Scattered broadcast over the territory of every medieval
state are towns endowed with special privileges, and ruled by special
magistrates. Some of these towns - particularly in Italy, Southern France, and
the Rhineland - stand on the sites, and even within the walls, of ancient municipia,
those miniature Homes which the statecraft of the Empire had created as seats
of government and schools of culture. But, even in Italy, the medieval town is
indebted to classical antiquity for nothing more than mouldering walls and
aqueducts and amphitheatres and churches. The barbarians had ignored the
institutions of the municipium, though it often served them as a
fortress or a royal residence or a centre of administration.
The citizens were
degraded to the level of serfs; they became the property of a king, a bishop,
or a count, and were governed by a bailiff presiding over a seignorial court. Only
at the close of the Dark Ages, with the development of handicrafts and a commercial
class, was it found necessary to distinguish between the town and the manorial
village; and to a much later time the small town preserved the characteristics
of an agricultural society. Many a burgess supplemented the profits of a trade
by tilling acres in the common fields and grazing cattle on the common
pastures; pigs and poultry scavenged in the streets; the farmyard was a usual
adjunct of the burgage tenement. Whether small or great, the town was a
phenomenon sufficiently unfamiliar to vex the soul of lawyers reared upon
Teutonic custom. They recognised that they were dealing with a new form of community;
but they were not prepared to define it or to generalise about it. They
preferred to treat each town as sui generis, an awkward anomaly, a
privileged abuse.
