Medieval TownsCategory: 12th century
By the end of the 10th century new towns had sprung up in England. Such old towns as London, Winchester, York which had become small trading settlements after the Romans had left Britain also grew into centres of trade and crafts. The Domesday Book mentions about 80 towns where 5 per cent of the population lived. In the 11th-12th centuries the towns were very small. London had only 20,000 people but it was considered a large centre of population. An average town had from six to four thousand people.
By the 13th century there were already more than 160 towns in England. But most of the towns were still quite small. There were only a few large centres of population, such as London, Bristol, Norwich and York. By the 14th century London had 40,000 people, York and Bristol had 12,000. Some other towns had only a few thousands of people, like Oxford, for example, with a population of 5,000 men. And there were many other towns which had less than a thousand people.
Most of these early towns did not differ very much from the villages. They were surrounded by walls which had a number of gates, guarded by gate-keepers, who opened them at dawn and locked them at sunset. Outside the town were the fields which came right up to the walls of the town. Three arable fields were divided into strips and the townspeople grew crops in them. There were common pastures and meadows where they fed their cattle and geese. Inside the walls there were also a good many kitchen-gardens and orchards. In such a town a man could be a smith or a carpenter or a Weaver, but he was also a tiller of the soil. His plot of land was not larger than that of the village cottar and agriculture was a secondary occupation. As time went on a baker or a weaver would find it less and less possible to do both things at once. He preferred to spend all his days working at his craft and to buy most of his food instead of growing it. But still at harvest time these craftsmen would help the rest of the inhabitants to gather in the crops. At the same time the peasants in the villages did not give up their crafts completely and they continued to produce handicraft wares both for themselves and for their lord.
London was then the largest city in the country. But many districts which are now in the heart of London were then separate villages or forests. Even Westminster area where many Government offices and the Houses of Parliament are situated today was not a part of London. There were green fields between these villages and the city, and the Londoners used to go out on Sundays and holidays for walks in the fields.
The medieval town grew in the small area within its walls. This growth was not planned. The buildings were crowded together and the streets were often very narrow. Many houses had two or three stories. The upper stories projected above till the houses of the opposite sides of the narrow street nearly met which made the downstairs rooms very dark. There were many dark corners and backyards where robbers could lurk. The streets were not lit at night and the robbers would attack any passer-by who dared to be out late. It was the duty of the watchmen to go through the streets at night and ring a bell, calling out the time and the state of the weather—“past two o’clock and a fine night”, “past three o’clock and raining heavily”, “near one o’clock and bitter cold”. But the watchmen could not keep order in the streets; the back streets were dangerous even in broad daylight.
Nearly all the houses in the town were made of wood and frequent fires would destroy whole districts. Very few houses had their own water-supply. Water was fetched from the nearest well or stream and the scarcity of water made fires still more dangerous in the narrow streets. Special orders were issued to secure the safety of towns. With the last stroke of the church bell in the evening all the townspeople had to put out their fires and lights and the town used to sink in darkness.
The shops where different goods were sold were on the ground floor. As a rule all the shops of one trade were next to each other, and this is still reflected in the names of such London streets as Milk Street, the Poultry, Fish Street and Haberdashers’ Row. Corn was for sale on Cornhill, meat in Butchers’ Row, and hay in the Haymarket.
The workshop where the craftsmen worked was also on the ground floor and the owner and his family lived upstairs. The craftsmen of one occupation lived in their own district too. For example, tailors worked in Threadneedle Street and bakers in Bread Street.
There were no pavements at the sides of the street. Along the street ran a gutter into which people threw their rubbish. The passers-by preferred to walk under the overhanging parts of the houses so as not to run the risks of being drenched with dirty water or hit by things thrown by a housewife out of a top window. There was no collection of house refuse and other rubbish and like in the villages it was a common thing to find poultry, dogs and even pigs grubbing among the refuse which lay rotting in the streets, giving off bad smells. There was no proper drainage system. It is not surprising therefore that such fatal diseases as the plague, cholera, fever and others were very common in medieval towns. These infectious diseases spread very quickly both in villages and in towns and many people died from them. In fact, very few people lived till old age.
All the same, there was an important difference between the first towns and the villages: while the villagers produced the necessities of life mainly for consumption the townspeople produced goods for sale. Crafts and trade began to develop now on a larger scale than before. The growth of towns was a new and very significant stage in the development of feudal society.