How Towns Grew in the Middle Ages

By Carol Symes, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

One of the factors that usually distinguishes a medieval city from a town is that most of the former tend to bear the hallmarks of Roman urban planning—a nine-square grid pattern and a standard set of municipal buildings such as temples, amphitheater, theatre, and baths. Medieval towns were almost always brand-new foundations that had grown up around the nucleus of a monastery or a castle.

Planning of Medieval Towns and Cities

Unlike the medieval towns, the planned Roman cities were episcopal capitals. There are, however, a few exceptions to this general rule.

In Roman Britain, which had been the last and most remote colony of the empire, local resistance to Roman occupation had necessitated a network of military fortifications, or castra, especially along western and northern frontiers. These, too, were laid out in a grid, but they were not proper cities; they were garrison towns, often very large ones. They, too, became the nuclei of later medieval towns, which are still named for the original Roman castrum or, in English, ‘chester’; these include Colchester, Winchester, Gloucester and Worcester, and just plain old Chester on the Welsh border. 

Conversely, some medieval towns were also deliberately planned: in England, the earliest are the network of Anglo-Saxon burhs, or ‘fortified settlements’, that were constructed in the 10th century to defend the country’s inhabitants against a wave of Viking raids. Like the Old English word ‘tun’, meaning enclosure, burhs often grew into much larger boroughs or burys. One, on the plain of Sarum, not far from Neolithic monument Stonehenge, eventually became Salisbury and site of a bishop’s cathedral.

This article comes directly from content in the video series The Medieval Legacy. Watch it now, on Wondrium.

Vikings and Huns Stop Raids

In the 11th century, western Europe experienced an unprecedented economic boom that led to the proliferation and expansion of medieval towns situated on coastlines and along waterways. This was, in large part, due to the cessation of raids by the Vikings in the north and west, and by the Huns (or Magyars) on the eastern frontier.

Both of these peoples had, in the 10th century, started settling down in the rich lands they had won, with the Hungarians becoming notable farmers and herdsmen, and the Norsemen founding towns of their own, such as Dublin, which had been a small Christian settlement, and Jorvik (or York), which had been the Roman city Eboracum.

Vikings even laid successful claim to entire territories, most notably the region around Kiev, which became the heart of a vast trading empire. They also gained the entire northwestern part of Francia, the region still known as Norsemanland, or Normandy. With these formidable travelers now tied down, port cities and coastal towns were no longer so vulnerable. 

Role of Monastries

In the meantime, the spread and growth of towns was also being encouraged by the power and prestige of the monasteries around which they clustered, usually along overland trade routes. These religious institutions were now actively challenging the power of predatory lords and their followers, who were themselves forming a new military caste of mounted warriors: chevaliers or knights.

Allied with powerful bishops, monasteries were encouraging these warrior elites to become peacekeepers. If they refrained from attacking farms and settlements, as well as traveling merchants and pilgrims en route to their churches, monks and cathedral clergy would actively intercede on behalf of their sinful souls, praying to God and his saints for mercy on them and their families, as well as their ancestors and descendants. 

Some elites were willing to bequeath lands or riches to monasteries in exchange for burial rites and masses. Some also began to notice that many monasteries managed to support themselves extremely well without resorting to cyclical violence and marauding. Instead, monks devoted their energies to improved farming techniques, engineering feats such as the harnessing of wind and waterpower for turning treadmills and grinding flour, and teaching these technologies to peasant farmers and laborers while supporting local artisans.

Valuable Work of Laborers

All of this meant that the work of laborers came to be more and more productive and thus more and more valuable. Nor was this lost on the laborers themselves.

Farmers saw that their improved crop yields made it possible for a monastery to support dozens, even hundreds of men or women who essentially did no work at all—save, that is, the work of prayer and the intellectual work of scholarship. Artisans saw that monasteries and cathedrals were vying with one another to build ever more splendid churches full of carved stone, stained glass, illuminated books, embroidered vestments, and gilded vessels.

Merchants, many of them unfree serfs themselves, saw that it was their skillful negotiations that enabled monasteries or lords to trade their wheat and wool for commodities that could not be made locally. In the region around the independent county of Flanders (now divided among parts of France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands), some unfree merchants also turned to banking and moneylending to increase the revenues of their lords.

Common Questions about Medieval Towns

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