Put yourself in the shoes of a grain farmer in Damerham. The miller wants all you can grow, so you encourage both your sons to marry early and rent a few acres off you. The carter, the miller, the baker, the merchant and the shepherds are all doing the same: setting their children up in business. Family formation – which had always been as much an economic as a biological decision – increased markedly in the thirteenth century. The consequence of all this early and frequent marriage was fecundity. In the thirteenth century the population of England seems to have doubled, from over two million
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