Introduction

A human community whose members are predominantly engaged in agriculture is unlikely to exceed a village in importance. A concentration of an urban character presupposes, in fact, the presence of a population whose resources are of quite a different order.

There are towns which, from the economic point of view, operate essentially as consumers. They obtain the means of purchasing the consumption goods their inhabitants require from dues derived from a variety of external sources, or receive these dues directly in kind. This was the position of such political and religious centres as Imperial Rome and Papal Rome. It was the position, too, of many civitates in the early Middle Ages, formerly Roman administrative centres with active populations of merchants and craftsmen, but now devitalized and inhabited primarily by clerical communities living on the produce of episcopal and abbatial domains.

Nevertheless, town-dwellers normally have an economic function as producers, not, of course, in agriculture, but in trade and in industry. In such cases, towns are at once producers and consumers.

In this chapter the history of the town will be studied in relation to economic history. We shall consider it in some measure from its beginnings, bearing in mind that in the Carolingian period the towns, as centres of population, were of slight importance. It should not be forgotten, however, that what then existed in the way of towns, and what in large measure would serve as the basis for later development, was inherited from earlier times.