The growth of medieval towns

The story

After the year 1000: more food, more people

In the early centuries of the Middle Ages, Europe was a continent of countryside, with isolated villages, huge forests and small towns, often just a cluster of houses around a church or a castle. After the year 1000 things began to change. The climate became a little milder and wars of invasion, such as those of the Vikings and the Magyars, became rarer. Work in the fields improved too.

Farmers began to use the heavy plough with a mouldboard, which turned the soil over more deeply, especially on the northern plains, where the ground is thick and wet. The yoke and the stiff collar let horses pull without choking, and watermills ground the grain without human effort. The three-field system, that is, letting a third of the fields rest each year, made the soil more fertile. More food meant less hunger and more children surviving: according to estimates, the population of Europe grew from about thirty-five million around the year 1000 to about eighty million in the 1300s.

The market and the walls

People who could not find land to work moved elsewhere. Many went to the places where people met to exchange goods: crossroads, rivers, ports, and the foot of castles and monasteries. Markets grew up there, first weekly, then daily. Craftsmen such as blacksmiths, weavers, shoemakers and bakers settled near the markets to sell what they made. Where there had once been a few houses, within a few decades there were hundreds.

The new towns surrounded themselves with walls, often more than once, because as the population grew wider walls were built. Inside the walls were narrow streets, tall houses of stone and wood, the market square, the cathedral or main church and, later, the town hall. In the evening the gates were shut, and at night nobody could go in or out.

Bells marked the day: they rang at dawn to open the gates and the market, at midday, and in the evening to close them, and also to warn of a fire, an attack or a meeting of the council. People who had no clock, and nobody did, ran their lives by that sound.

Air that makes you free

Living in a town was different from living in the countryside. A German saying, formulated later but based on medieval rules, said that “town air makes you free”: under many rules, a peasant who ran away from his lord and managed to live in a town for a year and a day became free. In towns people paid with money, not with work in the fields, and you could become rich through trade.

Craftsmen and merchants joined together in associations called guilds (in Italy, “arti”), which set prices, checked the quality of work and helped members in difficulty. A boy learned a trade by being an apprentice in a workshop, then worked as a journeyman, and finally, if he was good, could become a master. Some towns grew rich through trade: Venice with its ships to the East, Bruges and Ghent with wool and cloth, Florence with its banks and fabrics.

The hard side of the town

Towns were also dirty and dangerous. Rubbish ended up in the street, well water could be polluted, fires were frequent because many houses were made of wood, and diseases spread easily. There were many poor people, and in some districts poverty was plain to see. Yet people kept coming: the town promised work, protection, festivals, and a new idea, that of being citizens, with rights and duties, and not just subjects.