Life in a Medieval City

by Frances Gies

As the power of the Roman Empire faltered, local Roman officials lost their authority, creating a vacuum that was filled by Christian bishops.

In the sixth and seventh centuries a new ecclesiastical source of cities appeared—the Benedictine monastery. The institution spread rapidly, establishing itself sometimes in towns, sometimes in open country, and immediately attracting craftsmen, farmers, and traders. In the Bavarian forest appeared “Monks’ Town”—Munich.

Sacking was something to which citizens of an early medieval city had to be resigned. Not only pagan invaders, but Christian lords, and even bishops, did their share—Troyes was sacked by the bishop of Auxerre. But the champion raiders, who appeared in the late ninth century, were the Vikings.

The newly fortified towns were usually called “bourgs” or “burhs” (later, boroughs) in the Germanic dialects that were evolving into new languages. People who dwelt in the bourgs were known as bourgeois, or burghers, or burgesses.

“father of orphans, advocate of widows, eye of the blind, foot of the lame.”

By that date (1176) Venice, once a dependency of Greek Constantinople, was as sovereign as pope or emperor. For

The essence of the new movement was the “commune,” a sworn association of all the businessmen of a town. In Italy, where the nobility lived in towns, many nobles had gone into business, and some of them helped found communes. But the commune, even in Italy, was a burgher organization; in northwest Europe nobles, along with the clergy, were specifically excluded. Cloth merchants, hay merchants, helmet makers, wine sellers—all the merchants and craftsmen of a town—joined together to defend their rights against their secular and ecclesiastical lords.

A cardinal2 accused the communes of abetting heresy, of declaring war on the clergy, and of encouraging skepticism.

“Charter” joined “commune” as a fighting word to reactionaries.

Troyes merely underlines a truth about princes: the more money they have, the more they spend.

This is Troyes, an old town but a new city, a feudal and ecclesiastical capital, and major center of the Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages.

However, the faithful are not uniformly austere, and in fact the clergy often find loopholes in the law.

[Use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake]: only the word “little,” which he puts first, we leave out.

The preachers like to remind their lady parishioners that wigs are made of the hair of persons who are now likely to be found in hell or purgatory, and that “Jesus Christ and his blessed mother, of royal blood though they were, never thought of wearing” the belts of silk, gold, and silver that are fashionable among wealthy women.

the prices of the different loaves are legally fixed.

To be a woman in the thirteenth century is much like being a woman in any age. Women are somewhat oppressed and exploited, as always, but as in any age, social status is the really important thing, and a burgher’s wife is no serf. She is a person of dignity and worth, important in her family and respected in the community.

The cult of Mary serves to elevate the image of women and to counterbalance the misogyny of ascetic preachers who bestow such epithets as “man’s confounder,” “mad beast,” “stinking rose,” “sad paradise,” “sweet venom,” “luscious sin,” and “bitter sweet,” while lingering over the attractions of the temptresses.

One preacher complains that formerly wives were faithful to their husbands and peaceful as ewe lambs; now they are lionesses.

Perhaps the most important point to note about the medieval housewife, in contrast to women of earlier times, is that she has a purse. She goes shopping, she gives alms, she pays fees, she hires labor; she may, if the occasion arises, buy privileges and pay bribes.

A woman of means is always a person to reckon with.

That moment is extreme unction, after which the Church considers a man as good as dead.

A sick man who recovers after receiving it must fast perpetually, go barefoot, and never again have intercourse with his wife. In some places he cannot even amend his will.

Cider is unknown except in Normandy, and outsiders who have tasted it consider it to be a curse God has visited on the Normans.

the French prefer white wine, the Burgundians red, the Germans “aromatic wines,” and the English beer.

Every guild recognizes its stake in protecting the public, for since the guild restricts competition, it has an obligation to guarantee standards of quality.

Guild regulations reflect the nature of industry, which is small scale and familial.

A guild that does not provide benevolent services usually has a “brotherhood,” an auxiliary that may be the original form of the association.

A kind master is a blessing; perhaps an even greater blessing is a prosperous master. A kind mistress may be important too.

Guilds often specify in their regulations that an apprentice should not be beaten by the master’s wife.

abolishing the Jewish disabilities,

But princely self-interest is a capricious force.

If the thirteenth century is not the best time to be a European Jew, neither is it the worst.

Buy stingily and sell dear, And practice usury and fraud.

successful merchant turns moneylender. People who want to borrow money go where the money is.

Moneylenders run risks, so interest rates are high. The Church officially condemns all interest as usurious, but churchmen nevertheless borrow, and lend, too.

“Take while the patient is in pain.”

“When you go to a patient, always try to do something new every day, lest they say you are good at nothing but books.”

“If you unfortunately visit a patient and find him dead, and they ask you why you came, say you knew he would die that night, but want to know at what hour he died.”

“If the patient has the good fortune to survive,” he concludes, “he does so in spite of the bungling doctor, but if he is fated to perish, he is killed with full rites.”

“Sis mortuus mundo, vivens iterum Deo” (Be thou dead to this world, living again to God), concluding, “I forbid you ever to enter a church or a monastery, a mill, a bakery, a market, or any place where there is an assemblage of people.

I know you need a short sermon and a long table. May it please God not to make the time of the mass last too long for you. —An Easter sermon by ROBERT DE SORBON

The cities, with their notorious worldliness, are widely blamed by the Church for the spread of skepticism and something worse—heresy.

Albigensianism, or Catharism, originally brought to the West from Bulgaria by weavers and cloth merchants and fostered, as the Church complains, by the new independence and skepticism of the cities, has been the object of a vigorous crusade, lasting thirty-four years, with a ten-year interval of truce.

Parties of Dominican and Franciscan inquisitors journey from town to town inviting heretics to reform and Christians to inform.

When the metal is poured and the bell mounted, the bishop baptizes it as if it were a child, with salt, water, and holy oil. He prays that when it is sounded faith and charity may abound among men, that all the devices of the devil—hail, lightning, winds—may be rendered vain by its ringing, and all unseasonable weather be softened.

But with or without a grounding in theory, the new technology usually works, and works so well that though originally conceived in a spirit of economy, it has had a history similar to that of many other engineering advances. It has opened such social and aesthetic possibilities that in the end it has raised the cost of church construction.

The new technology and the new affluence have created this major industry.

Art begets artists, and the function of assembling the pieces of glass into pictures that the sun turned into miracles of radiant color devolved on those who were skilled at it.

No man, burgher or baron, can enter a Gothic cathedral without experiencing a sense of human insignificance in the presence of such majesty.

Since books have to be copied by hand and writing materials are expensive, memory and oral exercises are indispensable.