WIP : Town of Fière-Muraille

[Ilanthar]

By Narolas
Thanks for the people following this, I keep thinking my stuff is mediocre but it looks like people like it.

Are you kidding? No surprise that people like it (as do I), it's very well done. The shading is very good and your colors work well. I would only rework a bit the river banks : the line seems a bit strong compared to what you did with the cliffs and rocks.

[Narolas]

Some progress on the buildings !
I've prepared the main roads and streets and outlined the building clusters, walls, etc.. , i'll be redrawing the lines more cleanly on each cluster/building once i'm colouring and i've already tried it on some gates, towers and a bit of wall.



Next, I think I should have a rough placement of farms and farm buildings/houses so i can make sure everything fits, same for the few trees here and there and small details, then I can begin re-drawing and colouring each element.


On another note, while re-measuring the scale and population density, i've realised i've transformed this town (which was supposed to be a small 1000 pop town) into a pretty large city, about 9000 to 10.000 pop
Welp, It has a ton of good ideas and i've grown fond of it, so i'm keeping it this way and i'll use it as the major city of the area instead of the "small local town" type of thing it originally was (an opportunity to make another, very small, map !).

Tell me what you think of the progress !

[J.Edward]

That's looking really good Narolas.

[snodsy]

Really nice start, nice line work. It has a very strong diagonal emphasis, I'm wondering if one of the smaller hill tops might move off the diagonal axis or have a stronger North to South shape. Look forward to seeing this evolve, thanks.

[ChickPea]

Looking good!

[Narolas]

Thank you everyone.
Snodsy, yeah it does. It kinda was the goal from the start, the line of fortification being built mostly along a very small line of hills (remnants of a very old mountain range, something like that).
If it feels too diagonal, I might move the top-right hill a bit south and change the shape a bit.

[Narolas]

I just realised medieval farming is ... complicated, to say the least.

So far I have fields (divided between spring planting, autumn planting and fallow), some pastures and hay meadows, and wooded areas.
So my question is, is there anything else i'm missing ? I've found some example on google images, and there's things such as "closes" and "waste" that i'm not really sure mean, and i'm not quite sure i've got the other things right either.

(example map i mentioned HERE)

So basically, given my map (a fairly important city on a hill but still pretty calm, surrounded by a bunch of smaller farming villages, right in the middle of a large fertile area of plains, some areas along the wall being abandonned/unsafe), how would the farms look like ? The area is pretty safe, and it's in the center of a nation, so the majority of the terrain is being used. It's a temperate area, it gets pretty cold winters and some mist in the winter from the Lake of Mists and Veils. The area its in (rostland) is considered the breadbasket of the nation of Brevoy.
I'm wondering if they'd have, on top of the farm fields, pastures, meadows, fallows, closes and wastes, because i'm not sure what those exactly are. And if yes, how would those be placed, why, how do they work in relation to placement, elevation, proximity to a village or the big town (pollution ?), rivers, etc..

If there's any medieval expert reading, help

[Pixie]

Not the medieval expert, but when I was a kid I still helped around with ox ploughs and the sort at my grandparents village, during summer holidays. The region is now much less populated than 100 years ago, but while methods have changed it just didn't undergo industrial farming as its population is old and retired, while the younger generation left the villages. A satellite view of it will give you a good idea, I think...

https://www.google.pt/maps/search/co.../data=!3m1!1e3

The area is composed of little fertile valleys and granite outcrops, which you can spot easily. I think you can use it as a source for your map. I know the forested area was nearly 0% when my grandparents were young (at least, in way of thinking, that was middle ages!)

[Larb]

Not an expert but have had cause to look up the open field system in detail in the past. =P Closes are small privately owned fields and vegetable patches and stuff. I can't remember exactly what wastes refers to exactly. Pasture is just land for grazing livestock, fallows are the fields left empty for the year (it will be a third or a half of all the farmland depending on how inefficient your people are but I'm going to assume the three-field system so only a third will lie fallow), and meadows are grassy fields for growing hay and such if I remember right.

Oh and a few other odd names for crops you might come across: Dredge is wheat and barley planted together, and Mixtill is oats and barley planted together. Planting them in that way apparently made them more resistant to disease and things.

Pixie's link is pretty good - you can see the fields are separated into long thin strips like on the example map you posted. That is so you don't have to turn the plough around as much. People will probably use as much arable land as they can while leaving the not so good stuff for pasture.

[arsheesh]

Just wanted to chime in say this is looking very nice. I'll be following the progress on this one. Looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh