CITIES AND TOWN The medieval city.pdf

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THE MEDIEVAL CITY
managed only by sending it downriver to the next town. Congestion led
to the building of multistoried houses of wood that were both highly unstable
and very flammable (see pp. 39–40). Towns, last, never solved the
problems of street crime and maintaining adequate policing. All these
matters are examined in greater detail in later chapters of this book.
How many cities and towns were there in the continent of Europe
when, about 1500, the Middle Ages drew to a close? It will be argued in
Chapter 3 that they must have numbered two to three thousand or more.
Each was unique, differing from all the others in its physical qualities,
economic development, and institutions of government. All the larger
cities have been the subjects of major books, and a history could be written
for each of them. A short book about the medieval city can look only
at those features that were common to most if not all of them. It is impossible
in so short a space to delve into their peculiarities and idiosyncrasies.
It is not possible even to mention by name all those of greater
size and importance. What follows is necessarily a model showing what
it was like to live and do business in a medieval city.
NOTES
1. Aristotle, The Politics, ed. Stephen Everson, Cambridge Texts in the History
of Political Thought (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1988), p. 3.
2. In England the term city originally denoted a town that was also the seat
of a bishop, that is, a “cathedral town.” It is now an honorific title conferred by
the government. A common convention is to reserve the term city for the largest
and most important settlements.
3. The dividing line between the empire in the West and that in the East
ran from the river Danube upstream from Beograd southward through Bosnia to
the Adriatic Sea. The Eastern or Byzantine Empire claimed authority over all
lands lying to the east of this line.
4. Ernst Kitzinger, “A Survey of the Early Christian Town of Stobi,”
Dumbarton Oaks Papers, no. 3 (1946): 81–162.
5. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998), p. 463.
6. Norman John Greville Pounds, The Medieval Castle in England and Wales:
A Social and Political History (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), pp. 207–15.