Mean or average? Different things…
Just as a bit of anecdotal evidence [so take it for what it is worth]. We have traced back our male lineage and each new generation has been taller until we reach 5 generations ago. That generational ancestor was an aristocrat but up until my grandpa we were farmers. I reckon from this nutrition plays a huge part…
At the World War I museum here in Kansas City, there are a whole bunch of uniforms from that era (1914-1918), and they look like they wouldn’t fit most teenagers. Forget that today’s teens are rounder than most people were 100 years ago; the uniforms don’t look like they would fit most of today’s populace height-wise.
I just placed a hold at my library. I love social history.
Or conversely, the Medieval Warm Period leading to people being larger?
One day in college someone from a different class needed to locate one of my classmates. My friends described him as “oh yeah, he’s that cute guy… the short one?” “AH! Thanks, I know!” I started giggling, and my friends asked “what?” “You realize you’ve just described as ‘short’ a guy who’s almost 1’80? Only because our class happens to have half a dozen guys who got built rather than birthed and twelve others who can change lightbulbs without a ladder, that doesn’t make them ‘average’ or him ‘short’!”
There was a collective round of :smack:s. Yeah, he wasn’t short, he was average for the area, would have been on the tall side in Soria or Cádiz and definitely tall in our parents’ generation… but compared with Antonio the Armoire or with Tall Jordi, Taller Jordi and Tallest Jordi, he was “short”.
(FTR, the seeker homed in on the first try.)
Or just ask people to estimate actresses’ heights - being the size of a Lego figure is a plus if you’re going to be carried by the hero, that’s for sure.
One thin gI seldom see mentioned in these threads is indoor heating. Years ago I had a friend who worked in Child Protective Services. She said that people often mistook children who lived without heat for being malnurished. They would go in and inspect and always find adequate food in the house, yet the children were skinny and small. She said that keeping the house up to about 65 degrees made all the difference in the body’s ability to use the food for growth.
You seem to be dismissing what most people would perceive as a rather large difference in height. 5’10" is, indeed, only a few inches taller than yourself, but it’s the difference between Tom Cruise and Johnny Depp.
I mean, 3 to 4 inches is exactly what I mean when I say people were shorter “back then”. Do, in your experience, people mean that historically there were huge swaths of people under 5"? I’ve not run into that misunderstanding; I can see why it would grate.
Yes; however, they would also be subject to lean years and seasonal availability of foods.
They would eat well when conditions were good, but condititions were not always good. The food supply was subject to periodic interruption by weather, wars, political instability, etc.
I admit that one must resist the temptation to make medieval life sound like all doom and gloom (a definite Renaissance habit!), but OTOH there were definite drawbacks to living a medieval life - and for that matter a Renaissance life - and one was that the harvest could fail.
The Great Famine was an exceptional event: Great Famine of 1315–1317 - Wikipedia
But as mentioned, localized famines were reasonably frequent:
Ideally, the medieval diet was pretty good.
I was talking to a demographer a couple years ago and she told me that even today there’s a statistical height difference between people who grew up in Florida vs. Northern parts of the US.
On this very forum, and in real life, and in numerous online places I run into the sentiment that medieval people were “stunted” because “nutrition wasn’t so good back then.” My point isn’t that they were as tall on average as we, their modern-day descendants; its that if a medieval person were magically transported to this time and dressed in modern clothes, you likely wouldn’t notice that he or she was particularly short (you might notice his or her very outdated hairstyle!).
I harp on this so much for a couple of reasons; firstly, that it seems like every other culture reveres their ancestors, but ours looks down on them and disdains them as backward, ignorant, malformed. No, I would not like to switch places with a medieval person. But my research shows me they were people with fascinating cultures and a richly developed worldview; not one we might agree with, but that’s true of any number of cultures worldwide today.
Secondly, because for some reason the topic of medieval people and cultures will always get someone or several someones popping in with an anecdote they learned from a way out of date ‘popular history’ book about ‘prima nocte’ or knights being winched into the saddle. Then I’m like :smack: Look, I don’t know much about the Cuban Missile Crisis. But when it comes up in a conversation, I don’t shoot my mouth off about something I saw in a movie once, it was about Castro I think, or maybe it was just an Antonio Banderas movie, but anyway, what happened was… No, I shut up and pay attention, then I go look up what the experts have to say.
Malthus, I challenge you to go and read even a little of my Komnenoi thread, and putting aside the jokes, come back and say that I think the medieval period was some bucolic paradise. I am fully aware of famines and plagues and the limitations of medicines at that time. Hell, famines happen today. Children starve all over the world. They starve in my country, the wealthiest and most powerful in the world. Will our descendants look back on us the way we look back on our medieval ancestors? I’m not going around promoting this or that. I just want to put the truth out there.
Mm, but my great-grandfather was a farmer, and he was apparently 6’6"- definitely taller than any of his kids, grandkids, or great-grandkids (he also used to wear a top hat whenever possible, just to look even taller…).
I’d suggest that in the first world routine famines make rather less of an impact than in premodern times. What I’m reacting to is the unqualified notion that the medieval diet was quite healthy because it lacked refined sugars and industrial pollutants. Can’t let that go without a "yes, but … ".
Just as there is a hefty mythology anbout the negative aspects of Medieval life, there is an equally hefty mythology about the positive, naturalistic aspects (both, ironically enough, were heavily promoted by Victorian writers). Having been (reluctantly) a sort of farmhand as a child, I’d say there is a good side to industrial pollutants and pesticides. 
Nothing like a summer of picking potato beetle grubs to reconcile one with modern poisions …
If we’re gonna start showing our farmkid credentials, I grew up on a farm, too. I did a lot of pea-picking and feeding geese and weeding the gardens and riding tractors. And the effects of that modern farming is beginning to be seen, with the runoff creating ‘dead zones’ in coastal areas, including my own Mississippi Gulf Coast. Regardless, this thread is NOT about the benefits of organic farming. I want the diet and skeletal evidence posted about medieval people to stand on its own.
As I said before, go and read even a post or two of my Komnenoi series – or my Capetian series – both right here on the Dope, and then come back and tell me with a straight face that I portrayed the medieval period as “positive and naturalistic”. Go and read the parts about the blindings, the child marriages, the guy who got his face eaten off by dogs, the regicides, and then come back and tell me I have a naive viewpoint on the medieval period. Go ahead.
For that matter, right here in this thread, I posted about the obscene alcohol consumption that was common in medieval Europe and discussed the possible ill effects of that. There was a reason for it – there usually is a reason of some kind – but that doesn’t mean it didn’t impact them negatively.
I’m not suggesting that, as a general matter, your historical postings portray the medieval period as a utopia; I’m making a very specific comment about one posting made in this particular thread. I have no doubt you know your historical stuff. 
I am simply saying that, in your understandable and commendable zeal to expose common misconceptions concerning the alleged horrors of medieval daily life, it is possible to go a trifle too far.