People — Brytonia

Forty million. Never invaded, never owed its life to Rome, and that is why the Insular Schism was possible. It grew during the apocalypse: 18 million in 1780, 40 in 1890.

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1. The body — the widest spread on the continent

Average 169 cm, and the average means nothing here.

Rural aristocracy	178 cm
Manchaster worker	163 cm

Fifteen centimetres. More than between any pair of blocs on the map. The richest empire in the world produces at once the tallest and the shortest men in the west, and produces both on purpose: the same economy that gives hunting, meat and air to some takes sun, sleep and childhood from the others.

The industrial body

• Bowed legs. Urban rickets. Grown under coal smoke and never having seen a whole sun. In Manchaster this is so common that a recruiter for the insular army turns away half the urban volunteers because they cannot march, and the report that says so has been circulating since 1871 without consequence.
• Fingers without prints among the spinners — worn away on the thread.
• Loom deafness. A whole textile city where people speak loudly and do not know they do.
• The cough. Everyone. So universal that it stopped being a symptom and became an accent.

The aristocratic body

Hunting, horse, rowing, moorland air, three meals with meat. The tallest men on the western continent outside Königsmark, and with the best-kept teeth in the world, because Brytonia invented the dentist before it invented the sewer.