CITIES AND TOWN The medieval city.pdf

Preface xxv
and the disappearance of their urban functions. In extreme cases the former
towns ceased even to be inhabited places, and they are marked today,
if marked at all, only by banks and ditches and a few scraps of masonry.
During the following centuries the urban cycle began anew. Slowly,
haltingly, small rural settlements adopted craft industries and became
centers of exchange in a growing pattern of trade. This renewed growth
sometimes took place on sites which, until recently, the Romans had
once occupied and where they had left an infrastructure in the shape of
roads and bridges. Most, however, were on virgin sites more suited to
their newly developing economy.
This new urban pattern began to take shape in the seventh, eighth,
and ninth centuries. There were many false starts, but the process was
well under way during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and was in full
flood during the thirteenth. By the fourteenth the urban pattern was
complete. There was neither space nor need for more cities, and the pattern
which had been established by then was to remain little changed
until the eighteenth or even the nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution,
the use of mechanical power, and the creation of the factory system—only
vaguely hinted at toward the end of the Middle Ages—not
only transformed many of the existing cities, but also brought about the
creation of a new and, as far as Europe was concerned, final wave of urbanization.
It is with this intermediate phase in urban history, from the centuries
following the decline of Rome until the completion of the urban pattern
by the end of the Middle Ages, that we are primarily concerned in this
book. Enough remains of these cities in the physical sense to allow us to
construct a fairly complete picture of what they were like. Literary
sources—narrative, legal, administrative—are abundant and give insight
into the ways in which people lived within them.
It is no easier to estimate the number of cities that may have existed
in medieval Europe at the height of their development in the fourteenth
century than it is for the classical period. Their number fluctuated, as
new towns were founded to meet new demands and older towns fell out
of contention as, with changing economic circumstances, there ceased
to be a need for them. And again, as in classical times it is often difficult
to draw a line between small towns and large villages. They merge
into one another, and if we say that the distinction is a legal one, lying
in the possession, or the lack, of a charter of incorporation, this is as close