Human Stature

Several investigations from the second half of the twentieth century have used human height as a measure of material well-being, but this measure is of relatively little value in the Danish case until late in the period dealt with in this chapter.

Before 1789, the estate owners oversaw conscription for the national service and it was not normal practice for them to measure their soldiers. In this early period it is only for mercenaries that we have statistics of heights, and they indicate that only relatively tall people were recruited, so that they provide a biased sample of the total population. In 1789 a new conscription system was introduced—from that time the total male rural population was measured at a draft board, but the urban youth were not included until after 1849.

National statistics based on this material were not published until the 1850s, but a few regional samples have been collected by contemporaries and later researchers. These samples show relatively constant average heights from 1789 to the 1850s ranging between 165 and 167 cm; a growth process is not evident until the second half of the nineteenth century, and then with a growth rate of c.1 cm per decade. This development is therefore of little value in trying to estimate changes in the standard of living in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Also, none of the samples has information from the 1830s, which was a period of high mortality and one in which some other European studies have shown a decline in physical height.

8.