You can hover over a sentence that contains a footnote in order to read the footnote without scrolling (unless you're on a mobile device, in which case you'll still have to scroll).
The English aristocracy traditionally maintained at least two residences: a “country house” situated on their own estate, and a “town house” located in London. Country houses may also be called “stately homes” if they are grand (but “grandness” is a matter of subjective judgment) and town houses are often “terraced houses” along the lines of 12 Grimmauld Place. Landowners with multiple or extensive estates might have multiple country houses. It is plausible that wealthy magical families have kept up this tradition.
The Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 (a.k.a. Chesterfield’s Act) adjusted the calendar date in the British Empire by eleven days. This post-dates the Statute of Secrecy, but it is clear from the books that Hogwarts and the rest of Magical Britain follow the Gregorian calendar. That doesn’t mean that the change was without controversy, however, and “giving us our eleven days” may be a point of issue for traditionalists (who may or may not care that it’s technically twelve days, now).
Tired: Pure-bloods demand that “Christmas” be replaced by “Yule.”
Wired: Pure-bloods demand that Christmas be celebrated on the 6th of January (New Style) in accordance with the Julian calendar.
The most popular form of long-distance communication is by owl, but in the 1970s James and Sirius had a pair of “two-way mirrors” that were functionally equivalent to a free-roaming mobile videophone, a couple of decades later Hermione was able to build a pager network before she graduated school, and portraits can travel from Hogwarts to London in a single step if they have paintings in both locations. This suggests that British wixes could use magical cell phones if they wanted to do so, but choose to go without. It may be that Magical Britain runs at a slower pace than Muggle Britain and/or that Apparition and the Floo permit wixes to travel easily and quickly enough that they forgo phone calls in favor of house calls.
In the brilliant difficulty series by slashmarks, the simpler “two magical parents + four magical grandparents = Pure-blood” system is relatively novel, and was in fact supported by the Death Eaters.
Pencils predate the Statute of Secrecy, though they may be wrapped in string or paper rather than wood (but not necessarily: wood-encased pencils predate the Statute too). Wizards who use pencils may also employ pencil extenders, similar to the chalk extenders that are still in vogue.
People in Africa and Eurasia were setting afire and inhaling the fumes of cannabis, opium, and other drugs for thousands of years, but the methodology has undergone several changes in recent times. In Europe and nearby, smoking pipes were rare (though not unheard-of) before Columbus. For most of recorded history the more common practice was to hotbox, or light the substance in an enclosed area where the fumes could collect (but I assume that my college roommate’s preferred technique — to do so for hours at a time in the only accessible bathroom in half a mile — is a recent innovation).
European smoking practices entered a stage of rapid evolution with the introduction of tobacco, which became incredibly popular, incredibly quickly. By the 16th century, tobacco’s global omnipresence rivaled God; by the end of the 17th century, it surpassed Him.
Spanish cigarettes first copied the native practice of wrapping with maize leaves, but switched to paper by the 17th century. Cigarettes became popular in France in the early 19th century, and their use spread to the United Kingdom through soldiers fighting in the Crimean War (1853-1856), who rolled their tobacco in strips of newspaper. It took until the late 19th century or early 20th century for cigarettes to become truly popular in the U.K., however. The term “coffin nail,” for a cigarette, can be dated to the 19th century. All this considered, British wixes probably smoke tobacco but might regard cigarettes in particular to as a Muggle and/or foreign thing.
If so, Lucius Malfoy is most likely to smoke from a pipe, which was popular in England by the middle of the 16th century, well before the Statute of Secrecy. Cigars, which reached their height of popularity by the end of the 18th century, might be foresworn by hardcore traditionalists but are probably more acceptable than cigarettes.
Street food was extremely popular in urban Britain all the way to modern times, and will probably be available in Hogsmeade, Diagon and the other alleys, etc. Consider pies, which are very portable and can be filled with ingredients both strange and familiar.
Food delivery services have been around for at least a few centuries, and would probably be quite feasible for wixes: just write down your order and throw it into a Floo-fire connected to the restaurant of your choice, then wait for the Floo to go up again and exchange payment for food.
Eel farms are mentioned in Goblet of Fire.
White bread made of wheat is probably the most common variety, because magic. Traditionalists may eat on trenchers of thin, hard-baked bread, into which will soak the juices of the meal. Medieval Muggles trenchers were made from brown bread, but the ease of refining flour means that even disposable, low-value bread might be white.
Table forks were not popular popular in Britain until the 18th century, so traditionalist families might prefer to eat with a knife.
Ron puts milk in his cereal and Umbridge adds milk to her tea, but the only wixes who seem to drink milk as a beverage in its own right are Hagrid and Hermione (and arguably Voldemort). In the Medieval period, milk was mostly a beverage for the very young and very old. Don’t forget that there are more sources of milk than cows: people also drank donkey’s milk. Plant “milk” (e.g. almond milk) was known for more than a thousand years and considered very healthy.
Most wixes probably do not eat modern Muggle foods like margarine and Marmite, and may look with suspicion on sliced bread. Keep in mind that their fruits and vegetables, and indeed their livestock, may also differ from the Muggle sort: blueberries as you (probably) know them were not fully domesticated until the early 20th century, watermelons have become redder and fleshier since the Statute of Secrecy, and modern breeds of chicken are much larger than even chickens from the 1950s.
Peacocks were once raised for their meat, and the Malfoys may still eat them, though peacock meat is stringier than turkey meat (which is what British Muggles prefer today).
In the “Pure-blood” article on Pottermore, Rowling wrote that “several works of dubious scholarship, published around the early eighteenth century and drawing partly on the writings of Salazar Slytherin himself, make reference to supposed indicators of Pure-blood status,” among which were a “dislike or fear of pigs and those who tend them (the pig is often considered a particularly non-magical animal and is notoriously difficult to charm).” Hogwarts serves bacon, pork chops, and other piggie dishes, but we never see e.g. Draco or Voldemort eat these. Perhaps proper Pure-bloods abstain from the cursed beastie.
The most common spices in Medieval Britain were pepper and nutmeg, but flavoring salt (as opposed to salt intended for other purposes) would be easy for wixes to obtain.
Street food was extremely popular in urban Britain all the way to modern times, and will probably be available in Hogsmeade, Diagon and the other alleys, etc. Consider pies, which are very portable and can be filled with ingredients both strange and familiar.
Food delivery services have been around for at least a few centuries, and would probably be quite feasible for wixes: just write down your order and throw it into a Floo-fire connected to the restaurant of your choice, then wait for the Floo to go up again and exchange payment for food.
Eel farms are mentioned in Goblet of Fire.
White bread made of wheat is probably the most common variety, because magic. Traditionalists may eat on trenchers of thin, hard-baked bread, into which will soak the juices of the meal. Medieval Muggles trenchers were made from brown bread, but the ease of refining flour means that even disposable, low-value bread might be white.
Table forks were not popular popular in Britain until the 18th century, so traditionalist families might prefer to eat with a knife.
Ron puts milk in his cereal and Umbridge adds milk to her tea, but the only wixes who seem to drink milk as a beverage in its own right are Hagrid and Hermione (and arguably Voldemort). In the Medieval period, milk was mostly a beverage for the very young and very old. Don’t forget that there are more sources of milk than cows: people also drank donkey’s milk. Plant “milk” (e.g. almond milk) was known for more than a thousand years and considered very healthy.
Most wixes probably do not eat modern Muggle foods like margarine and Marmite, and may look with suspicion on sliced bread. Keep in mind that their fruits and vegetables, and indeed their livestock, may also differ from the Muggle sort: blueberries as you (probably) know them were not fully domesticated until the early 20th century, watermelons have become redder and fleshier since the Statute of Secrecy, and modern breeds of chicken are much larger than even chickens from the 1950s.
Peacocks were once raised for their meat, and the Malfoys may still eat them, though peacock meat is stringier than turkey meat (which is what British Muggles prefer today).
In the “Pure-blood” article on Pottermore, Rowling wrote that “several works of dubious scholarship, published around the early eighteenth century and drawing partly on the writings of Salazar Slytherin himself, make reference to supposed indicators of Pure-blood status,” among which were a “dislike or fear of pigs and those who tend them (the pig is often considered a particularly non-magical animal and is notoriously difficult to charm).” Hogwarts serves bacon, pork chops, and other piggie dishes, but we never see e.g. Draco or Voldemort eat these. Perhaps proper Pure-bloods abstain from the cursed beastie.
The most common spices in Medieval Britain were pepper and nutmeg, but flavoring salt (as opposed to salt intended for other purposes) would be easy for wixes to obtain.
There is no explicit reiteration of Muggle gender roles in wixen society, though Rowling brought enough of that in through the side-door that you could certainly infer a moderately patriarchal society in Magical Britain. Even so, the situation probably isn’t a 1:1 correspondence with Muggle attitudes in any century, because Artemisia Lufkin was elected Minister for Magic in 1798 and remained in office for two terms.
Some gender segregation exists at Hogwarts, but not in any consistent way. Boys are unable to enter the girls’ dormitories and there are separate lavatories for (most) boys and girls, but the Prefects’ bathroom and Quidditch changing rooms are unisex. These differences plausibly reflect a change in attitudes over time, which may have been fossilized, as it were, into the present conditions at Hogwarts because nobody actually cares enough to standardize things. Maybe the Board of Governors trusts boys more than the founders did, but that doesn’t mean they want to go to the trouble of undoing those enchantments, especially if older enchantments are more difficult to untangle (as they are in some stories). It may also be the case that specific groups are considered more mature than the standard student body, or that the administration recognizes that some students will be shyer and would prefer e.g. gender segregated bathrooms, so unisex facilities are restricted to prefects, Quidditch players, and other students who voluntarily chose to join their respective groups (though this still requires us to explain the discrepancy between boys’ and girls’ dormitories).
If contraceptive charms and so forth have been readily available for a long time, then Pure-bloods will probably be less concerned with virginity than Muggles. However, because (1) Magical and Muggle culture were largely integrated before the Statute of Secrecy, (2) Muggles at that time often cared about virginity, and (3) traditions can mutate in strange directions at the same time that they maintain a death-grip on a culture, you could plausibly have situations like “Pure-bloods don’t really care about premarital sex, but they magically restore the hymen prior to marriage, because ‘a woman should have an intact hymen on her wedding night’ has still survived, albeit completely detached from any of the contextual reasons for that rule.”
If Hogwarts Legacy is part of your canon, then the marriage of Nora and Priya Treadwell indicates that same-sex and mixed-race marriages are legal and (probably) culturally accepted.
J. Hall’s “Lust Over Pendle” series includes a detailed description and map of the village of “Malfoy Intrinsica,” as well as a floor plan for Malfoy Manor, all of which you can find here.
Fantasy Town Generator and Medieval Fantasy City Generator are both good resources if you want to map out a magical or part-magical village. I prefer the City Generator for most purposes (it’s prettier and simpler), but Town Generator will let you get very detailed, down to the number of inhabitants per house, and their names, occupations, appearance, etc.
If you would like a Magical Britain where wixes are less separate from Muggles than in most canons — a Britain where they live among, and conceal their nature but not their very selves, from Muggles — then I recommend taking a look at Taure’s “Small Wizarding World Universe.” There are some really interesting ideas in there, like the ideology of Wizarding Isolationism.
Several people have written about the population of Magical Britain.
White Hound argues that there are at least 10,000 wixes in Britain and around a million worldwide (and that a peer group of more than forty students in Harry’s year is not inconsistent with the books).
On Reddit, Totorox takes Rowling’s figure of 1,000 students for granted and comes up with 20,0000 - 28,000 wixes on the high end. They allow for an unequal distribution of students between houses (giving an example of 18% in Slytherin on the low end and 33% in Hufflepuff as the largest house that year), but point out that no house should be twice as large as any of the others.
In an essay on the student population, Leechinut suggests that Hogwarts hit its peak in the centuries immediately following its founder, and the population has been on the decline ever since. She also points out that the Hogwarts Express has at least six cars, and suggests that each car can hold around fifty students.
Eliza Grace’s “11 Wizarding Schools: A Look at the Logistics Behind JKRs Concept of Wizarding Education” suggests 13,000 wixes in Britain and roughly 1.4 million worldwide, nearly 100,000 of whom are Hogwarts-age, and nearly 20,000 of whom are Hogwarts-age muggle-borns.
Wellingtongoose has tried to work with Rowling’s statement that there are only 3,000 wixes in Magical Britain, one-third of whom are children. “Demographics of the Wizarding World” establishes their position that, “despite good living conditions,” there is nevertheless a high mortality rate. In “Magical Maladies” and “Fantastic Beasts and Gruesome Diseases,” Wellingtongoose suggests that non-infectious diseases are basically a non-issue for wixes (thanks to magic) but infectious diseases are more problematic because wixes secluded themselves prior to the development of modern medicine and our present science of pathology. “The Missing Babies” argues for high infant mortality. “Medieval in More Ways Than One” and “The Most Feared Dark Lord in a Century” argue that magical society is fairly unstable and wars are common.
I generally go with the “around 20,000 wixes” estimate,¹ in no small part because Taure has written a Personnel Breakdown of the Ministry of Magic based on that figure. It also has a few other demographic details (e.g. 130 births per year, average life expectancy of 150). If your Magical Britain has a different population, though, that doesn’t mean you have to reinvent the wheel. Just scale things up or down, for the most part, and do a bit of sanity checking at the end.
(If there’s a strong desire for it, then I might make a Google Sheet for the Personnel Breakdown that can be copied and subsequently edited, so that the scaling is taken care of automatically and any oddities are flagged.)
Another thing that I do is look at small countries that exist in real life, like Liechtenstein, Monaco, and San Marino. Gibraltar and the Faroe Islands are overseas territories (of the United Kingdom and of Denmark, respectively) but you might find them useful anyhow. These have between two and three times the population of Magical Britain (if you assume 20,000 wixes), but I figure that’s close enough.
It’s unclear how mixed muggle/wix settlements usually function, or whether there’s a “usually” at all:
While this doesn’t appear to be the case for Godric’s Hollow, it isn’t out of the question for a mixed settlement to have a distinct magical neighborhood, where muggles either rarely trod or simply have no access to, like a miniature version of Diagon Alley (“Little Wuyi,” in “Alexandra Quick and the Deathly Regiment,” is an example of how this might work).
¹ More precisely: 0.03% of the combined population of Ireland and the United Kingdom, in whichever year I’m working with. This sort of breaks down when you try to use it across multiple decades, but I mostly just use the numbers as a kind of “spot check” for my own notes anyway, and if I have a story which concerns itself with two separate periods of time then I just won’t give explicit population figures for both of them, at least not without doing a bit more work than just applying the Point-Oh-Three Percent Rule.
Or, what people who grew up in Magical Britain might think about people from Muggle Britain.
Real exorcisms rarely play out like they do in Hollywood, but it’s plausible that your ordinary Pure-blood (which, remember, means simply that their parents and grandparents were all magical) believes that Muggle-born children are at risk of lobotomies, frenzied exorcisms, and other terrors.
Magic is capable of horrors beyond what Muggle science can achieve, but Muggles can do their work at scale. This disparity means that Muggle warfare is more likely to destroy culturally and historically valuable sites, and to do so broadly. Pure-bloods may point to the events like the bombing of Rotterdam in 1940 and the destruction of the university library of Leuven (first in 1914 and a second time in 1940) — which resulted in the loss of more than a million books (including rare or unique texts) — as evidence that Muggles have no regard for matters of cultural value.