Pounds N. The medieval city

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The Urban Plan: Streets and Structures

few bridges were fortiﬁed and made to serve as part of the town’s defenses.

The Pont Valentre at Cahors in southwestern France is a particularly im-

pressive example of a fortiﬁed bridge, with three massive towers barring

its narrow road.

Other secular buildings within a town were largely concerned with its

trade and other economic activities. The gilds, whose role will be dis-

cussed in Chapter 5, possessed in many cases a building that served as a

kind of clubhouse, where members met to conduct the business of their

gild and, on a less formal basis, to celebrate their feasts and to initiate

new members. Gild halls usually took the form of large town houses, with

hall and kitchen and a number of smaller rooms. London, for example,

still has several, which continue to serve their traditional purposes,

though the gilds that use them are no longer associations of craftsmen

and have become honoriﬁc societies of well-heeled London businesspeo-

ple.

More directly linked with the economic activities of the gilds were the

warehouses in which merchants stored the raw materials and ﬁnished ar-

ticles in which they traded. Even today small hoisting devices are seen

to protrude from the gables of the tall brick-built houses lining the canals

of Amsterdam. In many other cities one can discover the warehouses of

medieval merchants, now converted to other uses.

Since most towns lay on the banks of a river, which provided the eas-

iest and cheapest mode of transport, they are likely to have had a quay,

revetted or covered with stone, at which river boats could tie up and load

or unload their cargoes. Many would have been equipped with a crane,

a curious contraption of wood, its windlass operated by a “man-engine,”

for lifting the heavier items. Such a primitive crane survives in some of

the small towns along the Rhine.

Another mechanical device that formed part of every medieval town

was the mill. Every grain, whether wheat, barley, or rye, had to be milled

before it could be baked into bread. In the countryside this had once

been done by means of a quern or large stone mortar, which called for

no power beyond that of the baker’s strong right arm. This was gradually

displaced by the water- and windmill. Milled ﬂour was difficult both to

transport and to store, and it became necessary for townsfolk to mill their

grain shortly before baking it into bread, which was the most common

item in their diet. Windmills were sometimes mounted on the town walls,

where the breeze blew more strongly, but more often the town relied upon

THE MEDIEVAL CITY

a water-mill, either built on the bank of the river or mounted on a boat

moored in midstream, where the speed of the current turned its massive

wheel.

The only other secular structures likely to stand out amid the huddle

of roofs and gables ﬁlling the late medieval town were those associated

with the market. The market, as has been seen, was an open space, some-

times rectangular, more often irregular in shape, where stalls for the dis-

play of goods were erected on market day. Above them there often stood

a market cross, a monument with religious connotations, which, as it

were, extended its benediction to the activities carried on around it.

There might also have been a market hall, where market officials met

and where tolls were collected and debts settled. It might also have given

shelter to at least some of those who did business in its shadow. Many

towns had been authorized to hold an annual fair, when stalls and

benches would have been set up in the streets and surrounding ﬁelds. Few

fairs continued to be held in the late Middle Ages. They had been asso-

ciated with the itinerant merchant, but he was now doing his business

more and more from his urban counting house rather than by traveling

the roads and facing the tumult of the fair. Specialist fairs did continue

to serve special interests, as, indeed, they continue to do today, but every-

where they were becoming more convivial than commercial, more fun-

fairs than centers of continent-wide trade. Where they continued to be

held, they ﬁlled the urban streets for a short period in each year with

their stalls and their merchandise and their turmoil.

NOTES

1. Qtd. in Maurice Warwick Beresford, New Towns of the Middle Ages: Town

Plantation in England, Wales, and Gascony (New York: Praeger, 1967), p. 16.

2. Aristotle, The Politics, ed. Stephen Everson, Cambridge Texts in the His-

tory of Political Thought (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 1988), p. 36.

3. On English walled towns see: Hilary L. Turner, Town Defences in England

and Wales: An Architectural and Documentary Study, AD 900–1500 (Hamden,

CT: Archon Books, 1971); Alfred Harvey, The Castles and Walled Towns of Eng-

land (London: Methuen and Company, 1911).

4. Hartmann Schedel, Liber Chronicarum (Nuremberg, 1493).

The Urban Plan: Streets and Structures

5. Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg, Civitates Orbis Terrarum, 6 vols.,

1572–1618. Twenty-four illustrations were republished as Old European Cities:

Thirty-two Sixteenth-Century City Maps and Texts from the “Civitates Orbis Ter-

rarum” of Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg, ed. Ruthardt Oehme (London:

Thames and Hudson, 1965), and there is a modern facsimile edition of the whole

work, published as Civitates Orbis Terrarum: “The Towns of the World,”

1572–1618, ed. R. A. Skelton (Cleveland, OH: World Pub. Co., 1966).

6. Jean Lestocquoy, Études d’Histoire Urbaine: Villes et Abbayes, Arras au

Moyen Âge, Mémoires de la Commission Départementale des Monuments His-

toriques du Pas-de-Calais (Arras: Impr. Centrale de l’Artois, 1966).

7. William Langland, William Langland’s “Piers Plowman”: The C Version: A

Verse Tranlsation, ed. George Economou, Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: Uni-

versity of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), p. 25, lines 104–7.

8. Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” in “The Cantebury Tales”

Complete, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Com-

pany, 2000), p. 235, lines 2, 12–13.

9. Robert Ricart, The Maire of Bristowe Is Kalendar, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith.

Camden Society Publications, n.s., vol. 5 (Westminster: Camden Society, 1872),

p. 43.

10. London Assize of Nuisance, 1301–1431: A Calendar, ed. Helena M. Chew

and William Kellaway, London Record Society Publications, vol. 10 (Leicester:

London Record Society, 1973), pp. xxi–xxx.

11. Such openings, each with a few steps leading down into the basement,

are still to be seen (and fallen into by the unwary) in the small coastal town of

Winchelsea in Sussex, England.

CHAPTER 3

THE URBAN WAY

LIFE

Towns came late in the long span of human history. They were imposed

on a landscape of small settlements, from which they drew their earliest

inhabitants. The town has been throughout its history a pole of attrac-

tion to the rural population. It was their “promised land,” tempting the

country dweller with its range of employment and experience, far beyond

anything that the countryside could offer. But the attraction of the town

was deceptive. Beneath its glossy facade lay crowding, disease, high mor-

tality, and a shorter lifespan. All too often the peasant who had migrated

to the town came to look back ruefully to the rural bliss which he had

left. This was as true of Aristophanes’ Attic peasant as of Wladislaw Rey-

mont’s nineteenth-century Polish peasants in his aptly named The

Promised Land.

In modern demographic terminology, its net reproduc-

tion rate—the average number of female children born to each woman—

was less than unity. This means that women each had on average less

than a single female child. In other words the population was not fully

reproducing itself. The reasons for this—both social and environmen-

tal—are complex. Among the former, in all probability, was the greater

age at which people married in the town than in the countryside. The

nature of urban employment and the restrictive inﬂuence of the gilds led

to the postponement of marriage—at least for young men. Then, too, it

may have been difficult for the journeyman who had just completed his

apprenticeship to establish himself in society and to accumulate enough

resources to acquire a home. Environmental factors were probably more

important than social, but also more difficult to evaluate. The town was

densely settled; people lived closely packed in their crowded quarters. In

contrast with the rural environment, any infectious disease that might

THE MEDIEVAL CITY

take hold would be likely to spread quickly with disastrous consequences.

Of no medical catastrophe was this more true than of the Great Plague,

the Black Death of 1348–1350. Once it had taken root in a congested

town, it spread rapidly, giving rise to a disastrous mortality.

The Black Death, otherwise known as the Great or Bubonic Plague,

deserves more than a cursory mention. It was spread by the symbiotic re-

lationships between the black rat, the ﬂea, and their human victim. It

has been argued—implausibly, it appears—that the great plague of

Athens late in the ﬁfth century b.c.e. was the bubonic plague. It is far

more likely that the disease that decimated Byzantium under the Em-

peror Justinian (527–565) was the bubonic plague. It raged in the city,

but seems not to have spread into its Balkan hinterland. There may have

been other occurrences before 1348, but they were contained, not by the

science of medicine, which was at this time almost nonexistent, but by

the vast, unpopulated distances that its vectors, the rat and the ﬂea, were

unable to traverse.

We have fairly reliable statistics relating to mortality in a few cities,

especially those in Italy and southern France (Figures 12 and 13), and

they demonstrate without question how great was the urban death toll.

It is sometimes said that a third or half the population perished. This is

no exaggeration for the cities, but such ﬁgures must not be extrapolated

for the countryside. Here the Plague’s spread depended on the movement

of people from town to village and from village to village, and such move-

ments were severely reduced as the rumor of plague spread. In conse-

quence, some villages and regions were scarcely touched by the disease.

The Plague was brought to Europe in the trading ships of the Genoese,

who did business with the caravan traders from Asia in Caffa and other

ports of the Black Sea. They brought their goods to Italy, dropping them

off at ports all the way from Sicily to Genoa itself. Infected rats and ﬂeas

harbored in the clothing of sailors also went ashore with them, and so

the Plague spread up through the Italian peninsula to France and was

then borne overland by traders to the Rhineland, central Europe, and the

British Isles. At last this wave of infection died away in Scandinavia and

the Baltic region where the population was so sparse that the Plague

could spread no more.

But the disease was only dormant. It reasserted

itself at intervals throughout the late Middle Ages and early modern

times in bouts of frenetic activity, mostly in the larger cities. Each re-

Figure 12. At both Volterra and San Gimignano in central Italy the number of

hearths (or households) increased until c. 1340. The Plague then cut their num-

ber to a third or even less.

Figure 13. The number of hearths in the town of Millau in southern

France at various dates. Note that their number was very nearly halved

between 1326 and 1353—the period of the Black Death. Based on a table

in Philippe Wolff, “Trois etudes de demographie medievale en France

meridionale,” in Studi in Onore di Amando Sapori, Milan, 1947, v. 1,

493–503.

THE MEDIEVAL CITY

currence decimated the urban population afresh and offered renewed op-

portunities in the shape of empty homes and opportunities for employ-

ment for more immigrants from the countryside. The last major outbreak

in England, in 1665, was largely—though not completely—conﬁned to

the city of London, and the last outbreak in France was at Marseilles in

1720. Thereafter, the Plague disappeared from western Europe but re-

mained endemic in the Balkans into the nineteenth century. The urban

population recovered after each outbreak—in part through the birth of

larger families, in part by increased immigration from the countryside.

Other urban diseases derived from congestion and the lack of cleanli-

ness. Foremost among them were typhus and tuberculosis, the former

transmitted from person to person by the microscopic body louse, the lat-

ter endemic in dark, damp, and crowded tenements. In addition there

were diseases transmitted by the polluted water supply that was normal

in most towns and especially in the larger and more crowded ones.

Cholera, which was to become the most dangerous of all water-borne dis-

eases, had not yet reached Europe in the Middle Ages, but it was en-

demic in the far East, waiting only for a fast boat from China in order

for it to reach the West. Gastric and pulmonary diseases were also rife

and without doubt caused a high mortality among all age groups. Not

until the eighteenth century did the scientiﬁc and environmental revo-

lution begin to bring these demographic catastrophes to an end.

There were many other infectious diseases in medieval Europe, but

their relationship with the environment was not recognized before mod-

ern times and no refuge from them was found. Typhus was spread among

unwashed humanity, especially during the winter months when people

were crowded more closely together for warmth. There were diseases of

the bronchial and digestive tracts that became more virulent during the

hot, polluted summer months, when pathogens multiplied in cesspits and

stagnant water and when food deteriorated quickly. Tuberculosis was ram-

pant in damp houses with rotting timbers, and smallpox was spread “on

the breath” when people were crowded together for warmth or shelter.

We know now how these diseases were communicated and the defenses

that can be erected against them. But to medieval people they were the

inevitable lot of sinful humanity; at the most they were seen as discharges

from the planets. It never occurred to anyone that their own physical en-

vironment was to blame or that they were themselves capable of pre-

venting or curing many of them. These revelations remained unknown

The Urban Way of Life

until Louis Pasteur and the discovery of pathogens late in the nineteenth

century.

THE SOURCES OF URBAN POPULATION

In the face of this variable but generally high mortality, the towns had

always to recruit population from their surrounding countryside. How ex-

tensive, one may ask, was the sphere from which the town drew its im-

migrants? The only certain measure is the possession of a locative personal

name. Town dwellers before the twelfth or thirteenth century had no last

or surname. They were known by some physical trait or, more often, by

the craft they practiced: William the Short, John the Smith, Peter the

Porter, and Thomas the Tailor. Alternatively they might be known by the

name of the village or even of the country from which they came: William

from Wickham or Ralph from Repton. In the course of time the preposi-

tion was omitted, and their names became William Wickham and Ralph

Repton. There is at least a high probability that such individuals (or their

ancestors) had come from the village whose name they bore. There are,

however, pitfalls in this line of argument. The person named, or his or her

forebears, may have migrated more than once, and women, who partici-

pated in this movement no less than men, lost their locative names on

marriage. This method may be rough, but it nevertheless deﬁnes an area

from which a signiﬁcant part of the urban population is likely to have

come. The names of townspeople can be found in tax records, in the pro-

ceedings of borough courts, and, at least for the late Middle Ages, in wills,

contracts, and churchwardens’ accounts. It was from such sources that the

raw material of Figures 14 and 15 was obtained. These maps show the

places from which locative family names had been derived for Toulouse

in southern France and for Beauvais, which was not far from Paris. The

maps show how far these families or their forebears had traveled in order

to reach their respective “promised lands.”

These maps suggest that most immigrants to the growing towns came

relatively short distances and that the farther one went from the city, the

fewer were the place-names commemorated in the names of migrants.

The pattern of movement, in other words, conforms to the so-called grav-

ity model, which suggests that larger cities have greater attraction as do

closer ones. This, however, leaves unanswered questions: who were the

people who ﬁrst made the journey to the site of the future town, why did

THE MEDIEVAL CITY

Figure 14. The source of the population of Toulouse, France, based on locative

personal names.

they gather there, and what fraction of the immigrant population con-

tinued to bear the name of their ancestral village? There are no satisfac-

tory answers. There was no one to leave a record of events and to ask

why they had left the relative security of their rural homes for the un-

certainties of urban life. We do, however, know very roughly what hap-

pened in the planted towns. We have seen how some of the planted

towns were populated. Their lords advertised for settlers, just as the early

railroads did in the settlement of the American West. But what of the

countless towns that emerged during the early Middle Ages, some of

them among the largest in Europe today? We must see their origins in

the gatherings—which were perhaps only irregular—of merchants who

had come together to buy and sell their wares. Gradually the temporary

and periodic became the permanent and regular, and a merchants’ set-

tlement was born. Many of the port towns around the North Sea and the

Baltic Sea almost certainly originated in this way. Many of them still bear

in their names the place-name element “wich,” meaning a trading place.

Norwich, Ipswich, and Woolwich are today large and populous places,

but their origins lay in small clusters of houses where merchants agreed

to meet at intervals and do business. Not all the “wiches” prospered. Ford-