What Actually Made a Settlement a ‘Town’?
What actually made a medieval settlement a “town” rather than an overgrown village? Not size, as it turns out — it was the market.
The defining feature was having one or more permanent, year-round markets, with guild self-regulation as the other big tell. A large village might hold a market once or twice a year, usually on its patron saint’s feast day, but a proper market town of a thousand-plus people held far more frequent regional markets, drawing goods from perhaps fifteen or more farming villages within a day’s travel by laden cart — roughly seven miles. True cities were vanishingly rare: one historian reckoned there were only six or seven Western European towns above 50,000 people in the year 1300, against roughly a hundred towns sitting in the more modest 5,000-to-10,000 bracket.
Towns grew from a genuinely varied set of starting points. Some evolved from old Roman street grids; others clustered around a bishop and his cathedral after Rome’s collapse, since bishops stepped into the resulting power vacuum as urban leaders; still others grew up around a monastery’s gates, which tended to produce a distinctly different, more radial street plan than the Roman grid towns. Then came the 9th and 10th centuries, when Viking raiders along the coasts and rivers, and Muslim raiders around the Mediterranean, hit most population centres at least once — the towns that hadn’t kept their fortifications in good repair paid the heaviest price, and simply contracted down to a smaller, more defensible core.
It’s a useful bit of scaffolding for anyone building a fictional town from scratch: start with the market, work outward, and remember that “town” was always more a legal and economic category than a simple matter of headcount.
Discover The Draychester Chronicles medieval mystery series on Amazon.