Chapter Text
So how many people are there in Camelot, anyway? Or the entirety of Albion? And how big an army would they be able to raise? Obviously canon doesn't provide a definite answer, but we can make a best guess using real world data.
The City of Camelot
In 1066, the largest city in Britain was London, thriving with 10,000 people. Let's compare this to Rome, one of the largest cities in Europe.
Population comparison over time:
| London | Rome | |
| 50AD | Rural | 1.6 million |
| 200AD | 60,000 | 1.4 million |
| 1000AD | 10,000 | 30,000 |
| 2013AD | 8 million (3rd largest in Europe) | 3.5 million (8th largest in Europe) |
Given what we see of Camelot in the pilot, and accounting for the massive anachronisms, I would put the show at around 1000AD. I would not say that Camelot is as large as London. It's a large city, yes, but it's suffered a lot of losses, and it's inland, away from the trade routes. It would be much closer in size to Winchester, which had a population at the time of 6,000. So a rough estimate would put the city of Camelot at 5-6,000. Ealdor, as an extremely rural village in a mountainous area, would only have a population of 100. That's including the elderly and the very young. An able, adult population of about 40-60 matches what we saw in "The Moment of Truth."
The Kingdom of Camelot and Albion
Data for 1000AD is rather sparse, so the best guide is population density. Medieval France has the highest population density of ME Europe, with over 100 people/sq mile. Germany at the time was 90 p/sqm, and the entire British Isles was at 40 p/sqm. Much of this is because the BIs have comparatively less arable farmland and a fair amount of rocky terrain. The size of Great Britain, our Albion analogue, is 89,000 sq mi. At 40 p/sqm, that gives us a population size of 3.5 million.
For my map of Albion, I used the following counties of England and Wales to make up the kingdom of Camelot:
| Clwyd | 2,910 sq mi |
| Shropshire | 1,347 sq mi |
| Staffordshire | 1,048 sq mi |
| West Midlands | 348 sq mi |
| Warwickshire | 763 sq mi |
| Worcestershire | 672 sq mi |
| Herefordshire | 842 sq mi |
| Oxfordshire | 1,006 sq mi |
| Gloucestershire | 1,216 sq mi |
| TOTAL | 10,152 sq mi |
10,152 sq mi with a population density of 40 brings the total population of the kingdom of Camelot to around 400,000. However, the terrain of Camelot would be mostly good farmland, and that would increase the supportable population. So we can bring that up. The north of Camelot is less arable than the south, especially the northern plains and there are three significant mountain ranges, so I wouldn't bring it all the way up to France or Germany. But let's say a population density of 60 for Camelot, bringing the total population to around 600,000. That would be roughly 17% of the entire population of the British Isles (4m).
Military Numbers
Let's start with a modern country. North Korea, the most heavily militarized modern country in terms of soldiers per capita, has an active military of 45 per 1000 people, or 4.5% of the total population. The next largest is South Ossetia, with 3.5%, and then Singapore with 1.6%. So the numbers drop off steeply. The US has a fairly small army of .04% of the population, but we make up for that with a large base population. The US army is 1.4 million, while the North Korean army is 1.1 million.
Now back to the height of the Roman Empire. A Roman legion was 5,400 soldiers. During the time of the Roman invasion (50AD), across the entire Roman empire there were about 30 legions, or 162,000 men. That would be 0.36% of a 45 million population of citizens, or 4% of the 4 million citizen population (most of the population were not full citizens). So we see that in a heavily militarized state, 4% is a good outside number for the size of the active army. Keep in mind that there would have to be a large support network for all of this: servants, smiths, carpenters, farmers, all the people who actually keep things running. Most states would not have such a large active military.
At full population and strength, Camelot could then support an army of 24,000. That's huge and incredibly costly. So let's bring that number down to something more reasonable. Most countries today have armies of less than 1% of the population, but Camelot has been actively at war for decades. That will both increase the size of the army and lessen it, since they would have lost a lot of population as a result of so much fighting. So Camelot might not be at 600,000 anymore, but 500,000, and they might be able to raise a full-strength army of 2%. That would provide a maximum of 10,000 soldiers. The vast majority of these would be common folk, not trained soldiers like knights. This would include border patrols, domestic military, etc. .5% to 1% would be more likely when Camelot was not actively at war: 2,500 to 5,000 soldiers.
I used 500 for Arthur's army in Bird of the Gauntlet since it was time-constrained, but if they'd waited a few weeks they would have been able to muster a strength of 1,000. If city of Camelot's population is 6,000, then sending off 500 soldiers and 500 support would mean losing 1/6 of their entire population for however long the Battle of Gedref would take. That would be somewhat ameliorated by people coming in from the surrounding towns and the knights recalled from patrols, but as you can see, it was as large as Arthur could feasibly manage.
These numbers are also important when considering the way that Rome conquered Britain/Albion. The initial period of invasion brought four legions to Britain, and three were generally stationed there until the 4th century. A fighting force of over 20,000 well-armed, well-trained men would have been overwhelming.