Receive, therefore, with eagerness, and study with cheerful diligence, these our laws, and show yourselves persons of such learning that you may conceive the flattering hope of yourselves being able, when your course of legal study is completed, to govern our empire in the different portions that may be entrusted to your care.

Given at Constantinople, on the eleventh day of the calends of December, in the third consulate of the Emperor Justinian, ever August (533).

94. The Early Medieval Town

(By Giry and Réville, in Lavisse et Rambaud's Histoire Générale; trans. by Bates and Titsworth, in their The Emancipation of the Medieval Towns. Henry Holt, New York, 1907. Reproduced by permission)

The following extract is a continuation of Reading 49, and describes briefly the formation of new towns and the condition. of towns-people down to the thirteenth century.

(a) To the Eleventh Century

Care should be taken not to overestimate the importance of the urban communities during the first centuries of the Middle Ages. They were more numerous than important, and it is probable that they were neither very populous nor very rich. In a backward state of civilization it is impossible for towns to develop. A large city can live only by the exchange of its products for those things which it does not produce but which are brought to it. Without commerce there can be no large cities. Now, in that obscure age which extends from the fifth to the tenth century, all commerce was reduced to an indispensable minimum, except during an ephemeral renaissance in the time of Charlemagne. Only the shores of the Mediterranean continued to be frequented by merchants, and the relations between Provence, Italy, Greece, and the Orient were never entirely broken. In consequence, the cities of that privileged region preserved, it seems, a commercial class and a certain degree of prosperity. Everywhere else commerce was nearly annihilated, because there was neither the security nor the centers of exchange which it needed. Each domain lived upon itself, was almost self-sufficient; made the iron, wood, and woolen articles it needed, as well as produced its own wheat. The towns probably did the same; they were rural bourgs, and the inhabitants were peasants who worked on the surrounding land. Besides, custom did not aid in their development. Kings, nobles, Gallo-Roman and Germanic proprietors preferred to live in the country; the towns were no longer the theater of great events.

It is difficult to form a clear picture of the urban groups at that time and of the people that composed them. The new small towns huddled

around the castles, abbeys, and churches. The old cities, once spacious, razed their former suburbs and restricted their limits so as to have less area to defend, as at Paris, Bordeaux, Evreux, Poitiers, and Sens. Roman monuments are discovered to-day outside the enclosures which these towns made for themselves at the time of the inva

sions. All towns, whenever possible, encircled themselves with ramparts, with embattled walls surrounded by moats, and armed their counterscarps with traps, abatis, and palisades. Inside the city the population, although not numerous, must have lived crowded together, as the architecture of the houses shows. The Roman dwelling was spread out in a comfortable way, with a large inner court, the atrium, and was generally low. Now the atrium was given up, filled in, and the roof rose high over a series of stories, which perhaps already were built so as to overhang, to gain still more room. As for monuments, the only ones which adorned the towns were those which the Romans had left. And sometimes even these were appropriated to strange uses, like the temple of Vesuna at Périgueux, which was changed into a tower for purposes of defense, or like the circus of Nimes, which sheltered a part of the inhabitants and formed a veritable "quarter." Sometimes, too, these monuments were destroyed that the materials might be used for other constructions, especially for fortifications.

Between the church and the seigniorial dwelling, which was usually built to one side upon a precipitous hill or upon an artificial mound, the townsman passed his monotonous life, happy when a private war or an incursion for pillage did not bring upon his house or upon him the horrors of assault. Of political rights, he had none. The lord or his officers ruled the inhabitants as masters, imposed dues upon them, arrested, and judged them. The civil condition of the inhabit

ants must also have grown harder. It seems, indeed, that the number of freemen had noticeably diminished in the towns as well as in the country. Perhaps the cities of the south, thanks to their privileged situation, may have escaped in part this social decline; but this decline was general in the north, where only those preserved their independence who made it their business to bear arms in the following of a seignior and to live at the expense of others.

Thus from the sixth to the tenth century, townsmen did not count in society. Bishop Adalberon, in a famous poem to King Robert, considered around him only two classes; churchmen and nobles, beneath whom, but very far beneath, were the commons who worked.

(b) By the Thirteenth Century

On the whole, nothing could be more variable, or diverse, than the condition of the towns in the middle of the thirteenth century. Diverse in their origin, some dated back to antiquity; others, born of the wretchedness of the times, during the ninth and tenth centuries, were slowly formed by continuous agglomeration about a monastery or castle; a goodly number were of recent and artificial formation and owed their existence to the intelligent initiative of a few barons. Diverse in their history, some sustained struggles that were prolonged and hard, and sometimes savage; many bought more privileges than they gained by conquest; certain ones neither had to fight nor spend money, and saw themselves granted privileges which they did not ask for. Diverse in their prerogatives, some became independent republics, others consular municipalities or sworn communes, free like the lords, and involved like them in the feudal hierarchy; some, finally, possessed liberties so strictly limited to the civil and administrative order that historians have made of them a separate class, under the name of towns of burgessy. These innumerable differences should not surprise us; it is the law of life and of progress. Societies, like species, become diversified as they develop.

Development, in fact, is the common characteristic of the history of urban populations of the Middle Ages; the variety of their development is infinite. Let us note the profound transformation they underwent. In place of small bourgs, continually narrowing their boundaries in order to have less to defend, and becoming depopulated through wars, pillage, and famines that commerce no longer mitigated, were substituted more numerous and larger towns, which outgrew their walls and had powerful suburbs, and in which, thanks to the impulse of industry and trade, inhabitants abounded. In place of miserable and servile populations succeeded new generations, which attained competence, sometimes wealth, and through competence liberty: personal and civil liberty always and everywhere; often also collective and political liberty, although in infinitely varied degrees and very unequally dis

tributed. The towns from the seventh to the tenth century seemed mute; a sepulchral atmosphere pervaded them. In the thirteenth century the cities hummed like hives. The streets were still narrow, irregular, and unsanitary, but they were teeming with life. Encumbering them were bales, baskets, venders crying their wares, and enormous signs swinging in the wind, which sometimes imperiled the safety of passers-by. It was a new civilization bursting into bloom. Splendid monuments arose, attesting the public prosperity and the genius of modest, unknown builders; romanesque and gothic churches lifted toward heaven their domes, campaniles, or spires; glorious belfries, which dominated and threatened their surroundings, awaiting the approaching time when the inimitable town halls, with their brilliant ornamentations of stone, should cause them to be forgotten. The town bell was the public voice of the city, as the church bell was the voice of souls. The city in the thirteenth century lived, spoke, and acted. It was a new factor in society. A heretofore unknown order, which grand and distant destinies awaited, was slowly growing. This order was the Third Estate.

95. An English Town Charter

(Gross, Charles, The Gild Merchant, vol. II, p. 244. Oxford, 1890) The following town charter, granted by Henry II (1154-89), to the town of Wallingford, England, is illustrative of these mediaval documents. Note the importance of the guild merchant in the government of the town and in freedom of travel.

Henry, by the grace of God, King of England, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, and Count of Anjou, . . . I command you that my burgesses of Wallingford shall have my secure peace through my whole land of England and Normandy, wherever they may be. And know that I have given and conceded to them forever all their liberties and laws and customs well and honorably, just as they had them best and most honorably in the time of King Edward, and in the time of my great grandfather King William, and of his son, the second King William, and in the time of King Henry, my grandfather; that is to say, that they should have freely the guild merchant with all its customs and laws, so that neither my bailiff nor any justice of mine should meddle with their guild; but only their own alderman and officer. And if my officers or any justice shall have brought suit against them in any plea or for any occasion or shall have wished to lead them into a suit, I forbid it, and require that they should not make defense in any manner, except in their own proper portmote. And if the reeve himself shall implead them on any occasion without an accuser, they shall not respond, and if on account of any transgression, or by a right judgment

any one of them shall have made forfeiture by a right consideration of the burgesses, to the reeve shall he pay it. I forbid, moreover, and require that there shall be no market in Crowmarsh, nor any merchant, unless he is in the guild of merchants; and if any one goes out from the borough of Wallingford and lives from the merchandise of the same Wallingford, I command that he should make the right guild of the merchants with the same burgesses, wherever he may be, within the borough or without. Know moreover, that I have given and conceded forever to all the men of Wallingford full quittance from my yearly rent, which they were accustomed to pay from the borough of Wallingford, that is to say, from that which pertains to me in the borough. All these laws and customs and liberties and quittances I give to them and concede forever, and all others which they are able to show that their ancestors had, freely, quietly, and honorably, just as my citizens of Winchester ever had them at the best; and this on account of the great service and labor which they sustained for me in the acquisition of my hereditary right in England. I concede to them, moreover, that wherever they shall go in their journeys as merchants, through my whole land of England and Normandy, Aquitaine and Anjou, "by water and by strand, by wood and by land," they shall be free from toll and passage fees, and from all customs and exactions; nor are they to be troubled in this respect by any one, under a penalty of £10. I forbid, moreover, and require under the same penalty, that the reeve of Wallingford shall not make any fine of scotale or New Year's gift from any one, and that he shall not establish any custom in Wallingford which shall injure the burgesses of the town. Of this grant and concession, the witnesses are Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury and others. Given at Oxford, the first day before the Ides of January.

96. Oath of a New Freeman in a Medieval Town (Sharpe, R.R., Calendar of Letter Books Preserved among the Archives of the Corporation of the City of London at the Guildhall, Letter Book D, p. 195. London, 1899-1912) Apprenticeship in England goes back to the thirteenth century. The regulations as to freemen, their oaths, and the number and conditions of apprenticeship were early prescribed. The following oath of a Freeman has been preserved at the Guildhall, in London, and dates from 1275.

Ye shall swear that ye shall be faithful and loyal unto our Lord the King, King of England . . . and the franchises and customs of the City ye shall maintain according to your power. . . . Ye shall take no apprentice for less than seven years, and ye shall cause him to be enrolled as such within the first year of your covenant, and at the end of his term, if he has well and loyally served you, you shall cause his