist of the clothes of the wealthy. (In my museum, we only have a few pieces of “common” people’s clothing-- more about them later.) The wealthy did not need to re-make clothing, though some certainly chose to. They could afford to buy another garment as soon as the old one no longer suited their needs.
We also have a few dresses of heavy-set women, which probably would have supplied enough material for two smaller dresses, if it had been re-made.
A poor person would not have just stored away the clothing when it became too small to be worn by any family member. They would have cut it down into rags, or used it for quilt-making. At worst, they could have traded it to a family who had young boys.
Poor Americans rarely saved anything for posterity. They re-used things until they literally disintigrated. Putting perfectly good cloth in a trunk simply because it was too small to fit any of the grown men in the family would have been unthinkable.
Civil War officer’s coats are an excellent research tool. A large number of officer’s uniforms were stored away as family heirlooms. (Ordinary enlisted mens’ clothing is much rarer-- they wore the uniforms as work clothing when they returned home.) As I previously mentioned, most of our officer’s uniforms are made to fit men which are around 5’3" and 115 lbs. Some are considerably smaller.
Note to moderators: first cite is from alumni pub of Oberlin. Presumably, SDMB is free to post, with proper citation.
http://www.oberlin.edu/alummag/oamcurrent/oam_may99/tall.html
Americans, for nearly two centuries, lived as the world’s tallest human beings. Averaging 172 centimeters in the year 1750, American men towered over English and Norwegians by seven centimeters, Austrians by six, and Swedes by five. But, somehow, things changed. Young Dutchmen, once among the shortest in Europe, today lead the pack at 183 centimeters, or just over six feet tall, while Americans, who gained just four centimeters in the last 250 years, are shorter than all of them.
Steckel says that traditional measures of standard of living-gross national product or per capita income-don’t reflect the total picture because they leave out other variables such as crime, congestion, workload, or the amount of leisure time afforded to a population. Height also has a direct relationship to longevity; research suggests that the height of a child at age 12 has a direct correlation with life expectancy as an adult. Per capita income can’t make the same claim.
Steckel’s research is derived in part from historical height data recorded on slave manifests of those shipped in the coast wide trade after 1807 and military muster roles from major wars.
“Among the things we learned is that slave children were dreadfully small, among the smallest populations ever measured, but recovered substantially as teenagers,” Steckel said. "Pregnant slave women had an arduous work routine, and their children as infants had a limited rate of breast feedings. Women were back in the fields within six weeks of giving birth, and the children left behind in the nursery were receiving a contaminated, low protein diet until age 10.
How tall one becomes is a function of net nutrition during periods of growth. Average height is not adept in distinguishing between degrees of opulence, but is good at distinguishing between degrees of deprivation. In other words, it’s a measure of one’s consumption of basic needs."
In the early 1700s soldiers in the United States were the tallest in the world, attributed, most likely, to a healthy diet and an abundance of farmlands. “Americans experienced the best of the old and the new world foods at that time, and also had low population density, few epidemics, and a reasonably even distribution of wealth,” Steckel said.
Average height for Americans peaked in the 1830s, then sharply declined toward a new low in 1880 (Chart 1). “Americans lost 1-1/2 to 2 inches in height despite an improving economy and increases in income,” Steckel said. "But we also had a greater spread of communicable disease as the United States urbanized. The transportation revolution in the 1820s and '30s brought steamboats, canals, and railroads. People moved and migrated, taking disease with them: cholera, scarlet fever, whooping cough. Wealth inequality was also on the rise and the poor were more exposed by business downturns.
Things didn’t get better until the end of the century with the purification of water, removal of waste, emphasis on personal hygiene, and use of antiseptics, after which point we saw an increase of eight centimeters in height in the next three-quarters of a century."
Many Europeans, whose heights once lagged several centimeters behind Americans, caught up, eventually surpassed, and continued rising. In the United States, however, height began leveling off in the mid-1900s, and, in the last 25 years, experienced no increase at all. This is a warning, says Steckel, since the majority of growth occurs in early childhood and adolescence.
http://grove.ufl.edu/~aquarius/morgan.html
Daniel Morgan, pioneer in the use of rifles in warfare, became famous as the leader of one of the most skilled regiments of sharpshooters of the American Revolution … the family moved to Jefferson County, Virginia when young Daniel was 17. By that time, Daniel Morgan had reached full maturity. At 6’2" tall and weighing 210 pounds, he was considered a giant for his day.
http://www.eh.net/lists/archives/eh.res/oct-1996/0005.php
Some of the more interesting results are as follows:
Slaves were almost as tall as freemen (Steckel, 1979) but slave
children were short (Steckel 1986). American slaves were taller than
Africans in Africa.
Americans were taller than Europeans already in the 18th century
(Sokoloff and Villaflor, 1982).
The propinquity to nutrients was advantageous (Komlos, 1985) and
therefore people living in underdeveloped regions were often taller than
those living in industrialized areas. This was true for Ireland v.s.
England (Mokyr and O’Grada 1994) as well as for the American south v.s.
North. (Steckel and Margo, 1983)
In cross-sectional samples heights correlate positively with
social status without exception (ceteris paribus).
Yet curiously, in my 1860s farmhouse (in rural Virginia) the doors and ceilings on the first floor are ENORMOUS. The doors are easily 7 feet and the ceiling is more than 10 feet. Weird.
I seem to vaguely recall a display at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History that covered the development of human civilization and featured wall painting of ‘average’ people of each era (going back to Babylon and such) and my kid sister, who was 10 at the time, being tickled to death that adults were just her size back then.
Take that for what you will.
I don’t know about the doors, but the ceilings are easily explainable. In the South, or areas with hot climates, ceilings were often tall to help keep the ground-floor rooms cooler.
I don’t know about the “average” person, but individuals like George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson were quite tall even by our modern standards. On a recent trip to Monticello, I asked why, if these guys were so tall, were their beds so short. I was told that at the time there was a belief amongst the elite that lying down was bad for your health, so most of them slept in a sitting position, propped up on pillows and such.
Not so re: James Adams, who was only 5’6". (Washington was about 6’1" while “Long Tom” Jefferson was about 6’ 2")
BTW, one reason for the stagnant height gains in the U.S. in recent years (as cited above) may be traced to the massive influx of Latinos and Asians.
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_US_Presidents_by_height_order
President Height (feet and inches) Losing candidate Height (feet and inches)
Abraham Lincoln 6’ 4"
Lyndon Johnson 6’ 3"
Bill Clinton 6’ 2½"
Thomas Jefferson ?
Chester Arthur 6’ 2"
George H. W. Bush ?
Franklin Roosevelt ?
George Washington ?
Andrew Jackson :6’ 1"
Ronald Reagan ?
James Buchanan 6’ 0"
Gerald Ford ?
James Garfield ?
Warren Harding ?
John Kennedy ?
James Monroe ?
William Taft ?
John Tyler ?
Richard Nixon 5’ 11½"
George W. Bush 5’ 11"
Grover Cleveland ?
Herbert Hoover ?
Woodrow Wilson ?
Dwight D Eisenhower 5’ 10½"
Calvin Coolidge 5’ 10"
Andrew Johnson 5’ 10"
Franklin Pierce ?
Jimmy Carter 5’ 9½"
Millard Fillmore 5’ 9"
Harry Truman ?
Rutherford Hayes 5’ 8½"
Theodore Roosevelt 5’ 8½"
Ulysses Grant 5’ 8"
William Harrison ?
James Polk ?
Zachary Taylor ?
John Adams 5’ 7"
John Quincy Adams ?
William McKinley ?
Benjamin Harrison 5’ 6"
Martin Van Buren ?
James Madison 5’ 4"
Plimouth Plantation says “not really”
Seems to be about 3" difference, at most. Hardly makes them dwarves.
Mark Gist also has something to say about it. Lots of interesting bits:
I loved this part: