Pounds N. The medieval city
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Secular authority, no less than ecclesiastical, sought the aura conferred
by the relics of the Roman Empire. To occupy its sites was in some de-
gree to inherit its authority. Most of the cities of regional importance
under the Romans continued, sometimes after the lapse of many decades,
to be centers of government. Feudalism, on the other hand, had a rural
basis. At its heart was the possession of land and the source of its power
was the rural castle. But, as we saw in Chapter 1, feudal society took the
town under its wing and attempted—in the end unsuccessfully—to ab-
sorb it into its system. One such method was to impose a royal or feudal
residence on the town, and increasingly king and baron made the town
the focus of their authority. In England, rural Windsor and Clarendon
6
were balanced by urban Whitehall and the Tower of London. The same
was happening in the territorial states of central and northern Europe
and in France, where Paris and a small number of provincial cities grew
in political importance and eventually dominated administrative affairs.
The castle epitomized royal or baronial authority. Again to cite English
examples: every regional capital of Roman Britain, with the exception
only of the very few that had not survived the Barbarian invasions,
7
came
to have a castle, and most of them remained in the possession of the king
for most of the time. In fact, the urban castle became the seat of the ju-
risdiction of the king’s local representative, the sheriff. Often the castle
had been created at the expense of the town. Domesday Book, compiled
twenty years after the Norman Conquest, records in city after city the
destruction of domestic houses to make space for the castle.
The system of counties that was established in England and later in
Wales and Scotland very roughly replicated Anglo-Saxon tribal areas, as
these had succeeded the civitas areas of Roman Britain. Within each
county, there had been a Roman town, the civitas, or capital, and many
centuries later this capital became the site of a Norman castle and the
center of the county or shire administration. Since Anglo-Saxon times,
the ruler had placed an administrator—a “reeve”—in charge of each
county. He became the “shire-reeve,” abbreviated at an early date to
“sheriff.” Every county had, and still has, its sheriff. At first the seat of
his authority was in the urban castle, but this has in modern times been
overwhelmed and destroyed by the growth of the town, and the county
administration is today usually housed in a modern office block. But in
London we can still envisage in the Tower of London the means by which
the royal government once held sway over the unruly population of a
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132
great city. In Paris the outbreak of the French Revolution was marked by
the destruction of the royal castle, the Bastille, even though by that date
this was little more than a symbolic act.
In England feudalism seldom broke down into anarchy, and the urban
castle was very rarely called into service in defense of the monarch. In
continental Europe things were less orderly and regular, chiefly because
the power of king and emperor was much less, and that of the barons,
supported by more extensive lands, was proportionately greater. It is as
difficult to generalize regarding continental Europe as it is about Eng-
land, but here, too, in varying degrees the city became the seat of power
and the focus of the machinery of government. In some regions, where
the authority of the central government had broken down, as in the Low
Countries and Italy, the authority of the city came to predominate and
brought large areas of the surrounding countryside under its control. Thus
were formed the city-states, in each of which the urban focus had as-
sumed great administrative powers. Ghent and Bruges in Flanders and
Florence, Lucca, Siena, Ferrara, and many others in Italy all represent
the governmental role the city had assumed. In each a castle was built
or, at a later date, a palace, that represented the power of the city as the
Doge’s Palace did in Venice and the castle of the Counts of Flanders in
Ghent.
The administrative role of the smaller towns was generally restricted
to the towns themselves and their immediate surroundings. They had no
jurisdiction very far beyond their walls or farther afield than the land
their citizens cultivated. Their local government was, by and large, in the
hands of unpaid, part-time amateurs.
FROM WORKSHOP TO FACTORY: THE STRUCTURE
OF URBAN MANUFACTURING
Urban manufacturing activities remained into modern times predom-
inantly small scale. In most instances the manufacturing unit embraced
at most half a dozen people and in the majority of cases they were sig-
nificantly smaller. Only in nonurban pursuits, such as mining, quarrying,
and smelting, does one find large units of production before modern
times.
Another feature of medieval craft industries was that they were never
separated far from the residence of those who practiced them. The me-
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133
dieval craftsman lived “above the shop,” and domestic and manufactur-
ing quarters were never clearly differentiated. In most nonwestern cul-
tures the craftsman or retailer lives in one place and carries on his
business in another. In medieval Europe, these two activities were almost
always combined. A result was that for craftsmen there was never a jour-
ney to work. At the same time, the manufacture of an article, with the
significant exception of cloth, was not often separated from the shop
where it was sold. For most commodities the workshop was both the place
of work and the point of sale.
One speaks today of industrial integration, of the union in some kind
of association of all units engaged in the same branch of manufacturing—
horizontal integration—or of all sequential processes within a single
branch of manufacturing—vertical integration. Medieval manufacturing
knew of neither of these types of industrial organization, except insofar
as the gild system provided for the association in common membership
of those in a particular town who followed the same craft. The cloth in-
dustry provides a partial exception. The production of a fabric involved
a number of sequential stages from the shearing of the sheep to the shear-
ing and finishing of the cloth. The more refined the fabric, the greater
the number of these discrete processes, most of which were carried on by
separate, independent craftsmen. But very rarely does one encounter any
significant degree of vertical integration between these separate branches,
each of which sold its products on to the next in the manufacturing
process for which they had become its own raw material.
Nor can one detect any significant change in the structure of manu-
facturing before the end of the Middle Ages. The only conspicuous ex-
ample of the application of mechanical power to any industrial process
during the whole Middle Ages was the adoption of the fulling mill in the
thirteenth century, which has already been mentioned. The process con-
sisted of beating the cloth, to which a detergent, usually fuller’s earth,
had been added, with large, flat beaters. This process had at first been
carried on by the fullers themselves who trod the cloth in large wooden
vats (hence their alternative name of “walkers”), in much the same way
that their country cousins trod the grapes to make wine. The mecha-
nization of the process consisted in using a simple waterwheel to raise
and lower the “beaters.” The fulling mill represented an important piece
of capital equipment, not only in the timber structure itself but also in
the conduits by which the flowing water was taken from a river and re-
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134
turned to it after its task of turning the mill wheel had been accom-
plished. This often called for the services of skilled surveyors and engi-
neers.
The flour mill used basically the same type of equipment, and it too
called for the diversion of a stream so that it flowed over or under the mill
wheel. Both flour mills and fulling mills had necessarily to be located in
the countryside, which provided the force for their wooden machinery.
These industries were nevertheless carried on as family enterprises.
The factory as a large unit of production, employing a relatively large
number of people, was an invention of the very end of the Middle Ages.
A modern factory depends on the employment of mechanical power to
operate its machines, and this had, in effect, to await the invention of
the steam engine in the eighteenth century. About 1540, one William
Stumpe purchased the buildings of the dissolved monastery of Malmes-
bury in England, and there he established the manufacture of cloth. At
this time he was visited by Henry VIII’s antiquary, John Leland. Leland
found “every corner of the vaste houses of office that belongid to thab-
bay be fulle of lumbes [looms] to weve clooth yn, and this Stumpe en-
tendith to make a stret [street] or 2. for clothier[s] in the bak vacant
ground of the abbay.”
8
It was, however, no factory; it used no power be-
yond the fingers of the weavers who sat before their looms under the
watchful eyes of William Stumpe. It was a means of ensuring quality and
maintaining discipline, and it lasted for only a few years. The true fac-
tory lay two centuries in the future, and it was at first a rural rather than
an urban phenomenon because it was dependent on water power.
NOTES
1. Giovanni Botero, “A Treatise Concerning the Causes of the Magnificency
and Greatness of Cities,” in The Reason of State, trans. P. J. Waley, D. P. Waley,
and Robert Peterson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), p. 227.
2. E. M. Carus-Wilson, “An Industrial Revolution of the Thirteenth Cen-
tury,” Economic History Review 11, 1 (1941): 39–60.
3. See Edouard Forestiè, Barthélemy Bonis, and Géraud Bonis, eds., Les Livres
de Comptes des Frères Bonis, Marchands Montalbanais du XIVe siècle, Archives
Historiques de la Gascogne, 3 vols. (Paris: H. Champion, 1890), 2:xix–cxliii.
4. A very fine leather which took its name from the Moorish city of Cor-
doba.
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135
5. The Assizes of Bread and Beer were courts which sat periodically in Eng-
land in order to fix the price of these commodities. Some cities in Italy and else-
where had a similar practice.
6. Clarendon was a rural palace of the English kings, located near Salisbury.
It fell to ruin and only faint traces now survive.
7. Several towns in Roman Britain failed to survive the Barbarian invasions
and are represented today by at most a few ruins. Well-known examples are:
Silchester (Calleva Atrebatum) and Wroxeter (Uriconium). Verulamium was
abandoned, but the nearby town of St. Albans took its place. In France, Glanum
is now a ruin, but was succeeded by nearby St. Remy.
8. John Leland, The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years 1535–1543,
ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith, 5 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1964), 1:132.
CHAPTER 7
HEALTH, WEALTH,
AND WELFARE
And before a few years finish famine shall arise,
............................. . . . . . . . . . .
Through floods and foul weather fruits shall fail;
Pride and pestilence shall take out many people.
—Piers Plowman
1
We turn at last to the social structure and well-being of the population
of the medieval town. Medieval urban society was, in contrast with that
of the countryside, free. “Stadt Luft macht frei” ran a very old saying.
The villein who had escaped to a town and had breathed its “free air”
for a year and a day became a free man or woman and could not be hauled
back to his or her village of origin by any territorial lord. There is, how-
ever, little evidence that this really happened on a regular basis. There
was no “underground railroad” as there was in the U.S. antebellum
South. All citizens might be free, but the town was very far from egali-
tarian, more unequal in fact than the contemporary countryside.
Medieval society was often represented even by contemporaries as
consisting of three classes. At the summit of its social structure was the
noble class of lords and warriors. Besides them were the clergy whose task
it was to serve God and thereby to save the souls of all others. Below
them both and at the bottom of the social pyramid were the peasant class
who tilled the soil, produced the crops, and thereby ensured the welfare
of the other two. No place was found in this model for those who dwelt
in towns and who made and sold things. These constituted a class that
emerged during the early Middle Ages, the burgesses or bourgeoisie. The
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138
burgesses in turn divided into three overlapping groups, which never-
theless constituted a social pyramid. At its summit, by the late Middle
Ages, were the patricians, men who had accumulated a modest fortune,
usually by trade, and used their wealth to achieve status within their re-
spective towns. It was usually this class of person who occupied the may-
oralty and comprised the common council. Below them was the class of
master craftsmen, men who had their own workshops, where they worked
with the help of a journeyman or two and usually an apprentice. Last,
there were the laborers and unskilled workers, the journeymen and the
apprentices, many of whom hoped to climb the social ladder and join the
class above them. In order to do this they had to be very fortunate in-
deed. Nevertheless, there was a sufficient social mobility to blur the lines
that have here been drawn between the classes that made up urban so-
ciety. The merchant class included both the “grocer” who, by definition,
made bulk purchases in gross and sold them on to lesser traders, and the
man who bought a pig from a peasant, butchered it, and sold it piece-
meal from a stall in the open market. The smaller the town, the fewer
there were of the grocers, until in the smallest towns there were only
petty traders who dealt in local produce together with the urban prole-
tariat.
Nor was the line between merchant and craftsman clear cut. Many,
perhaps most, craftsmen were traders insofar as they sold the products of
their own workshops to passing customers. With few exceptions their
workshop was their shop. Some required little by way of tools, equipment,
and capital; others had necessarily to be well capitalized in order to carry
on their business. The stock in trade of the goldsmith or the silversmith
was itself worth a very considerable sum. They were craftsmen, but their
personal wealth must have been far greater than that of many a patrician
who dealt in simple commodities such as wool or cloth.
The operating unit was small, consisting of the master craftsman and,
since his skills had to be passed on to the next generation, an appren-
tice, bound for a notional seven years to do his master’s bidding and ac-
quire the rudiments of his craft, even if these could have been learned
in a week or two. All too often the apprentice constituted a form of cheap
labor. The idealized production unit was filled out with one or more jour-
neymen—from journee, because paid by the day—a class, underpaid and
overworked, who had learned a craft, but lacked the capital or the in-
fluence to be able to set up shop on their own account. The journeymen
Health, Wealth, and Welfare
139
were always a restless class, and it was chiefly from them that the trou-
blesome, rebellious medieval crowd was drawn. They were, along with
the unskilled and footloose, the underclass. This is the social background
of the stories of the apprentice who married his master’s daughter, rose
in the social scale, and joined the elite of the town. Few could ever have
done so well for themselves, for the master in an average lifetime would
have trained far more apprentices than could ever have married his
daughter and inherited his shop.
The craftsman class thus graded downward into that of workers, some
of them skilled, most of them not, who accepted what work they could
and lived on the margin of subsistence. They, if they were fortunate,
served a master but had no hope of ever becoming more than a wage
earner. Otherwise, they swept the streets, cleaned the sewers, manhan-
dled the merchandise, or stood around waiting for the next remunerative
job to turn up. They were les classes dangereuses—“the dangerous
classes”—of medieval society. They fed the criminal class, and we en-
counter them in urban revolts and in the proceedings of the criminal
courts.
Urban society consisted, therefore, not of three neatly bounded classes,
but of a continuum, which reached from the richest merchant to the
poorest of the unskilled. This fragmentation of society had emerged
slowly and was in a state of constant change. There was a degree of so-
cial mobility, though this is difficult to measure and, through the tales of
successful apprentices, has certainly been exaggerated. There was a kind
of hierarchy into which people fresh from the countryside were con-
stantly being fed at the bottom, some making their way a short distance
up the steep slope of the social pyramid, few reaching its summit. But
there were those who did. The English story of Dick Wittington, the poor
country boy who made his way to London accompanied by his remark-
ably talented cat and there rose to fame, fortune, and the lord-mayoralty
of London, is firmly entrenched in popular folklore and also has a firm
foundation in fact. Such cases were rare, but nevertheless sufficiently nu-
merous to raise the hopes of a poor country lad.
The sex ratio in the medieval town is far from clear, but there would
appear to have been a surplus of men, if only because men were more
likely to abandon the country and make for the city. The city held less
attraction for women. There were fewer occupations in which they could
find employment, and within the city, if they could not find refuge in
THE MEDIEVAL CITY
140
marriage, they had little hope of employment outside what came eu-
phemistically to be called “domestic service.” The unmarried woman was
a “spinster,” but the spinning of yarn was not a significant urban em-
ployment.
Many of the great merchant families were remarkably short-lived.
Rapid rise from the bottom to the ranks of the elite and as quick a de-
cline was often the case if it was not also the rule. From rags to riches
and back again within three or four generations was often the fate of
elite families. There were many reasons. The merchant’s business was a
precarious one. Ships were lost at sea; goods were stolen on the high-
ways; debts could not be collected; there was a constant fear of fire and
flood, and against none of these was it possible to insure. Then too the
accidents of birth and death led to the extinction of many a merchant
dynasty. Last, many of those who did survive the trials and tribulations
of medieval life and succeeded in accumulating a modest fortune often
sought safety in the ownership of land far beyond the city’s walls. When
all is said, real estate was the only safe and satisfactory form of invest-
ment. Merchant families retired to the countryside, bought a small es-
tate, and joined the ranks of the gentry. Many of the European
aristocracy had their origins in that urban trade which they later affected
to despise.
MEDICAL CARE AND HEALTH
The medieval town offered little by way of medical care. Toward the
end of the Middle Ages the well-to-do and the well-disposed often
founded and endowed hospitals and schools. The larger towns were
rarely without them, but the purpose of hospitals was not to heal the
sick. They were places where the old and the infirm could pass their
last days in relative peace and comfort. There were no institutions ded-
icated specifically to healing the sick because the sick were rarely healed
unless nature itself healed them. The practice of medicine consisted of
little more than a few traditional methods, which, if they did no harm,
nevertheless had no therapeutic value. The medical knowledge that was
taught in the schools of medicine derived from the classical world of
Greece and Rome and in fact had made no significant advances since
the time of Hippocrates and Galen. Their writings had been transmit-