Towns, Cities, and Urban Life in the Late Middle Ages
The late medieval city was small by modern standards — perhaps 10 to 20 per cent of Europe’s population by 1500, with only a handful of true metropolises — but it punched far above its weight. Bruges, Ghent, Ypres, and the Flemish cloth towns in the north; Venice, Genoa, Florence, Milan, and Naples in the south; the great Rhine cities of Cologne, Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Strasbourg in the German lands; and the two late medieval giants of London and Paris in the west together generated most of the manufacturing, most of the long-distance trade, most of the banking, and most of the literary and artistic production of the period. The three articles in this section treat, respectively, the texture of life inside these places, the guild organisations that ran their economies, and the very rapid growth of London and Paris in the two centuries after 1300.
From Commune to Capital: The Shape of the Late Medieval City
The physical shape of the late medieval city was set by its walls, by the cathedral and the market square, and by the lanes of artisans and merchants that fanned out from the centre. A city of 20,000 — Venice in 1300, Florence a generation later — had a footprint of perhaps 60 to 100 hectares inside the walls, with a density approaching 200 persons per hectare in the densest quarters around the Rialto or the Ponte Vecchio. The communes of northern Italy had, by 1300, already fought and won long wars of autonomy against the bishops of Milan, the marquesses of Tuscany, and the Emperor himself; the movement spread north into Flanders, Brabant, and the Rhineland, where cities such as Liège, Dinant, and the great Hanse towns of Lübeck, Bremen, and Hamburg acquired communal charters between the 1230s and the 1370s. The Italian city-state has been analysed to within an inch of its life by David Herlihy, Philip Jones, and Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur, whose work on the popolo minuto — the artisan quarters of the Italian commune — has transformed our picture of who actually governed Florence in the late Duecento. The lived experience of being inside such a city — the streets, the noise, the bread, the taverns, the saints’ days — is set out in the article on daily life in a medieval city.
Guilds, Wages, and the Labour of the City
The guild was simultaneously a confraternity, a regulator of entry, a protector of the urban franchise, and a co-signer of the city’s loans to the prince. The great English livery companies of London — the Mercers, the Drapers, the Goldsmiths, the Grocers — were by 1400 the kind of bodies that could lend to Henry IV and Edward IV, and whose members sat on the Common Council. Across the Rhine, the patrician-dominated Zünfte of Cologne and Augsburg wrestled for control with the guilds of artisans; in Florence, the fourteen Arti Maggiori and Minori both governed the city and excluded those they could not absorb — a tension memorably caught in the 1378 Ciompi Revolt of the wool carders, the only successful rising of urban labourers in the Italian communes. The wage-labourer in the city, from the Lombard weaver at his loom to the journeyman smith of Nuremberg, was, by the late fifteenth century, a well-defined figure in wage ordinances, plague rolls, and notarial contracts — a world that the historians of late medieval labour, from Steven Epstein to John Munro, have reconstructed in detail. The architecture of this world is treated in the article on medieval guilds and the organisation of labour.
London, Paris, and the Problem of Size
London and Paris stand apart from other European cities in the late Middle Ages for the simple reason of scale. London’s population, perhaps 40,000 in 1300, fell sharply during the plagues of the 1340s and 1360s but was recovering by 1400 and accelerating in the fifteenth century, reaching something close to 50,000 by 1500; Paris may have touched 200,000 at its late medieval peak in the years before the crises of the Hundred Years’ War depressed the population of the Île-de-France. Both were, in different ways, anomalous. London was a port without a great cloth industry of its own, a capital of a poor kingdom, and a city whose governing elite was unusually open to men of trade — an openness that the Hanse merchants in the Steelyard and the Florentine bankers exploited. Paris, by contrast, was a royal capital and a university city, anchored by the Palais de la Cité, the cathedral of Notre-Dame, and the schools of the Left Bank that by 1400 had been reorganised into a coherent studium after the upheavals of 1380. The parallel growth of both, and the regional and demographic explanations for it, is the subject of the article on the growth of London and Paris in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
What this section covers
- Daily life in a medieval city
- Medieval guilds and the organization of labor
- The growth of London and Paris in the 14th and 15th centuries