Fig 1.
Schematic Social Networks of Towns and Cities.
(A) An unstructured network where anyone can in principle connect with anyone else, subject to limitations deriving from cost of movement. Such a network is characterized by increasing connectivity with city population size, with mean degree k(N) = k0 Nδ, δ ∼ 1/6. (B) A structured socioeconomic network. In this case, interactions between individuals are regulated by social groups and institutions (black squares) and may be damped by a factor s<1, for each level of institutions involved. If the parameter s<1, the net effect of institutions is to weaken social possibilities and thus reduce agglomeration effects, taking the exponent of the scaling of area with population for settlements closer to unity.
Fig 2.
Map of Western European Settlements ca. 1300 CE Examined in this Paper.
Medieval towns and cities of Western Europe ca. AD 1300 examined in this paper (n = 173), in England (red; n = 40), France and Belgium (blue; n = 63), Northern Italy (green; n = 30) and Germany (yellow; n = 40). All settlements examined have populations of >1,000, and in most cases have populations >5,000. This map was created using ArcGIS® software by Esri, © OpenStreetMap and contributors, Creative Commons-Share Alike License (CC-BY-SA).
Table 1.
Scaling of Settlement Area with Population Size: ln(area) = α + βln(population).
Fig 3.
Estimation of Area—Population Scaling Relations for Regional Urban Systems.
Estimation of Area—Population scaling relations for: (A) England (red); (B) France and Belgium (blue); (C) Northern and Central Italy (green); and (D) Germany (yellow). The black line represents proportionate (linear) scaling; the yellow line the theoretical prediction where α = 5/6; and the red line the best-fit line from OLS regression of the log-transformed data.
Fig 4.
Estimation of Area—Population Scaling Relation for All Settlements.
The Area—Population scaling relation for the entire data set of all medieval cities (n = 173). The black line represents proportionate (linear) scaling; the yellow line the theoretical prediction where α = 5/6; and the red line the best-fit line from OLS regression of the log-transformed data.
Fig 5.
Measuring the Settled Area of Medieval Settlements.
Bristol’s built-up areas in the later middle ages (late 13th–early 14th centuries), including built-up suburban areas shaded in grey. The red line indicates the 130 ha settled area we measured for the city, whereas the inner area circumscribed by walls and rivers measures only 55 ha. Even our relatively conservative outline of the city’s built up area more than doubles Bristol’s settled area. This map is modified and redrawn by the authors from Derek Keene’s (1976) map of the suburban built up area of later medieval Bristol [102].