Walls surrounded almost all medieval towns and cities, and constant repair of these walls was usually the town’s greatest expense. Gates pierced the walls, and visitors waited at the gates to gain entrance to the town. Most streets in a medieval town were marketplaces as much as passages for transit. Poor people selling soap, candles, wooden dishes, and similar cheap products stood next to farmers from the surrounding countryside selling eggs, chickens, and vegetables. Because there was no way to preserve food easily, people — usually female family members or servants — had to shop every day, and the market was where they met their neighbors, exchanged information, and talked over recent events.
Some selling took place not in the open air but in the craftsman’s home. The family lived above the business on the second or third floor. As the business and the family expanded, additional stories were added. Second and third stories jutted out over the ground floor and thus over the street. Because the streets were narrow to begin with, houses lacked fresh air and light. Fire was a constant danger: houses were built close to one another, and fires spread rapidly.
Most medieval cities developed with little planning. As the population increased, space became increasingly limited. Air and water pollution presented serious problems. Horses and oxen, the chief means of transportation and power, dropped tons of dung on the streets every year. It was universal practice in the early towns to dump household waste, both animal and human, into the road in front of one’s house.
People of all sorts, from beggars to wealthy merchants, regularly rubbed shoulders in the narrow streets and alleys of crowded medieval cities. This interaction did not mean that people were unaware of social differences, however, because clothing clearly indicated social standing and sometimes occupation. Friars wore black, white, or gray woolen clothing that marked them as members of a particular religious order. Military men and servants who lived in noble households dressed in the nobles’ distinctive colors known as livery (LIH-
In the later Middle Ages, many cities attempted to make clothing distinctions a matter of law as well as of habit. City councils passed sumptuary laws that regulated the value of clothing and jewelry that people of different social groups could wear; only members of high social groups could wear velvet, satin, pearls, or fur, for example, or wear clothing embroidered with gold thread or dyed in colors that were especially expensive to produce. Along with enforcing social differences, sumptuary laws also attempted to impose moral standards by prohibiting plunging necklines on women or doublets (fitted buttoned jackets) that were too short on men. Their limits on imported fabrics or other materials also served to protect local industries.
Some of these sumptuary laws called for marking certain individuals as members of groups not fully acceptable in urban society. Many cities ordered prostitutes to wear red or yellow bands on their clothes, and the Fourth Lateran Council required Jews and Muslims to dress in ways that distinguished them from their Christian neighbors. Sumptuary laws were frequently broken and were difficult to enforce, but they provide evidence of the many material goods available to urban dwellers as well as the concern of city leaders about the social mobility and extravagance they saw all around them.