The following article describes a recent study addressing the change in height of people since Medieval times. Read the text and answer the questions below.
It is commonly believed that people living in the Middle Ages were much shorter than people living today. Much of this belief comes from the low doorways seen in some medieval houses and from the small suits of clothes and armor shown in museums. After an exhaustive study of hundreds of churchyard skeletons, however, British archaeologists Charlotte Roberts and Margaret Cox now say that the height difference has been highly exaggerated.
Roberts and Cox studied hundreds of skeletons from a churchyard in the abandoned medieval village of Wharram Percy in Yorkshire. They found that while “ten-year-olds were around 8 inches shorter than children today, by the time they were fully grown they were nearly as tall as modern adults.” Overall, adult heights of men and women have remained constant at about 5 foot 7 inches (170 cm) for men, and 5 foot 3 inches (160 cm) for women.
Concerning the short doorways and armor, Sebastian Payne, chief scientist at the English Heritage governmental agency, says that there are plenty of tall doors, and that lower doorways may simply have been a way to conserve heat. In addition, “recruits in 18th and 19th-century military records were considerably below today’s average heights,” because they “often came from poorer families whose average height is less, and were often not fully grown.”