Urbanisation

By the close of the thirteenth century, the population of England had reached or was close to its medieval peak. Although there is no unanimity as to the precise magnitude, it is widely believed that there were more people in the country c. 1300 than there were to be for some 300 years thereafter and perhaps considerably longer. Until comparatively recently it has been a commonplace to stress the overwhelmingly rural nature of that population and of the economy which sustained it, and the most influential writer on the medieval English economy, M. M. Postan, has stressed the fragile nature of the ecological balance within which it operated, portraying the relation between people and resources in neo-Malthusian terms. New research directions since the 1970s have substantially modified that picture, placing increased emphasis upon the adaptive and innovative character of pre-Black Death England, and upon the degree to which its economy had developed a commercialised character. Parallels are sought with the England of the later sixteenth century, and continuities in the fundamentals of economic and social life receive increasing stress. England's towns c. 1300 were bigger than previously thought, and its agrarian base more varied and responsive to the stimulus provided by concentrated market demand. Consequently, the interrelations of town and country have assumed greater significance and are viewed in a more dynamic light, with greater emphasis placed upon interconnection and mutual stimuli.

Introduction

Town-country relations in the Austrian and Czech lands offer a study in contrasts. Urban densities in most regions were high, but towns were on the whole rather small. The legal status of towns was of the utmost importance. Princely towns usually enjoyed a set of privileges vis-à-vis the countryside, which they tried to defend against the growing competition of feudal towns and markets. Political and jurisdictional differences mattered. They determined not only the absolute and relative levels of taxation across towns and between town and country, but also the towns’ powers over the countryside, including their marketing rights and industrial monopolies, the extent of commercial integration within and between regions, and the central state's ability to negotiate reductions in local privileges. This chapter therefore focuses on the economic consequences of political and institutional relations between towns, feudal lords and the central state from a regional perspective under three headings.

After an introductory section describing urban size and networks in the area, the first main part discusses the long-term characteristics of town–country relations in the context of the struggle between feudal lords and the expansionary state, in which town and countryside participated as secondary actors. The second section examines the long period of demographic and economic expansion between the late medieval and seventeenth-century crises. The most salient feature of the period was the growth of industrial activities, particularly in the textile and mining sectors, in which both town and country played active roles.

Hierarchies and distinctions

Walls separated town and country through much of the early modern period. Walls not only protected towns, they also helped give them a sense of autonomy and identity. By the eighteenth century, when many French cities had lost their walls and all had lost their autonomy, the town walls do not seem to have much relevance. But an important study of late medieval towns argues for the distinctive social and political roles that walls gave the bonnes villes in an age of endemic war and political chaos. Walls made a town into a military force, at a time when the monarchy could often barely assemble an army. Towns used their walls to divide the world up between what was ‘polite’, ‘policed’, ‘civilised’, ‘urbane’ – all words etymologically linked to towns – and what was not. Towns used their walls to order themselves internally – into guilds and confraternities, but also into a political and civic unity. The town walls, and the bonnes villes they created, did not last through the early modern period. A study of Toulouse, for example, charts the slow death of this civic identity, as power and public ritual were gradually usurped by royal officials in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the same time, the decline of town walls through the early modern period coincided with the increasing integration of town and countryside, as towns exerted greater influence over their hinterlands economically, judicially and culturally.

Introduction

The sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century was a period of expansion for most Dutch towns. By 1650, approximately 42 per cent of the almost 2 million inhabitants of the northern Netherlands lived in towns numbering at least 2,500. Urban concentrations were strongest in the maritime western provinces; in the province of Holland alone, which included about two-fifths of the total Dutch population, the proportion living in towns came to 61 per cent. Although inland the population was less concentrated, the overall rate of urbanisation (taking 2,500 as the urban threshold) was still between 20 and 30 per cent.

Most historians link seventeenth-century Dutch wealth and power to the simultaneous rise of trade and the political co-operation of Holland's urban elites. The countryside is seen as being carried along with the towns, with a similar display of rising commercialisation and specialisation and a general increase in labour productivity. What this picture leaves out is the relation between town and country and, more specifically, the control exerted by Dutch towns over their surrounding countryside. Most urban histories treat the towns as if they were islands and leave out the surrounding hinterland, whereas agrarian historians generally evade the issue of urban control. Both the dominance of urban elites in ‘high politics’ and the countryside's prosperity are taken for granted, even though the extensive privileges and political rights towns were often directed against rural trade and industry.

It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that Swiss historians began to turn their attention to the relationship between town and country. The first systematic studies by Frantisek Graus on the late middle ages and Jean-François Bergier on the early modern period focused on the ambivalence of the concept of a ‘town’, the demographic differences between town and country, the shifting legal relationships between town- and country-dwellers, the economic dependence of farmers and handicraft workers on town markets, and urban territorial policy. Whereas Graus stressed the underlying persistence of the feudal hierarchy, the development of rural resistance to urban domination and the unstable antidynastic alliances between peasants and townsmen, Bergier set out a series of analytical contrasts – espace rural versus tissu urbain, symbiosis versus dependence – to express the townsmen's economic domination of rural areas through control over the labour market and over foreign mercenary services, over the putting-out system and rural credit, and, more generally, their legal and administrative centrality. Both authors drew attention to the fact that the sources tend to show us the countryside through urban eyes rather than vice versa. Late medieval observers tended either to idealise or to demonise the urban environment, while descriptions of Switzerland by early modern travellers often failed to distinguish clearly between town and country.

‘Town and country’ is among the most abiding metaphors of economic and social development in the past. Relations between town and country are central to several of the most significant ‘grand narratives’ in economic history, including the extension of markets, the rise of capitalism, and the growth of modern manufacture. The metaphor's success is partly dependent on its deceptively simple dichotomy, which is apparent in the very etymology of the term ‘country’: originating in the late Latin contrata, meaning ‘that which lies opposite’, the term subsequently took on in opposition to ‘town’ the meaning of ‘those parts of a region distant from cities or courts’. From its very origin, country came to signify what ‘townness’ was not – a residual meaning, so to speak, which raises the fundamental problem of defining what a town is.

The considerable geographical and historical variation between towns in terms of size, function (industrial, commercial, administrative and cultural), and political and institutional features, makes clear and unambiguous definitions hard to come by. Most historians have chosen either a demographic or a functional definition depending on the questions they wished to answer. The approach pioneered by E. A. Wrigley, Jan de Vries and Paul Bairoch defines urbanity in strictly demographic terms as centres with more than 5,000 or 10,000 inhabitants.

Introduction

During the fourteenth century new prospects opened up for east-central Europe. Poland, Bohemia, Hungary and Lithuania underwent intensive economic development, consolidated and strengthened their polities, and initiated a period of external expansion. In 1340 the newly united Polish state began a struggle to succeed the disintegrating duchies of the western Rus’. Lithuania gained vast tracts of the northern Rus’ and Kievan Duchy. A union between Poland and Lithuania, formed in 1385 and made permanent in 1569, created one of the biggest states in Europe at the time, known as the Commonwealth of the Two Nations, which by 1500 covered 1,140,000 km2, of which the territory of the Polish crown accounted for only 255,000 km2. The Commonwealth extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea and from the Carpathian mountains to the outskirts of Moscow. It formed a vast cultural frontier between the Latin West and the Byzantine and Orthodox East, and after the Turks expanded into Europe it also became a gate to the Muslim world. The Commonwealth also displayed considerable internal diversity. Poland, especially its eastern lands, included a particularly heterogeneous mixture of ethnic groups, religions and cultures, with corresponding differences in development ranging from simple barter economies to sophisticated forms of market exchange.

Although Poland was rich in land, this was not the main source of the country's wealth. The most important natural resource for a feudal economy was men, and Poland was one of the most sparsely populated countries in Europe.

The history of early modern southern Italy or Mezzogiorno has been read since the eighteenth century in terms of a contrast between the capital, Naples, the seat of royal authority and of the supreme magistracies, a centre for the development of a powerful bureaucracy, and a cultural pole endowed with a university, museums and libraries, and the provinces, viewed as a vast countryside oppressed by feudal powers. This dualism has been a matter of debate since 1734, when Naples became the residence of an independent monarchy after more than two centuries of foreign domination. The city was praised as the expression of a new reforming central power, but its provincial hegemony was denounced as the cause, together with feudal oppression, of the country's economic retardation. Nineteenth-century historiography tended to continue this polemic, which was further nourished by the way the Neapolitan Republic of 1799 opposed the martyrs of the Revolution, children of the Enlightenment, to the provincial counter-revolutionaries whom it saw as avenging centuries of rural subordination to the capital's interests, exigencies and exploitation.

In the light of this historiographic tradition, relations between town and countryside have attracted little attention and have been largely ignored; discussion tends to focus on Neapolitan domination of a poorly differentiated provincial ‘country’.

Urban size and networks

In the course of the seventeenth century Sweden became one of the great European powers. Among the reasons for the country's military success was the administrative efficiency of the Swedish state, led by king and nobility in unison. The government had previously aimed to modernise society, and among its targets had been the urban system, including not only the towns but also relations between towns and their hinterland. This chapter discusses the urban policy of the Swedish state and its effects on town–country relations from the fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. It examines the division of labour and interactions between town and country and the institutional framework in which relations took place, including the character and consequences of town policy. The discussion ends with the first half of the seventeenth century, when the urban system within the old Swedish territory was extensively transformed and the borders of the Swedish realm changed.

Sweden was one of the least urbanised countries in Europe until the end of the nineteenth century. As late as 1850, less than 10 per cent of the population lived in towns and half of the towns had fewer than 1,500 people. While this implies a fortiori that early modern Sweden was a relatively backward country, it also reflects the country's vast size and high transport costs, which made it difficult to support a high level of urbanisation.

Introduction

Although it is easy to see retrospectively that the foundations for the state that came to be known as the Dutch Republic were laid during the late middle ages, as late as 1550 no one could have imagined its coming into being, let alone predicted its territorial composition and boundaries. Until the 1540s the driving force of state formation had been the conscious assemblage of principalities in the area of the Low Countries by the dukes of Burgundy and their successors, the Habsburg emperors of Germany. The process began with Philip the Bold entering into possession of the County of Flanders in 1384, and it ended with the submission of the duchy of Guelders to Charles V in 1543. The County of Holland that is the subject of this chapter was added to the Burgundian multiple state in 1428, when Duke Philip the Good successfully intervened in the protracted civil war between Jacqueline and John of Bavaria, the German house that had ruled Holland from 1349.

The focus on the County of Holland, which was only one of the seven provinces later to constitute the Dutch Republic, suffers to some extent from a retrospective bias. In the Republic's Golden Age, Holland's demographic, economic and political preponderance was overwhelming. In 1622 more than 40 per cent of the Republic's population lived in Holland alone. Regional patterns of urbanisation were even more skewed.

Introduction

The pattern of town–country relations in the German-speaking lands from the Alps to the North Sea from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries displayed a greater variety than in any other part of Europe. It ranged from fully-fledged city-states in the Swiss Confederation, sovereign principalities in their own right, to spheres of regional economic influence in the southern Low Countries, where the leading cities dominated the economy of their hinterlands without achieving exclusive jurisdiction. Across this spectrum the cities of Germany were located at intermediate points. Some, such as Nuremberg, attempted to acquire land which would directly serve their commercial interests as a source of labour or raw materials; others, such as Augsburg or Cologne, came to dominate the economies of their hinterlands in the organisation of production and distribution without ever amassing a landed territory of any size. Nuremberg was a city-state in all but name; Augsburg and Cologne echoed the regional economic sway exercised by the Flemish cities.

In either dimension, cities were concerned to extend their centrality – whether jurisdictional, political, economic, or social – over their surrounding countryside, in other words to establish a hierarchy of influence or dependence. But it should not be forgotten that relations between town and country were shaped by co-operation between cities as well as by competition. This, too, was a particular feature of the German-speaking lands, reflected in both political and commercial alliances.

Introduction

By European standards, late sixteenth-century England was lightly urbanised; London aside, a land of small towns. Two centuries later England had become entrained in urban growth that was without European parallel. This transformation raises many questions about the town–country relations and the economic and cultural context within which it occurred.

Discussion of town–country relations involves tensions, sometimes contradictions, among themes of contrast (the divergent experiences of ‘town’ and ‘country’), diversity (a variety of experiences in particular places that undermines the categories ‘urban’ and ‘rural’) and integration (connections among places). There is no inevitability about how these themes are interrelated. For example, places frequently became increasingly differentiated as spatial divisions of labour increased within a more integrated economy, while other facets of spatial integration were associated with reduced diversity, such as the diffusion of more uniform attitudes to work or consumption. Moreover, a dualism of town and country may not provide the most important categories within which to analyse integration and differentiation. For example, analyses of industrial change may reject perspectives based on competition between urban and rural industries, in favour of an emphasis on changing regional town-country networks, and the intertwining of urban and rural life.

The chapter is divided into four main sections. The first section examines institutional factors bearing on town-country relations and regional economic change in early modern England, which have a lower historiographical profile than in continental Europe.

Introduction

The long transition in central and northern Italy from independent city-states to larger territorial states between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries entrenched major institutional disparities in territorial organisation between regions and within the confines of the same state. A multi-faceted institutional geography was established based upon a variable combination of jurisdictional prerogatives, fiscal policies and commercial and manufacturing regulations. These configurations, whose outlines emerged for the most part during the politically and militarily fraught later middle ages, were frequently renegotiated between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries in response to shifts in the balance of power. Demographic change – periods of sustained population increase or, alternatively, a phase of sharp mortality crises – and economic developments – for example, manufacturing success or decline – could give rise to friction within the existing institutional set-up, or, conversely, changes in the institutional status quo could improve conditions for manufacturing activities and demographic growth. Thus, the interplay of political and economic agents and pressure groups, which jostled with each other to defend, extend or challenge the privileges and regulations inherited from the past, introduced an element of institutional dynamism. In some cases the state managed to impose a degree of centralisation and to simplify the institutional infrastructure, even at the cost of inhibiting local dynamism.