CITIES AND TOWN The medieval city.pdf

2
THE MEDIEVAL CITY
travel? The answer must be no greater distance than they could travel in
an hour or little more; the farthest cultivated field could be no more than
what a citizen could walk in an hour or so, whether the town covered
only a few acres and had less than a thousand inhabitants or was by medieval
standards a giant city of 50,000. Renaissance engravings of towns
show them surrounded by the cultivated fields of their citizens.
In the course of European history, there have been four periods or
phases when the foundation and development of towns was a major preoccupation
of European peoples. The first was during the prehistoric period,
from the Bronze Age to the Iron, when the so-called hillforts were
constructed. These were large areas, enclosed by bank, ditch, and palisade.
For the inhabitants of nearby farms and hamlets, the hillforts were
places of refuge to which they could retreat in time of war. They served
also for the storage of food and the practice of simple craft industries,
which may have included tanning, weaving, and metalworking.
Such a hillfort was Danebury, lying amid the rolling hills of southern
England. It is a rounded site with multiple banks and ditches and a highly
sophisticated entrance that an attacker would have found very difficult
to penetrate (Figure 1).
The enclosed area was about twelve acres, closely similar to that of
many medieval towns. The dating of Danebury fort is difficult. The
carbon-14 method was used with fragments of wood found in the foundations
of huts within the banked perimeter. This showed that the site
was occupied, perhaps not continuously, from the seventh century b.c.e.
until the period of the Roman invasion in 43 c.e. Excavation revealed
huts in which stores of food might have been kept and people might have
lived during an emergency. There was also evidence for crafting within
the enclosure, especially potting, weaving, the manufacture of wooden
articles such as plows and even wheeled vehicles, and the fabrication of
tools and weapons of iron. Most of the raw materials used came from the
local agricultural activities, but iron ore was not among the local resources.
It was probably obtained by the Danebury people from as far
away as the Weald of Kent—some forty miles—in southeastern England,
a region important for its ironworking from prehistoric times until the
eighteenth century. In this and in other ways, Danebury had become a
center of long-distance trade. We know from the finds retrieved in the
course of excavation that a variety of goods was imported by the Danebury
people.