---
id: book-3-chapter-03
title: "OF THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF CITIES AND TOWNS, AFTER THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE."
book: "3"
chapter: 3
artifact_type: content
---

CHAPTER III.
OF THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF CITIES
AND TOWNS, AFTER THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE.



      The inhabitants of cities and towns were, after the fall of the Roman
      empire, not more favoured than those of the country. They consisted,
      indeed, of a very different order of people from the first inhabitants of
      the ancient republics of Greece and Italy. These last were composed
      chiefly of the proprietors of lands, among whom the public territory was
      originally divided, and who found it convenient to build their houses in
      the neighbourhood of one another, and to surround them with a wall, for
      the sake of common defence. After the fall of the Roman empire, on the
      contrary, the proprietors of land seem generally to have lived in
      fortified castles on their own estates, and in the midst of their own
      tenants and dependants. The towns were chiefly inhabited by tradesmen and
      mechanics, who seem, in those days, to have been of servile, or very
      nearly of servile condition. The privileges which we find granted by
      ancient charters to the inhabitants of some of the principal towns in
      Europe, sufficiently show what they were before those grants. The people
      to whom it is granted as a privilege, that they might give away their own
      daughters in marriage without the consent of their lord, that upon their
      death their own children, and not their lord, should succeed to their
      goods, and that they might dispose of their own effects by will, must,
      before those grants, have been either altogether, or very nearly, in the
      same state of villanage with the occupiers of land in the country.

      They seem, indeed, to have been a very poor, mean set of people, who
      seemed to travel about with their goods from place to place, and from fair
      to fair, like the hawkers and pedlars of the present times. In all the
      different countries of Europe then, in the same manner as in several of
      the Tartar governments of Asia at present, taxes used to be levied upon
      the persons and goods of travellers, when they passed through certain
      manors, when they went over certain bridges, when they carried about their
      goods from place to place in a fair, when they erected in it a booth or
      stall to sell them in. These different taxes were known in England by the
      names of passage, pontage, lastage, and stallage. Sometimes the king,
      sometimes a great lord, who had, it seems, upon some occasions, authority
      to do this, would grant to particular traders, to such particularly as
      lived in their own demesnes, a general exemption from such taxes. Such
      traders, though in other respects of servile, or very nearly of servile
      condition, were upon this account called free traders. They, in return,
      usually paid to their protector a sort of annual poll-tax. In those days
      protection was seldom granted without a valuable consideration, and this
      tax might perhaps be considered as compensation for what their patrons
      might lose by their exemption from other taxes. At first, both those
      poll-taxes and those exemptions seem to have been altogether personal, and
      to have affected only particular individuals, during either their lives,
      or the pleasure of their protectors. In the very imperfect accounts which
      have been published from Doomsday-book, of several of the towns of
      England, mention is frequently made, sometimes of the tax which particular
      burghers paid, each of them, either to the king, or to some other great
      lord, for this sort of protection, and sometimes of the general amount
      only of all those taxes. {see Brady’s Historical Treatise of Cities and
      Boroughs, p. 3. etc.}

      But how servile soever may have been originally the condition of the
      inhabitants of the towns, it appears evidently, that they arrived at
      liberty and independency much earlier than the occupiers of land in the
      country. That part of the king’s revenue which arose from such poll-taxes
      in any particular town, used commonly to be let in farm, during a term of
      years, for a rent certain, sometimes to the sheriff of the county, and
      sometimes to other persons. The burghers themselves frequently got credit
      enough to be admitted to farm the revenues of this sort which arose out of
      their own town, they becoming jointly and severally answerable for the
      whole rent. {See Madox, Firma Burgi, p. 18; also History of the Exchequer,
      chap. 10, sect. v, p. 223, first edition.} To let a farm in this manner,
      was quite agreeable to the usual economy of, I believe, the sovereigns of
      all the different countries of Europe, who used frequently to let whole
      manors to all the tenants of those manors, they becoming jointly and
      severally answerable for the whole rent; but in return being allowed to
      collect it in their own way, and to pay it into the king’s exchequer by
      the hands of their own bailiff, and being thus altogether freed from the
      insolence of the king’s officers; a circumstance in those days regarded as
      of the greatest importance.

      At first, the farm of the town was probably let to the burghers, in the
      same manner as it had been to other farmers, for a term of years only. In
      process of time, however, it seems to have become the general practice to
      grant it to them in fee, that is for ever, reserving a rent certain, never
      afterwards to be augmented. The payment having thus become perpetual, the
      exemptions, in return, for which it was made, naturally became perpetual
      too. Those exemptions, therefore, ceased to be personal, and could not
      afterwards be considered as belonging to individuals, as individuals, but
      as burghers of a particular burgh, which, upon this account, was called a
      free burgh, for the same reason that they had been called free burghers or
      free traders.

      Along with this grant, the important privileges, above mentioned, that
      they might give away their own daughters in marriage, that their children
      should succeed to them, and that they might dispose of their own effects
      by will, were generally bestowed upon the burghers of the town to whom it
      was given. Whether such privileges had before been usually granted, along
      with the freedom of trade, to particular burghers, as individuals, I know
      not. I reckon it not improbable that they were, though I cannot produce
      any direct evidence of it. But however this may have been, the principal
      attributes of villanage and slavery being thus taken away from them, they
      now at least became really free, in our present sense of the word freedom.

      Nor was this all. They were generally at the same time erected into a
      commonalty or corporation, with the privilege of having magistrates and a
      town-council of their own, of making bye-laws for their own government, of
      building walls for their own defence, and of reducing all their
      inhabitants under a sort of military discipline, by obliging them to watch
      and ward; that is, as anciently understood, to guard and defend those
      walls against all attacks and surprises, by night as well as by day. In
      England they were generally exempted from suit to the hundred and county
      courts: and all such pleas as should arise among them, the pleas of the
      crown excepted, were left to the decision of their own magistrates. In
      other countries, much greater and more extensive jurisdictions were
      frequently granted to them. {See Madox, Firma Burgi. See also Pfeffel in
      the Remarkable events under Frederick II. and his Successors of the House
      of Suabia.}

      It might, probably, be necessary to grant to such towns as were admitted
      to farm their own revenues, some sort of compulsive jurisdiction to oblige
      their own citizens to make payment. In those disorderly times, it might
      have been extremely inconvenient to have left them to seek this sort of
      justice from any other tribunal. But it must seem extraordinary, that the
      sovereigns of all the different countries of Europe should have exchanged
      in this manner for a rent certain, never more to be augmented, that branch
      of their revenue, which was, perhaps, of all others, the most likely to be
      improved by the natural course of things, without either expense or
      attention of their own; and that they should, besides, have in this manner
      voluntarily erected a sort of independent republics in the heart of their
      own dominions.

      In order to understand this, it must be remembered, that, in those days,
      the sovereign of perhaps no country in Europe was able to protect, through
      the whole extent of his dominions, the weaker part of his subjects from
      the oppression of the great lords. Those whom the law could not protect,
      and who were not strong enough to defend themselves, were obliged either
      to have recourse to the protection of some great lord, and in order to
      obtain it, to become either his slaves or vassals; or to enter into a
      league of mutual defence for the common protection of one another. The
      inhabitants of cities and burghs, considered as single individuals, had no
      power to defend themselves; but by entering into a league of mutual
      defence with their neighbours, they were capable of making no contemptible
      resistance. The lords despised the burghers, whom they considered not only
      as a different order, but as a parcel of emancipated slaves, almost of a
      different species from themselves. The wealth of the burghers never failed
      to provoke their envy and indignation, and they plundered them upon every
      occasion without mercy or remorse. The burghers naturally hated and feared
      the lords. The king hated and feared them too; but though, perhaps, he
      might despise, he had no reason either to hate or fear the burghers.
      Mutual interest, therefore, disposed them to support the king, and the
      king to support them against the lords. They were the enemies of his
      enemies, and it was his interest to render them as secure and independent
      of those enemies as he could. By granting them magistrates of their own,
      the privilege of making bye-laws for their own government, that of
      building walls for their own defence, and that of reducing all their
      inhabitants under a sort of military discipline, he gave them all the
      means of security and independency of the barons which it was in his power
      to bestow. Without the establishment of some regular government of this
      kind, without some authority to compel their inhabitants to act according
      to some certain plan or system, no voluntary league of mutual defence
      could either have afforded them any permanent security, or have enabled
      them to give the king any considerable support. By granting them the farm
      of their own town in fee, he took away from those whom he wished to have
      for his friends, and, if one may say so, for his allies, all ground of
      jealousy and suspicion, that he was ever afterwards to oppress them,
      either by raising the farm-rent of their town, or by granting it to some
      other farmer.

      The princes who lived upon the worst terms with their barons, seem
      accordingly to have been the most liberal in grants of this kind to their
      burghs. King John of England, for example, appears to have been a most
      munificent benefactor to his towns. {See Madox.} Philip I. of France lost
      all authority over his barons. Towards the end of his reign, his son
      Lewis, known afterwards by the name of Lewis the Fat, consulted, according
      to Father Daniel, with the bishops of the royal demesnes, concerning the
      most proper means of restraining the violence of the great lords. Their
      advice consisted of two different proposals. One was to erect a new order
      of jurisdiction, by establishing magistrates and a town-council in every
      considerable town of his demesnes. The other was to form a new militia, by
      making the inhabitants of those towns, under the command of their own
      magistrates, march out upon proper occasions to the assistance of the
      king. It is from this period, according to the French antiquarians, that
      we are to date the institution of the magistrates and councils of cities
      in France. It was during the unprosperous reigns of the princes of the
      house of Suabia, that the greater part of the free towns of Germany
      received the first grants of their privileges, and that the famous
      Hanseatic league first became formidable. {See Pfeffel.}

      The militia of the cities seems, in those times, not to have been inferior
      to that of the country; and as they could be more readily assembled upon
      any sudden occasion, they frequently had the advantage in their disputes
      with the neighbouring lords. In countries such as Italy or Switzerland, in
      which, on account either of their distance from the principal seat of
      government, of the natural strength of the country itself, or of some
      other reason, the sovereign came to lose the whole of his authority; the
      cities generally became independent republics, and conquered all the
      nobility in their neighbourhood; obliging them to pull down their castles
      in the country, and to live, like other peaceable inhabitants, in the
      city. This is the short history of the republic of Berne, as well as of
      several other cities in Switzerland. If you except Venice, for of that
      city the history is somewhat different, it is the history of all the
      considerable Italian republics, of which so great a number arose and
      perished between the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the sixteenth
      century.

      In countries such as France and England, where the authority of the
      sovereign, though frequently very low, never was destroyed altogether, the
      cities had no opportunity of becoming entirely independent. They became,
      however, so considerable, that the sovereign could impose no tax upon
      them, besides the stated farm-rent of the town, without their own consent.
      They were, therefore, called upon to send deputies to the general assembly
      of the states of the kingdom, where they might join with the clergy and
      the barons in granting, upon urgent occasions, some extraordinary aid to
      the king. Being generally, too, more favourable to his power, their
      deputies seem sometimes to have been employed by him as a counterbalance
      in those assemblies to the authority of the great lords. Hence the origin
      of the representation of burghs in the states-general of all great
      monarchies in Europe.

      Order and good government, and along with them the liberty and security of
      individuals, were in this manner established in cities, at a time when the
      occupiers of land in the country, were exposed to every sort of violence.
      But men in this defenceless state naturally content themselves with their
      necessary subsistence; because, to acquire more, might only tempt the
      injustice of their oppressors. On the contrary, when they are secure of
      enjoying the fruits of their industry, they naturally exert it to better
      their condition, and to acquire not only the necessaries, but the
      conveniencies and elegancies of life. That industry, therefore, which aims
      at something more than necessary subsistence, was established in cities
      long before it was commonly practised by the occupiers of land in the
      country. If, in the hands of a poor cultivator, oppressed with the
      servitude of villanage, some little stock should accumulate, he would
      naturally conceal it with great care from his master, to whom it would
      otherwise have belonged, and take the first opportunity of running away to
      a town. The law was at that time so indulgent to the inhabitants of towns,
      and so desirous of diminishing the authority of the lords over those of
      the country, that if he could conceal himself there from the pursuit of
      his lord for a year, he was free for ever. Whatever stock, therefore,
      accumulated in the hands of the industrious part of the inhabitants of the
      country, naturally took refuge in cities, as the only sanctuaries in which
      it could be secure to the person that acquired it.

      The inhabitants of a city, it is true, must always ultimately derive their
      subsistence, and the whole materials and means of their industry, from the
      country. But those of a city, situated near either the sea-coast or the
      banks of a navigable river, are not necessarily confined to derive them
      from the country in their neighbourhood. They have a much wider range, and
      may draw them from the most remote corners of the world, either in
      exchange for the manufactured produce of their own industry, or by
      performing the office of carriers between distant countries, and
      exchanging the produce of one for that of another. A city might, in this
      manner, grow up to great wealth and splendour, while not only the country
      in its neighbourhood, but all those to which it traded, were in poverty
      and wretchedness. Each of those countries, perhaps, taken singly, could
      afford it but a small part, either of its subsistence or of its
      employment; but all of them taken together, could afford it both a great
      subsistence and a great employment. There were, however, within the narrow
      circle of the commerce of those times, some countries that were opulent
      and industrious. Such was the Greek empire as long as it subsisted, and
      that of the Saracens during the reigns of the Abassides. Such, too, was
      Egypt till it was conquered by the Turks, some part of the coast of
      Barbary, and all those provinces of Spain which were under the government
      of the Moors.

      The cities of Italy seem to have been the first in Europe which were
      raised by commerce to any considerable degree of opulence. Italy lay in
      the centre of what was at that time the improved and civilized part of the
      world. The crusades, too, though, by the great waste of stock and
      destruction of inhabitants which they occasioned, they must necessarily
      have retarded the progress of the greater part of Europe, were extremely
      favourable to that of some Italian cities. The great armies which marched
      from all parts to the conquest of the Holy Land, gave extraordinary
      encouragement to the shipping of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, sometimes in
      transporting them thither, and always in supplying them with provisions.
      They were the commissaries, if one may say so, of those armies; and the
      most destructive frenzy that ever befel the European nations, was a source
      of opulence to those republics.

      The inhabitants of trading cities, by importing the improved manufactures
      and expensive luxuries of richer countries, afforded some food to the
      vanity of the great proprietors, who eagerly purchased them with great
      quantities of the rude produce of their own lands. The commerce of a great
      part of Europe in those times, accordingly, consisted chiefly in the
      exchange of their own rude, for the manufactured produce of more civilized
      nations. Thus the wool of England used to be exchanged for the wines of
      France, and the fine cloths of Flanders, in the same manner as the corn in
      Poland is at this day, exchanged for the wines and brandies of France, and
      for the silks and velvets of France and Italy.

      A taste for the finer and more improved manufactures was, in this manner,
      introduced by foreign commerce into countries where no such works were
      carried on. But when this taste became so general as to occasion a
      considerable demand, the merchants, in order to save the expense of
      carriage, naturally endeavoured to establish some manufactures of the same
      kind in their own country. Hence the origin of the first manufactures for
      distant sale, that seem to have been established in the western provinces
      of Europe, after the fall of the Roman empire.

      No large country, it must be observed, ever did or could subsist without
      some sort of manufactures being carried on in it; and when it is said of
      any such country that it has no manufactures, it must always be understood
      of the finer and more improved, or of such as are fit for distant sale. In
      every large country both the clothing and household furniture or the far
      greater part of the people, are the produce of their own industry. This is
      even more universally the case in those poor countries which are commonly
      said to have no manufactures, than in those rich ones that are said to
      abound in them. In the latter you will generally find, both in the clothes
      and household furniture of the lowest rank of people, a much greater
      proportion of foreign productions than in the former.

      Those manufactures which are fit for distant sale, seem to have been
      introduced into different countries in two different ways.

      Sometimes they have been introduced in the manner above mentioned, by the
      violent operation, if one may say so, of the stocks of particular
      merchants and undertakers, who established them in imitation of some
      foreign manufactures of the same kind. Such manufactures, therefore, are
      the offspring of foreign commerce; and such seem to have been the ancient
      manufactures of silks, velvets, and brocades, which flourished in Lucca
      during the thirteenth century. They were banished from thence by the
      tyranny of one of Machiavel’s heroes, Castruccio Castracani. In 1310, nine
      hundred families were driven out of Lucca, of whom thirty-one retired to
      Venice, and offered to introduce there the silk manufacture. {See Sandi
      Istoria civile de Vinezia, part 2 vol. i, page 247 and 256.} Their offer
      was accepted, many privileges were conferred upon them, and they began the
      manufacture with three hundred workmen. Such, too, seem to have been the
      manufactures of fine cloths that anciently flourished in Flanders, and
      which were introduced into England in the beginning of the reign of
      Elizabeth, and such are the present silk manufactures of Lyons and
      Spitalfields. Manufactures introduced in this manner are generally
      employed upon foreign materials, being imitations of foreign manufactures.
      When the Venetian manufacture was first established, the materials were
      all brought from Sicily and the Levant. The more ancient manufacture of
      Lucca was likewise carried on with foreign materials. The cultivation of
      mulberry trees, and the breeding of silk-worms, seem not to have been
      common in the northern parts of Italy before the sixteenth century. Those
      arts were not introduced into France till the reign of Charles IX. The
      manufactures of Flanders were carried on chiefly with Spanish and English
      wool. Spanish wool was the material, not of the first woollen manufacture
      of England, but of the first that was fit for distant sale. More than one
      half the materials of the Lyons manufacture is at this day foreign silk;
      when it was first established, the whole, or very nearly the whole, was
      so. No part of the materials of the Spitalfields manufacture is ever
      likely to be the produce of England. The seat of such manufactures, as
      they are generally introduced by the scheme and project of a few
      individuals, is sometimes established in a maritime city, and sometimes in
      an inland town, according as their interest, judgment, or caprice, happen
      to determine.

      At other times, manufactures for distant sale grow up naturally, and as it
      were of their own accord, by the gradual refinement of those household and
      coarser manufactures which must at all times be carried on even in the
      poorest and rudest countries. Such manufactures are generally employed
      upon the materials which the country produces, and they seem frequently to
      have been first refined and improved in such inland countries as were not,
      indeed, at a very great, but at a considerable distance from the
      sea-coast, and sometimes even from all water carriage. An inland country,
      naturally fertile and easily cultivated, produces a great surplus of
      provisions beyond what is necessary for maintaining the cultivators; and
      on account of the expense of land carriage, and inconveniency of river
      navigation, it may frequently be difficult to send this surplus abroad.
      Abundance, therefore, renders provisions cheap, and encourages a great
      number of workmen to settle in the neighbourhood, who find that their
      industry can there procure them more of the necessaries and conveniencies
      of life than in other places. They work up the materials of manufacture
      which the land produces, and exchange their finished work, or, what is the
      same thing, the price of it, for more materials and provisions. They give
      a new value to the surplus part of the rude produce, by saving the expense
      of carrying it to the water-side, or to some distant market; and they
      furnish the cultivators with something in exchange for it that is either
      useful or agreeable to them, upon easier terms than they could have
      obtained it before. The cultivators get a better price for their surplus
      produce, and can purchase cheaper other conveniencies which they have
      occasion for. They are thus both encouraged and enabled to increase this
      surplus produce by a further improvement and better cultivation of the
      land; and as the fertility of the land had given birth to the manufacture,
      so the progress of the manufacture re-acts upon the land, and increases
      still further its fertility. The manufacturers first supply the
      neighbourhood, and afterwards, as their work improves and refines, more
      distant markets. For though neither the rude produce, nor even the coarse
      manufacture, could, without the greatest difficulty, support the expense
      of a considerable land-carriage, the refined and improved manufacture
      easily may. In a small bulk it frequently contains the price of a great
      quantity of rude produce. A piece of fine cloth, for example which weighs
      only eighty pounds, contains in it the price, not only of eighty pounds
      weight of wool, but sometimes of several thousand weight of corn, the
      maintenance of the different working people, and of their immediate
      employers. The corn which could with difficulty have been carried abroad
      in its own shape, is in this manner virtually exported in that of the
      complete manufacture, and may easily be sent to the remotest corners of
      the world. In this manner have grown up naturally, and, as it were, of
      their own accord, the manufactures of Leeds, Halifax, Sheffield,
      Birmingham, and Wolverhampton. Such manufactures are the offspring of
      agriculture. In the modern history of Europe, their extension and
      improvement have generally been posterior to those which were the
      offspring of foreign commerce. England was noted for the manufacture of
      fine cloths made of Spanish wool, more than a century before any of those
      which now flourish in the places above mentioned were fit for foreign
      sale. The extension and improvement of these last could not take place but
      in consequence of the extension and improvement of agriculture, the last
      and greatest effect of foreign commerce, and of the manufactures
      immediately introduced by it, and which I shall now proceed to explain.
