I don't think we can use the current ratio of magicals to muggles to estimate the magical population size 1000 years ago. The factors that caused the real-world population explosion of recent centuries - sanitation, agricultural methods, medical science, literacy, etc. - would not have affected the magical population nearly as much. The magical community was a comparatively "developed" society centuries earlier. So the current student body size may not be significantly different from what it was, say, 500 years ago.
Something to consider, in terms of a possible population decrease, is emigration. There are huge swaths of the Americas and Australia with extremely low population densities, large enough to potentially hide a small city. And there may have been an exodus from Europe during the witch hunts, which began around the same time as European exploration (maybe not a coincidence, given who the experts in astronomy were.) More recently, some families may have left the UK because of either Voldemort or Dumbledore, which might have made Harry's class size smaller than that of his parents.
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timeasmymeasure
Magical Population Size
Date: 2015-09-22 05:47 pm (UTC)I don't think we can use the current ratio of magicals to muggles to estimate the magical population size 1000 years ago. The factors that caused the real-world population explosion of recent centuries - sanitation, agricultural methods, medical science, literacy, etc. - would not have affected the magical population nearly as much. The magical community was a comparatively "developed" society centuries earlier. So the current student body size may not be significantly different from what it was, say, 500 years ago.
Something to consider, in terms of a possible population decrease, is emigration. There are huge swaths of the Americas and Australia with extremely low population densities, large enough to potentially hide a small city. And there may have been an exodus from Europe during the witch hunts, which began around the same time as European exploration (maybe not a coincidence, given who the experts in astronomy were.) More recently, some families may have left the UK because of either Voldemort or Dumbledore, which might have made Harry's class size smaller than that of his parents.