Medieval men and women grew to heights similar to our own. What happened to shrink our more recent ancestors?

Go on most historical tours in Europe or America, and you’ll often hear that the small doorframes, cramped quarters, and other incongruities to our modern standard of living exaplained as simple “they were smaller back then.”

But at the turn of the 17^th century – in Shakespeare’s generation – the average man stood around 67.7 inches. A few centuries before, medieval men averaged around 68.75 inches (Steckel, 2004), a height not dissimilar from men 500 years prior and close to the 69.5 inches today. But in the latter 17^th century, heights in England and continental Europe began to decline. In the mid-to-late 19^th century, these reached a low of 65.5 inches (Floud, 1980).

What happened? And how do we know?

Understanding Our Data Sets

Quant-focused historians, economists, and social scientists have been studying height data for about 150 years, but until the 1970s, most told a one-sided story: The world was getting better. Adults grew taller, healthier, and stronger since the studies began in the 1850s.

 But in the 1970s, historians and economists began to dig backward in time, noticing that heights in their data sets showed a downward trend beginning the 17^th century and reaching it’s nadir at different points across the mid-nineteenth century in England, France, and Germany.

The major data sets in this exercise began as draft rolls. Draft offices physically inspected men to qualify or disqualify them from military service. This meant individuals tended to be largely drawn from the lower classes of society, factory or farm workers, so information for the well-to-do is largely absent.

But other data sets have provided a more dynamic lens into the past. Drawn from contemporary studies by philanthropists, medical professionals, or others concerned about the social ills of a factory-based society. Some factory owners kept notes about their factory workers, preferring to test out the ideal body types for their work (One of the most robust data sets comes from stocking-makers in 1830s Lyons). Other published work studies doctors’ records that note heights, weights, and other ailments.

For pre-modern sources, archaeologists and anthropologists have added a robust number of skeletal height studies, some of which are forecast from femur length (and are often assessed as gender agnostic). Plague pits, mass burials from outbreaks of Bubonic disease, have proved very illuminating for the 14th to 17th century.

Taken together, geographic and period specific studies have been able to paint a dynamic picture of heigh across Europe using a multitude of data sets. Although most height data skews male, there is as of yet no reason to think that women’s height did not also rise and fall similarly to men. Some data sets have, mostly through skeletal remains, have suggested as much.

What Put Downward Pressure on Heights?

Human height has a recipe. The main ingredient is genetics. Inheritable traits make up 80% of final adult height.  The rest of the recipe calls on environmental factors like exercise, sleep, caloric intake, and general early childhood health.

 make up the remaining 20% environmental factors like sleep, exercise, caloric intake, and early childhood health. It’s three of these environmental factors that we’ll largely investigate to determine why we see the decline into the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

Climate Changes – Before 1300, Western Europe had enjoyed a period of warmer climate. Crops yield records indicate an overall more productive agricultural output for most of Western Europe. Calories became more plentiful, and diets included higher volumes of protein rich foods like eggs, cheese, and milk as a result. While in no way equivalent to our own agricultural output, many areas enjoyed more reliable harvests than in the centuries to come. Between 1450-1850, the climate cooled. Crop yields dropped. This led to declining living standards even before farmers left to become industrial workers in the 18^th and 19^th century (Griffin, 2019). Given their own lack of food, English and German women weaned children earlier and contributed to higher rates of malnutrition among infants (Radtke, 2004). At the worst of the cold? The apocalyptic Thirty Years War broke out further dislocating the population, interrupting agriculture, and dropping central European heights for births in those years (Mears 1988).

Industrialization and the Rise of Cities – In the 1780s, industrial production of textiles began near Manchester. Industrial productions spread across Western and Central Europe. Cities swelled as industrialists swept away old handicraft and guild networks to establish a new economy. In the countryside, small farmers could no longer pay their rents as home handicrafts  were undercut by industrial goods. After leaving for the city, they found crowded, cramped cities without minimum wages laws or workers protections. In cities, open sewers and cramped quarters exposed children to illnesses in great volume than ever before. Living standards dropped precipitously for most families through the first half of the 19^th century. Much of the Revolutions of 1848 complained of the “pauperization” of the masses.

Early childhood illness – Illness within the first five years of life had the greatest impact on final adult height. Or, to put it more simply, sick children become shorter adults. In the past, childhood illnesses were both more common and more deadly. In 1800, nearly every one in two children died in the United States. Today, it’s 7 in every 1000. The broad degree of statistics. But that hides higher rates of mortality, sometimes over 50%, in many crowded slums of the industrial cities of Western and Central Europe. That tells us many children became sick routinely and contributed to the downward pressure on adult heights. Infections like small pox, mumps, rubella, pertussis, and typhoid claimed many children. Open still water bread mosquito-born illnesses in warmer climates; malaria and yellow fever stuck in waves in such places. All of this meant sicker children and shorter adults.

So what happened to improve the situation?

Across Europe, heights have risen since the end of the 19^th century. The return and ultimately growth in height comes down to solving many of the problems that caused heights to drop in the first place.

Industrial production eventually elevated farm outputs that, when coupled with labor laws ensuring fair renumeration, meant families could adequately feed themselves. The end of the Little Ice Age around 1850 also improved crop outputs. The living standards of the average family in England in 1600 were regained around1860 (Galofré-Vila 2017).

Scientists, medical professionals, and public health officials identified causal agents for different childhood illnesses developed vaccines for many childhood illnesses. Municipal governments buried sewers in many major cities, drained standing water, and processed human waste to limit disease. Laws on safe housing and rising living standards reduced the health risks in earlier tenement housing. Yellow Fever and Typhoid fever became managed by public works projects and by 1910, by a variety of tools developed by American doctors.

Around 1900, England and the Netherlands returned to their pre-1700 heights (Baten and Blum 2015, Floud 1980). France and Germany recovered by 1920 (Op. Cit.).  But what unfolded around the next century pushed heights beyond their historical maximums. Men born today in the much of Europe average nearly 70 inches – nearly a full inch taller than the historical maximum.