What Was City Life Like in the Middle Ages?

a lot of medieval cities were similar to ours today in that they had governing bodies educational structures bankers lawyers hospitals merchants and an exchange of goods and services as well as some extraordinary Cathedrals that are still standing today though the medievals themselves were unsure about the advantages of their cities the English chronicler and monk Richard devy's wrote about London in the 1190s and said quote whatever evil or malicious thing that can be found in any part of the world you will find it in that one city so what was life like for these medieval metropolitans

let's travel back in time and find out welcome to Medieval Madness foreign of the Middle Ages about 90 percent of Europeans lived in the countryside and religious communities or in feudal land but by the time we reached the high Middle Ages in the 11th century that number had fallen as more business opportunities opened up and trade overseas expanded then more people decided to migrate to the towns and cities in search of a better way of life many villages had grown up outside of manners castles or monasteries and along trade routes over time these Villages later

became towns and cities that were enclosed within a protective wall in dispersed with towers that would have Arrow slits for defense access to a medieval city was usually controlled through Gates inside the walls it would be crowded with streets and buildings usually with a central Cathedral safety most people in the cities were either Born Free or were a peasant who had escaped from a manner in the countryside peasants or serfs who lived on a piece of land were required to work for the Lord of The Manor in return for this they had the right to

cultivate that plot of land for their Provisions but they also had to work on their Lord's Fields serfs could not leave the land that they were bound to and were only allowed to marry with their Lord's permission it's no surprise then that many serfs run away to the cities whenever they got the chance As Cities grew the authorities encouraged people to relocate by offering any peasant the opportunity to become a Freeman if they left their rural community and resided within the city for a year and a day without being claimed by their lord they could

gain their freedom however the last thing that someone who was essentially a runaway slave would want to do as they entered the city walls was to announce themselves and record their name in the date otherwise your lord could send his Steward or bailiff looking for you and easily find out that you were somewhere within the city but these cities needed workers to function properly so the hours that bee organized many hush-hush under the table lists of people who were waiting for their year and a day of Freedom some bailiffs and stewards were even accepting bribes

from the city authorities to encourage serves to leave their farms and migrate to the cities crowded today in 2023 our idea of a city is somewhere like Delhi in India with a population of over 16 million people or New York with over 19 million medieval cities were tiny in comparison in Europe there were about 15 to 20 cities that housed about 25 000 people in Spain the cities on the quarter of a million resident list included Valencia and Barcelona in Germany cologne and Nuremberg and in France Bordeaux and toulou among others in England by 1300

York and Bristol were the second largest cities but only housed around 10 to 12 000 people each in comparison the capital London had grown to accommodate between 80 and 100 000 although figures took a huge dip in the middle of the century when the first wave of the Black Death pandemic hit in 1339 King Edward III called London the mirror and Exemplar of the whole realm in about 1100 though London shared the same number of citizens of around 40 000 habitants as its trading cities of Bruce and gent which were just across the English Channel

this was not a coincidence as the three cities had a close trading relationship raw wool was manufactured in the rural areas of England before being transported to London then it would be loaded and shipped down the Thames river and across the channel to the textile cities of Bruges and Ghent where it would be processed and made into clothing some of that clothing would be shipped out across Europe and some would find its way back to England so it makes sense that the three cities were roughly the same size stinky most medieval cities might now be

home to great opportunities and wealth but they were also Rife with squalor they were noisy crowded places with a hodgepodge of narrow streets stuffed full of houses some had yards where pigs and other animals were kept they were smelly packed full and a breeding ground for disease even though the scientific discovery of bacteria was still centuries away the medieval soon came to understand that waste was filthy and certainly not pleasant to be around especially in cities on a warm summer's day this prompted stricter criteria for the disposal of waste water but from 1371 in London

there was no more throwing it out of bedroom windows onto the people passing below yes it could be disposed of in the central drainage channels that ran down most of the city streets but get caught chucking it out rather than walking downstairs with it and you would be fine two Shillings following the understandable paranoia of disease after the black death householders in London and York were officially held liable for keeping the area outside of their own front door clean in Coventry any man that did not clean the pavement town out of his home with a

broom and a bucket on a Saturday was fined 12 Pence that was okay for the side streets but what about the busy thoroughfares jam-packed with people and horses and all of the rubbish that they created in 1372 London came up with the idea of organizing its first refuse collection publicly funded by using the money raised from the fines on dodgy Brewers 24 horses and 12 carts were purchased to start a waste management scheme weekly rubbish collections also occurred in York and Norwich whilst in Coventry the cart came by on a Saturday probably to align with

the enforced cleaning day rubbish was to be kept inside the home until the carts arrived demand had grown so much that by the early 16th century collections in London had increased to three times a week despite these measures there was no way to regulate the behavior of the hundreds of visitors that came into the towns and cities every day with their dogs pigs horses and poultry their litter let an adequate amount of work for the many scavengers and nutcrackers who had to collect their detritus from the filth ridden streets and take the feces soil and

debris by boat or cart and deposited outside of the city walls violent the murder rate Rose unrelentingly towards the end of the 14th century murder along with theft and assault became a serious problem for the medieval city dweller curfews were used to try and keep citizens safe from strangers and a bell would be wrong to allow people to hurry back to their homes before the city Gates were closed and locked but sometimes the dangers were a lot closer to home and came from a citizen's own neighbors many residents became quite protective over the state of

their cities and arguments would often break out some becoming quite heated and violent in London in 1322 the son of a Goldsmith called William relieved himself into a pot and then threw the urine onto the shoes of a passerby a raw erupted and philipped acidone who tried to intervene was killed by a wound that was penetrating to the brain just for trying to make the peace an ill seller from Hampton named Roger styward also met a sticky end he was caught on Caldwell in a street in London fly tipping eel skins in front of two

shops one of the shopkeepers chased him into a nearby churchyard and gave him such a brutal beating that Roger was only able to manage to Lurch a few steps to cheapside before he dropped dead Simon De Warfield continued to throw his rubbish into the street despite several warnings he called his Alderman rude names after being arrested in 1343. similarly Beatrice lanbourne called her Alderman a broken down old Yokel when she was charged with the same offense 30 years later William Emery a poulterer known for littering the London streets with Heron horse and gustung really got

on his neighbor's nose when he threw out quote horse pissed that had stood under his horse a month or six weeks so that no man could pass perhaps it could be called Poetic Justice then when Johan Tully fell to his death in 1326 was urinating out of his window into the street the authorities at London in 1414 were so set on cleaning up their filthy streets that they even offered a reward for snitching on waste dumping neighbors anyone willing to grasp on a litera was given two Shillings and four Pence's payment and an extra 12

Pence out of the culprit's four Shillings fine that little incentive would have been worth about 100 pounds today and probably resulted in turning many fed up londoners into still pitch business and culture although only a small minority of people made up the population of medieval cities they benefited well from the spending power of those Countryside dwellers who traveled in to take advantages of the goods on offer but they also brought in Goods to sell to Merchants such as butchers Millers and furriers without this flow of fresh goods such as meat and milk neither manufacturer nor

retailer would have been able to make a living the hierarchy of cities was different from that in rural areas at the top of the social scale were the landlords who usually held important governmental positions followed by the merchants and lawyers then came The Artisans and Traders with the unskilled workers and laborers at the bottom of the pile just as today medieval cities had a mixture of residential and commercial buildings many Craftsmen lived with their family upstairs above the workshops in medieval cities today we can see the legacy of their occupation with street names such as

pie Corner beef Lane Apothecary Street and Fisher row guilds were established for skilled Artisans which meant special privileges such as workman's compensation the right to trade of the market and limiting the number of specific trades within a city Parish churches and other religious houses were important in cities during an age when the Catholic Church dominated all aspects of medieval life probably the most impressive part of a medieval city was its Cathedral some were hundreds of years in the making York Minster although founded in 627 wasn't finished until 1472 and while Cologne Cathedral was begun in

1248 it was the middle of the 16th century before work was fully completed these buildings fueled their City's economies by employing stonemasons Glaziers Engineers Architects and a multitude of Craftsmen down through the centuries Richard Davies saw London as a den of iniquity full of dangerous Temptations with its taverns gambling dens and brothels and there can be no doubt that most cities in the Middle Ages were similar in that they were dirty overcrowded expensive and full of disease but not long after Davies maligned London the cleric William Fitz Stephen praised the city as quote a place

of thrilling spectacles at devotion and exciting pastimes including skating and football just like our cities of today for the medievals they were essential hubs for Spiritual economic political and cultural activities thank you for watching this episode of Medieval Madness please subscribe if you haven't and I'll see you next week for another video cheers