" Medieval homicide rates are very sensitive to population estimates. Of course they are. In his study, Plantagenet England, Michael Prestwich found reason to revise previous population estimates for medieval London; and with previous population estimates, previous homicide rates.51 One estimate of London’s population in the mid-fourteenth century puts the figure between thirty-five and fifty thousand: H/P ≈ 44 per 100,000. The true population of London, Prestwich argued, was somewhere between one hundred and one hundred and seventy-six thousand inhabitants: H/P ≈ 18 per 100,000. "

― David Berlinski , Human Nature