The area controlled by a mid-level lord (count or margrave) can vary widely, but 10-30 miles on a side is pretty reasonable. (In a less productive area-say, an arid region like Spain-they might be somewhat farther apart.) Each village is typically ruled by a knight, though there are exceptions: Villages held by the church or the local monastery, or cases where a given knight holds more than one village and has a seneschal of some description running things at one or more of them.
![mount and blade medieval conquest kingdoms mount and blade medieval conquest kingdoms](https://g2anewsprod02storage.s3.amazonaws.com/app/uploads/2019/02/Kingdom-Come-Deliverance-700x394.jpg)
Call it 6 square miles on average, if you want a quick rule of thumb. So that’s 4 to 9 square miles per village. Given a productive agricultural region (like most of northern Europe), the manors are typically spread across the countryside about 2 or 3 miles apart. So, how many villages in a kingdom? Depends on the size and terrain. Land was the big-ticket currency of the medieval world.) But unlike modern national borders, they did change frequently through conquest and diplomacy. (Obviously, these lands weren’t reconquered with every generation the borders became somewhat traditional. The duchy (or other next step up) was defined by how many counties and manors that lord was able to subsume, and the kingdom was defined by how many duchies and counties and manors the king was able to bring under control. Rather, the countryside was dotted with manors, and the county or regional authority was defined by how many of those manors a given lord was able to amass under his control. The king didn’t sit down and divide up the map into duchies, then divide those up into counties, and then into manors and so on. This division was really from the bottom up, not the top down. That higher lord might owe service up the chain to someone even higher, and at the top was the king. Local peasants toiled for a knight, the knight owed service to a higher lord. The feudal system was the way things were done. “No land without a lord” was a Norman motto about the time of their conquest of England. There were no vast expanses of wilderness or areas unruled by a recognized authority. Here’s how it more or less was: Virtually all of northern/western Europe was settled. But we all have a sort of image in our head of what that term means (based I think, mostly on northwestern Europe in the period spanning the age of the Crusades through to about Chaucer and the Black Death), so we can work to that. The question isn’t simple: When you look across an entire continent, over half a millennium, there really isn’t a “typical” typical medieval kingdom. Worldbuilding is a topic of fascination for me, both as a writer and a gamer, and this is a subject about which there are a lot of misconceptions that, at least for me, undermine the veracity many stories and games I’d otherwise enjoy. I stumbled across a conversation on a message board in which a guy was curious about a typical medieval kingdom’s resources-specifically, how many villages and towns a kingdom might encompass, and how big its army might be.