Did the Roman Occupation Make Celtic Britons Taller? 2,000 Years of Changing Heights in England
Channel: Celtic History Decoded
Date: 2023-03-02

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Chapters:
0:00 Did the Romans Make Englishmen Taller?
1:39 Norman Period
3:22 Industrial Revolution
3:49 Today
4:09 Support 

Did the Romans Make Englishmen Taller?

When researching my video on what Vikings actually looked like, I came across an interesting working paper from Oxford University that studied the height of Englishmen over a span of 2,000 years through looking at skeleton remains. 

They used skeletons found all over England of men between 21 and 49 and calculated their full height by using the length of their femurs or thigh bones. They found that Englishmen became taller when Britain was under Roman occupation (200-410 AD), with average height rising from 167 cm to 170 cm (or 5 feet 5 inches). 

The researchers suggest this rise in average height coincided with the Romans’ improved water supply and sanitation systems and a more varied diet at this time. After the Romans left Britain in 410, heights did not deteriorate immediately but fell from 600 onwards. 

The paper highlights previous research suggesting that health may have deteriorated when populations moved out of the towns and cities set up by the Romans, abandoning their more hygienic water supplies and waste disposal systems. Plague and pestilence then became common and infectious diseases are known to have increased at this time, with archaeological evidence also suggesting that diets were inadequate.

Average heights of men started to go up again after the Norman Conquest of 1066, says the paper. By the end of the early medieval period, heights had increased to 172 cm, increasing to 173 cm in the 1100s, edging closer to heights achieved at the start of the 20th century. 

After 1200, heights started to decline, and archaeological evidence shows that at this time, the rural populations were decreasing, farmland had become degraded and there were shortages of crop seeds. 
It also notes that other research has suggested temperatures turned colder over the century, with weather becoming far more changeable until the early 1300s. The early 1300s started with the Great Famine (1315-1317) which may have exaggerated the decline in average heights, but the paper says men had started getting shorter several decades before. 

Sources:

University of Oxford, Highs and lows of an Englishman’s average height over 2000 years - https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-04-18-highs-and-lows-englishman%E2%80%99s-average-height-over-2000-years-0 

BBC News - Statistics reveal Britain's 'Mr and Mrs Average' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11534042 

Heights across the Last 2,000 Years in England https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/S0363-326820180000034003/full/html 

#rome #history #romanempire