Medieval Society

Towns

Town and Country

Town life was distinct from country life; the two were separate, though interdependent, worlds. There were many manifestations of rural life in the city: gardens, herds of livestock, even farms within the city walls. Yet townsmen saw themselves as distinct from country folk, and country folk viewed the cities with suspicion and envy.

Towns were much smaller than what we're used to in industrialized societies. Most towns were only a few thousand people. Even the big cities can be measured in the tens of thousands, while a mere handful reached one or two hundred thousand. Paris, Milan, Naples, Venice, and not much more, and even then only in the 1200s and 1300s. After 1350, the plague greatly reduced the size of the big cities. The largest city on the continent of Europe was Constantinople, with about 400,000.

A town could be, and often was, defined legally in the Middle Ages. From around 1100 or so, towns started to get charters from a bishop, a great lord, or a king. The charters varied greatly, but commonly authorized the town to form its own city council and to regulate certain aspects of city life. Thus the towns after that period had a legal identity within society and before the law, much the same way a modern corporation does.

Citizenship

Those who were citizens formed perhaps half the population, though sometimes they were as little as 10 or 15 percent. The citizenry were the skilled tradesmen and the merchants, the economic lifeblood of the city. Citizenship was generally only inherited, but it could be granted to individuals or to families, usually as a recognition for some extraordinary service to the city. By the later Middle Ages, guild membership and citizenship went hand in hand. In Florence, for example, membership in a guild was a requirement of citizenship.

Everyone knew who the citizens were, for they annually swore an oath of loyalty to the city. They would gather in one of the city plazas, often in front of the town hall, and there repeat the oath out loud, for everyone to see. This served the double purpose of binding the citizens and of letting everyone else see who were recognized as citizens.

Citizenship brought privileges but also brought obligations. They were required to serve in fire brigades and street patrols. In times of war they manned the walls and served in the city militia. Only citizens had to pay taxes. On the other hand, they were legally protected and often could only be tried in the town courts.

The citizens were the real caretakers of the city's prestige and reputation, ethics and the common weal.

Outsiders

Among those were usually were not citizens were the clergy. Though they were still privileged and prestigious members of the community. The nobility were sometimes allowed to be citizens, sometimes were required (in Italy) to be citizens, and sometimes were forbidden citizenship.

Others who were not allowed to be citizens were the Jews. They were tolerated usually, persecuted sometimes, but the Jewish communities often fulfilled necessary functions.

And then there were the unehrliche Leute, the people without honor. These included the hangman, gravediggers, and prostitutes. These were all recognized and legitimate professions, but they were socially repugnant and these people were never allowed to be citizens.

Rights and Privileges

Personal freedom was vitally important to anyone who lived in a town and was widely regarded as an essential element of town life. A townsman had to be free from the obligations that bound a peasant, and must be free also from the arbitrary taxation to which a peasant was subject. A merchant, moveover, must be free to move from place to place, while a villein had no right to leave his lord's land.

The city itself, as a corporation, had freedom too. The city flourished best when free from feudal lords, though some cities were ruled by bishops or barons. Even so, cities needed to manage their own legal affairs and their own fiscal affairs.

The political history of many cities in the 1100s and 1200s is dominated by their struggles with their feudal overlords, bishop or baron. The final product was often a charter of liberties that spelled out the exemptions and rights the city, and its citizens, would enjoy.

Cities often bought their freedom by paying their lord for a charter of liberties. Later, as the profits of urban centers became apparent, lords encouraged the founding of cities by granting privileges to some settlement whose growth he hoped to encourage.

The charter usually stipulated that everyone living in the town would be free. A widespread custom was that anyone who lived in the town for a year and a day would become free. The Germans had a saying: Stadtluft macht frei: "city air makes one free", a saying that illustrates the role played by towns in this regard.

Other elements of city charters might include: Landholding was to be by lease and rent, not by feudal tenure. Freedom from taxation was achieved by fixing limits to what the lord would levy. Freedom from tolls on bridges in the lord's lands; freedom from sales taxes levied by the lord on his other subjects; freedom from the lord's courts -- a burger could be tried only in the courts of his home town; right to their own merchant courts (these were commercial courts, but were sometimes given jurisdiction over low justice - often called pied-poudre, or "pied-powder", which meant "dusty-foot").

Town Government

There was a bewildering variety to town governments, yet there were common elements. Most had some sort of chief executive. His powers might vary widely, but some such office as Mayor (from the Latin maior which simply means "greater") existed in nearly every town. The Mayor—by whatever title—might be elected or appointed, but it was unusual to find no such office at all.

There was normally one or more councils, and these were vital. A Mayor might be a powerful figure or merely a figurehead (such as the Doge in Venice), but real power always lay with the city councils. Cities tended to have multiple councils, but most commonly you would find a Great Council and a Small Council. The Great Council might consist of hundreds of members, met rarely as an entire body, and really served as a kind of pool from which were drawn the members of the Small Council plus members of a myriad of standing committees that actually got most of the work done. The Small Council was more in the nature of an executive council, comprised of only a few members (six or ten or so). This Council made many of the tough decisions, including deciding matters of alliances, treaties, war, and so on.

Much of the day to day administration of a town was done by committee. Medieval towns tended to spawn committees for just about everything, and much of the detailed politics of a town centered around control of these.

One of the more unexpected aspects of medieval town government was their election process. Many elections were by lot: candidates had their names put in a hat (the mechanics of this varied) and six names or fifty names or whatever were drawn from it. Elections were very rarely run the way we mean, with the citizens stating their choice; and they were never done in secret ballot, which is a modern invention.

Terms of office were extremely short: a year, six months, even two months. Since the election of a new council was a matter of picking names by lot, it could be done quickly. The idea was to leave no one person in power for too long. Medieval towns were obsessed by a fear of demagogues.

Florence: an example

We happen to know a good deal about the electoral process in Florence. We know about quite a few other towns as well, and they were all similar to this.