By Carol Symes, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Opportunities for social mobility were an outgrowth of the new freedoms towns afforded—and one of the medieval legacies we treasure today as the hallmark of a liberal democracy. Geographical mobility is always linked to social, economic, and political mobility. It is also what makes it possible for an individual, family, or entire group, to assimilate into a new culture, or to try on a new identity.
Women in Cities
In the countryside, among people who have known you your whole life, and your family for generations, you are born into a status and a role in the community. In the town, you are a social actor, literally—able to take on new forms of dress and manners, to learn a new trade, to seek political office, even to advance yourself by attending a monastery or cathedral school, which were free to all those free to attend.
Of course, we must always bear in mind that these freedoms were gendered and were almost never accessible to women in the same ways. For women, the move to a city or town was often one of desperation, flight from slavery or abuse. Moreover, the jobs available to women were usually few—domestic service or sex work, or some combination of the two.
All urban trades were governed by guilds that regulated the quality and pricing of goods, the training of apprentices, and the rules by which an artisan or merchant could prove himself ready to open his own business or shop. Almost none of these trades allowed women to become apprentices—even in the trades that we usually associate with women, such as weaving. However, women were able to participate in the trades of their husbands and fathers, and thereby learned many of the same skills secondhand. They could also come to control the family business if their husbands died. So, for at least some women, the opportunities of urban life could still be seized upon.
This article comes directly from content in the video series The Medieval Legacy. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Culture and Art in Towns
As self-governing entities with their own civic institutions, towns also generated their own forms of culture, their own particular artists and achievements.
Beginning in the late 11th century—just as cities and towns were booming—French and Norman masons began to experiment with the techniques of construction and ornamentation that we call Gothic—flying buttresses that could anchor and support higher and thinner structures whose walls were pierced with enormous windows filled with stained glass, whose tall columns and capitals were festooned with carvings.
Within a century, the older Romanesque cathedrals and churches had almost disappeared from towns and cities north of the Alps—wherever there was the will, money, ingenuity, and talent to build the new Gothic structures. These projects demanded the involvement, in one way or another, of every person in the community and were, as a result, a shared symbol of pride and collective identity.
Bawdy Fabliaux
The cathedral builders, the bishops who financed them, master architects who designed them, and common artisans and laborers contributed to the cultural life of the town, and were the audience for the many new kinds of urban entertainment that were simultaneously emerging, including new genres of theatre and music as well as for such literary genres as the bawdy fabliaux.
Fabliaux were composed in rhymed couplets, usually in French, which was becoming the lingua franca of urban Europe and of European settlements in the Mediterranean, too. Although they circulated in written form, fabliaux were really designed for public performance in marketplaces, taverns, and inns—the gathering-places where people met to enjoy themselves and satirize the foibles of town life and those of the rural gentry. As such, they are snapshots of the hot topics and tensions that arose from social mobility and rapid urbanization.
New Towns
The 13th century was the heyday of the medieval town in western Europe. In subsequent centuries, the growth of large-scale territorial monarchies, the ravages of the Black Death, and heightened economic inequalities would erode the freedoms which the serfs of the 11th and 12th centuries had won. Still, the customs and laws of towns managed to safeguard many liberties, or at least to enshrine an idea of their importance.
Meanwhile, in Scandinavia, the Baltic, and eastern Europe, new towns were being founded and new freedoms claimed along the same lines. The kings of Poland-Lithuania, Hungary, Bohemia, and other new principalities actively sought to encourage immigration to their territories, safeguarding even the rights of the Jews who were being expelled from England and France.
A network of boomtowns sprang up, funneling riches in and out of these developing territories. When Europeans began to found towns in the as-yet-undiscovered lands of the Americas, in the 16th and 7th centuries, they too would be stamped with the distinctive characteristics and aspirations of the medieval town.
Common Questions about the Characteristics and Aspirations of Medieval Towns
The growth of large-scale territorial monarchies, the ravages of the Black Death, and heightened economic inequalities eroded the freedoms which the serfs of the 11th and 12th centuries had won.
Beginning in the late 11th century—just as cities and towns were booming—French and Norman masons began to experiment with the techniques of construction and ornamentation that we call Gothic—flying buttresses that could anchor and support higher and thinner structures whose walls were pierced with enormous windows filled with stained glass, whose tall columns and capitals were festooned with carvings.
Although they circulated in written form, fabliaux were really designed for public performance in marketplaces, taverns, and inns—the gathering-places where people met to enjoy themselves and satirize the foibles of town life and those of the rural gentry. As such, they are snapshots of the hot topics and tensions that arose from social mobility and rapid urbanization.
