The Later Medieval City, 1300-1500, the second part of David
Nicholas's ambitious two-volume study of cities and city life in
the Middle Ages, fully lives up to its splendid precursor, The
Growth of the Medieval City. (Like that volume it is fully
self-sufficient, though many readers will want to use the two as a
continuum.) This book covers a much shorter period than the first.
That traced the rise of the medieval European city system from late
Antiquity to the early fourteenth century; this offers a portrait
of the fully developed late medieval city in all its richness and
complexity. David Nicholas begins with the economic and demographic
realignments of the last two medieval centuries. These fostered
urban growth, raising living standards and increasing demand for a
growing range of urban manufactures. The hunger for imports and a
shortage of coin led to sophisticated credit mechanisms that could
only function through large cities. But, if these changes brought
new opportunities to the wealthy, they also created a growing
problem of urban poverty: violence became endemic in the later
medieval city. Moreover, although more rebellions were sparked by
taxes than by class conflict, class divisions were deepening. Most
cities came to be governed by councils chosen from guild-members,
and most guilds were dominated by merchants. The landowning elite
that had dominated the early medieval cities of the first volume
still retained its prestige, but its wealth was outstripped by the
richer merchants; while craftsmen, who had little political
influence, were further disadvantaged as access to the guilds
became more restricted. The later medieval cities developed
permanent bureaucracies providing a huge range of public services,
and they were paid for by sophisticated systems of taxation and
public borrowing. The survival of their fuller, richer records
allow us not only to apply a more statistical approach, but also to
get much closer, to the splendours and squalors of everyday
city-life than was possible in the earlier volume. The book
concludes with a set of vibrant chapters on women and children and
religious minorities in the city, on education and culture, and on
the tenor of ordinary urban existence. Like its predecessor, this
book is massively, and vividly, documented. Its approach is
interdisciplinary and comparative, and its examples and case
studies are drawn from across Europe: from France, England,
Germany, the Low Countries, Iberia and Italy, with briefer reviews
of the urban experience elsewhere from Baltic to Balkans. The
result is the most wide-ranging and up-to-date study of its
multifaceted subject. It is a formidable achievement.
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