Re:Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
by adhesive_wombat on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @02:48AM
(#31904867)
Well also Rotherham in the UK is a town with over 100k people, though not US-style "small town", it's certainly not a city, and not even a particularly huge town (there are many 100k+ towns that aren't cities: the largest is Reading with nearly 1/4 million)
But that might be just a UK naming thing since "city" means something special (and isn't actually especially related to size: the smallest one is 1600 people).
But yes, perhaps it's not really a "small" town but just a town.
In medieval times, people had lots of children, but most of them died very young. Of course this doesn't fit into Tolkien's idyllic description of the Shire, so it's not mentioned, but I guess families with 13 children who all survived to adulthood were the lucky exception...