Medieval Cities

As I was reading over the section on this history of social welfare and the religious roots of social work I was reminded of an old book by Henri Pirenne (1862-1935) called Medieval Cities (in a 1925 English translation made by Frank D. Halsey).

I think I'll share some passages from pages 143-150 of my edition of the book. Henri Pirenne thought very highly of the organization of the cities of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. According to him, by the fourteenth century the situation he describes here was lost, and people were exploiting each other and fighting each other in cities.


. . . The peace (of the city), on the other hand, contributed largely in making the city a commune. It has, in effect, the oath as its sanction. It supposed a conjuratio of all the city population. And the oath taken by the burgher was not confined to a simple promise of obedience to municipal authority,. It involved strict obligations and imposed a strict duty to maintain and respect the peace. Every juratus—that is to say, every burgher sworn—was obliged to lend a helping hand to any burgher calling for help. Thus the peace created, among its members, a permanent solidarity. Hence the term “brothers” by which they were sometimes designated, or the word amicitia used at Lille, for example, as synonym for pax. And since the peace covered the whole city population, the later, therefore, was a commune. The very names which the municipal magistrates bore in a number of places—”warders of the peace” at Verdun, “reward of friendship” at Lille, “jurors of the peace” at Valenciennes, Cambrai, and many other cities—make it easy to see the close relationship between the peace and the commune. . . .

. . . Taxes, naturally, provided the means of securing the needed resources. To subject the taxpayers thereto, recourse had to be had to compulsion. Everyone was obliged to participate, according to his means, in the expenses incurred in the interests of all. Whoever refused to support the charges which they involved was barred from the city. The latter was therefore a commune, an obligatory association, a moral personality. . . .

. . . The [town] council carried on the routine administration. It had charge of finances, commerce, and industry. It ordered and supervised public works, organized the provisioning of the city, regulated the equipment and the deportment of the communal army, founded schools for children, provided for the upkeep of almshouses for the old and the poor. The statutes it degreed formed a genuine body of municipal legislation of which there existed, north of the Alps, scarcely any prior to the thirteenth century. . . .

. . . In the first, taxes were merely a fiscal pre-station, an established and perpetual obligation taking no count of the means of the taxpayer, bearing down only on the people, and the proceeds of which were added to the demesnial resources of the prince or seigneur who collected them, without any part of them being directly appropriate for the public interest. The second, on the contrary, recognized neither exceptions nor privileges. All burghers, enjoying equally the advantages of the commune, were equally obligated to contribute towards the expenses. The quota of each was in proportion to his means. At the start it was generally calculated on the basis of income. Many cities kept consistently to this practice up the end of the Middle Ages. . .
. . . But this city-excise was in no way connected with the old market-tolls. It was as flexible as the latter were strict, as variable in accordance with the circumstances of the needs of the public as the latter were immutable. But whatever might be the form they took, the proceeds of these taxes were entirely devoted to the needs of the commune. By the end of the twelfth century, a fiscal system had been developed and at this era can be discovered the first traces of municipal accounts.. . .

. . . The city economy was worthy of the Gothic architecture with which it was contemporary. It created with complete thoroughness—and, it may well be said, it created it ex nihilo—a social legislation more complete than that of any other period in history, including our own. In doing away with the middlemen between buyer and seller, it assured to the burgher the benefit of a low cost of living; it ruthlessly pursued fraud, protected the worker from competition and exploitation, regulated his labor and his wage, watched over his health, provided for apprenticeship, forbade women-and child-labor, and at the same time succeeded in keeping in its own hands the monopoly of furnishing the neighboring country with its products and in opening up distant markets for its trade.
All this would have been impossible if the civic spirit of the burghers had not been equal to the tasks that were laid upon them. It is necessary, in fact, to go back to antiquity to find as much devotion to the public good as that of which they had given proof. Unus subseviet alteri tamquam fratri suo—”let each help the other like a brother”— says a Flemish charter of the twelfth century, and these words were actually a reality. As early as the twelfth century the merchants were expending a good part of their profits for the benefit of their fellow citizens—building churches, founding hospitals, buying off the market-tolls. The love of gain was allied, in them, with local patriotism. Every man was proud of his city and spontaneously devoted himself to its prosperity. This was because, in reality, each individual life depended directly upon the collective life of the municipal association. The commune of the MIddle Ages has, in fact, all the essential attributes which the state exercises today. It guaranteed to all its members the security of his person and of his chattels. . . .