City

Photo: The Shambles at York

City is a spreadsheet tool for country designers. It tries to answer such questions as

'If Freedonia is this size how many cities will it have?'

'How many people live in Minas Tirith'?

'How many cabbage farms are there around Ank-Morpork?'

Use is made of formulae devised by Ed Stephan, spreadsheets using them by Burton Choiski and equations added by Juha Vesanto. Without all three, this present work would never have been contemplated. Quite a few changes have been made but (hopefully) the original ideas are not too distorted.

Ed Stephan's book on Population and Area is well worth a look, you don't have to buy it as the whole thing is on the Net!

Burton Choiski's spreadsheets in Excel 4.0 format are available from this page which is itself an explanation of them. You will also find here extracts from the medieval economics thread that ran on the World Design mailing list Summer '96.

A caveat: this is a tool for designers, not a college textbook. If you think you can improve on something, do it.

Comments, queries, corrections and requests are welcome. The latest version of these notes are available from http://village.vossnet.co.uk/h/hpttrsn/ along with some other pages that may be of interest.
If that Site is dead try searching with 'Medieval Economics' as keywords using the Altavista search engine.

Spreadsheet versions

Unfortunately Spreadsheets are no more compatable than anything else in the Wonderful World of Computers, but let's try...

The zip file has the spreadsheet in three formats: Works for Windows 3.0 (city.wks), Excel 4.0 (city216a.xls) and Lotus 1-2-3 (city.wk1). The 1-2-3 version is monochrome but is included as just about any spreadsheet program should load it. The Excel version has had labels removed to avoid a bug in the Works-to-Excel filter, there is a label list that should enable you to replace them which makes the formulae much easier to comprehend.

Why zip them? Well if you downloaded one format, found it didn't load properly, and had to come back...

If you're not sure what formats your program will accept, find the 'Import' menu item if there is one or 'Load' and 'File Type' if there isn't, you should be given a choice.

If anyone manages to load into other spreadsheets successfully I'd appreciate a copy.

And if you're really stuck e-mail me and moan and we'll try something else.

On other pages...

A guided tour of City takes you through the easy bits and invites you to inflict famine, murrain and plague on my homeland.

City Technical Stuff tries to explain how the formulae work and what the Warnings mean.

Some links

As is often the case on the Net there are some academic sites but much of the interesting material is produced by enthusiastic amateurs.

Another (larger!) medieval price list.

A Medieval Sourcebook is intended for college courses, it has links to on-line versions where possible. If you want feudal fealty oaths, viking sagas or saints' lives this is the place to go.

A page for Gothic Cathedral fans, recently revised and expanded. Part of the larger Earthlore site.

A good general links page for Medieval History and Literature. For the Byzantine Empire try Byzance, and NetSERF... OK, you guessed.

Well, gosh! There's another spreadsheet here, this one's to do with converting AD&D prices into the coinage of the fantasy world of your choice and is on a site detailing the world of Drasil.

The Society for Creative Anachronism have a large site, they are an old established medieval reenactment group originally based in California but now worldwide. It's nearest British equivalent is the Far Isles Medieval Society, who are more into medieval banqueting...

Regia Anglorum - Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Norman and British Living History 950-1066AD is another British group, a bit early for us but an interesting site.

Here is an excellent site for model languages, by which we mean artificial ones, either serious like Esperanto or fictional like Klingon or Quenya. It includes a neat program for designing your own.