3.8 Towns — A Different World

By the eleventh century the agricultural surplus described in the previous part was beginning to feed something quite new in western Europe — a network of towns^?. Some grew up at the gates of an old Roman city (Cologne, Trier, Paris); others sprang up around a fortified castle (Burg in German), a great monastery (St-Albans, Bury St Edmunds) or a river-crossing where merchants paid toll. By 1200 a traveller could find a market town within a day's walk almost anywhere in France, England, the Low Countries and the Rhineland.

Towns were a different world from the manor. Their populations were small by modern standards — even Florence and Venice held only about 100,000 people in 1300; London had perhaps 80,000 — but the proportion of people who did not farm was high. Townsfolk were largely free. The legal principle Stadtluft macht frei ("town air makes one free") meant that a serf who lived undetected in a town for a year and a day could no longer be reclaimed by his lord. Many towns also bought or won charters from their kings or feudal overlords, granting them the right to elect their own councils, to hold a market, to mint coin or to collect toll — the start of a new urban political order.

3.8.1 Merchants and the Long Trade Routes

From the twelfth century the maritime cities of Italy — above all Venice and Genoa — built fleets that re-opened long-distance trade with the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Spices from India, silk from China, sugar from Egypt and slaves from the Black Sea passed through their warehouses on the way north. The Crusades (from 1095 onwards) intensified those connections. In northern Europe, the merchants of Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen and other Baltic and North Sea ports formed the Hanseatic League^? from the late thirteenth century, dominating the trade in furs, wax, timber, fish and Russian grain.

3.8.2 Fairs and Cathedral Towns

The arteries that linked the maritime traders of the south to the markets of the north were the great fairs^?. The four fairs of Champagne in north-eastern France (Provins, Troyes, Lagny, Bar-sur-Aube), in particular, ran in rotation through the year and drew Italian, Flemish, English, German and Spanish merchants for several weeks each. Money-changers at the fairs invented bills of exchange; lawyers worked out a kind of trans-European commercial law (lex mercatoria); insurance, double-entry book-keeping and the first banks all took shape here.

Larger towns were cathedral towns — cities such as Chartres, Reims, Lincoln, Cologne, Florence — whose silhouette was dominated by the soaring stone cathedral built between roughly 1150 and 1300. The Gothic cathedral, with its pointed arches, ribbed vaults, flying buttresses and immense stained-glass windows, was an enormous civic effort: it could take three or four generations of masons, glaziers, sculptors and carpenters to complete, paid for by the parishes, the bishop and the merchant guilds.

3.8.3 Guilds — The Heart of the Urban Economy

Inside the town, almost every profession was organised into a guild^? — bakers, butchers, weavers, dyers, goldsmiths, masons, doctors, painters. A guild fixed prices, controlled the quality of its products, regulated apprenticeship, ran its own chapel and provided welfare for the widows and orphans of its members. Becoming a master craftsman normally required seven years of apprenticeship under one master, several years of paid work as a "journeyman" (from French journée, a day's wage), and finally the production of a "masterpiece" judged by the senior members.

3.9 The Crisis of the Fourteenth Century

Between 1300 and 1400 western Europe went through what historians call the fourteenth-century crisis — a clustered set of disasters that broke the long medieval expansion. The crisis had three interlocking faces: a climatic and agricultural collapse, a catastrophic pandemic and waves of political and social revolt.

3.9.1 The Great Famine of 1315–17

The continent had already pushed cultivation onto poor, marginal soils to feed a population that had grown to perhaps 75 million by 1300. From the late thirteenth century, the climate became cooler and wetter — the start of a long-running cooling sometimes called the "Little Ice Age". Then, in the spring of 1315, torrential rains fell across western Europe and continued through the summer. Crops rotted in the fields; livestock drowned; salt could not be extracted because the sun never shone long enough. The harvests of 1315 and 1316 failed almost completely. Bread prices in northern France quadrupled. By 1317, perhaps 5–10 % of the population of England, the Low Countries and northern France had died of starvation or hunger-related disease — the worst peacetime mortality in two centuries.

3.9.2 The Black Death, 1347–53

A still greater catastrophe followed. In October 1347 a Genoese galley slipped into the harbour of Messina in Sicily; her crew were already sick with what eyewitnesses described as black swellings (buboes) the size of an apple in the groin and armpits, followed by haemorrhages, fever and rapid death. Within five years this plague — the Black Death^? — had swept across the entire continent. From Sicily it reached the ports of southern France in early 1348, Paris by August 1348, England in the summer of 1348, Norway in 1349 and Russia by 1351.

The plague was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, carried by fleas on the black rat (Rattus rattus). Modern science has confirmed this through DNA analysis of medieval skeletons. But the people of 1348 had no idea of bacteria or fleas. They blamed bad air (miasma), the alignment of planets (a Saturn–Jupiter–Mars conjunction had been observed in 1345), the wrath of God, and — appallingly — the Jews of the Rhineland, whom they accused of poisoning wells. Across Germany, Switzerland and Spain, hundreds of Jewish communities were burned in pogroms in 1348–49 despite the protests of Pope Clement VI.

3.10 Peasant Revolts

The crisis broke open the social contract of feudal Europe. With nearly half the workforce dead, the survivors discovered that their labour was suddenly precious. They demanded higher wages and lower rents. Lords and parliaments responded by trying to freeze wages at pre-plague levels — England's Statute of Labourers (1351) made it illegal for peasants to take, or for employers to pay, more than the customary rate. Where lords also tried to reimpose long-abandoned labour services, the peasantry rose in armed revolt.

3.10.1 The Jacquerie (France, 1358)

In May 1358, peasants in the Beauvais region of northern France rose against their lords. The revolt — known as the Jacquerie^?, after the nickname "Jacques Bonhomme" (everyman) — followed years of devastation by the Hundred Years War with England, fresh epidemic outbreaks, and a heavy royal ransom levied on the peasantry to free King John II from English captivity. The peasants attacked manor-houses, burned charters and killed several score knights. Within six weeks, a coalition of nobles led by Charles the Bad of Navarre crushed the rising at the battle of Mello (10 June 1358); thousands of peasants were killed in the reprisals.

3.10.2 The English Peasants' Revolt (1381)

A still larger revolt broke out in England in June 1381, triggered by a third poll tax in four years — a flat tax of 12d per head, demanded to finance the war with France. Led by the Kent labourer Wat Tyler and the radical priest John Ball, an army of perhaps 50,000 peasants, urban poor and minor townsmen marched from Kent and Essex on London. They burned the Savoy palace of John of Gaunt, beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Treasurer, and met the fourteen-year-old King Richard II at Mile End and Smithfield (14–15 June 1381) to demand the abolition of serfdom, the commutation of all labour service into a fixed rent of fourpence per acre, and a general amnesty.

The young king promised concessions. As soon as the peasant army dispersed, the promises were withdrawn; Wat Tyler had already been killed at Smithfield, John Ball was executed and the leaders were hunted down. Yet the political shock was lasting. No further poll tax was demanded for nearly three centuries; lords accepted that the old labour services could not be reimposed; and serfdom in England slowly faded out over the next hundred years.

3.11 The Long Decline of Feudalism

The social and political world that emerged after the crisis was visibly different from the one that went into it. Five major changes can be summarised:

3.11.1 The Rise of New Monarchies

The cost of the long Hundred Years War (1337–1453) and the impact of gunpowder — cannon could batter down the walls of the most expensive feudal castle — strengthened the kings of France, England and Spain at the expense of their old feudal nobility. By the end of the fifteenth century these new monarchies had:

• A standing army paid by the crown, not by feudal levy. France's compagnies d'ordonnance were established in 1445.
• Permanent royal taxation, often voted by an embryonic parliament — the French taille, the Spanish servicio, the English subsidy.
• A central royal bureaucracy staffed increasingly by university-trained lawyers rather than by feudal magnates.
• Religious unification within their territory — Spain expelled its Jews in 1492 and its Muslims in 1502; France's Concordat of Bologna (1516) brought the French Church under royal control.

The unified Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella, the centralising France of Louis XI (d. 1483) and the Tudor England of Henry VII (r. 1485–1509) were the prototypes of the modern nation-state. The age of the independent feudal lord, holding his castle against his own king, was effectively over by 1500 in western Europe — though the legal framework of feudalism, including titles of nobility and aristocratic privilege, would endure in many countries until the French Revolution of 1789.