by Secre

Created on: April 07, 2008

Cities in the High Middle Ages brought about huge social and economic changes in the theatre of medieval Europe; heralding the end of the feudal land laws in many places and bringing about a monetary economy and social structure that exists all over the world to this day. Not only were cities places of wealth and trade, they also facilitated the growth of a worldwide economy not seen since the fall of the Roman Empire a thousand years previously; as well as setting a precursor to the modern Trade Union movements in the form of trade guilds to represent the urban workforce.

When examined properly, the growth of cities at this time appears to be not so much a phenomenon but more a logical development of society given the technologies available to the people of the time. Huge advances in the sphere of technology; examples of which include the mill and the loom; enabled people to produce more than that on which they could only subsist. Furthermore, the skills and time required to perform such activities took away the ability as well as the need to simply farm and pay 10 per cent in tithes to the local lord and the Church. This led to a shift in skills; allowing people to specialise in a specific trade and forcing inter-reliance with other people upon them.

For such a social structure to emerge, a larger dwelling was required in which people could sell their surplus produce at readily available markets to any buyers wishing to trade. The attraction of people to these new urban dwellings caused them to grow and prosper and encouraged further reliance on people not to sustain themselves but to live off a single, specific trade.

Economically speaking, this makes cities of the period essential in the transfer of the idea of wealth from a land based feudal economy to a monetary economic structure: land in itself became less valuable as a commodity due to money being the bartering chip found within markets. As it was money, and not the promise of land, which bought everything from food to service, a new breed of trader came into play: the merchant.

Due to the difference in value of certain commodities (for example, England was a huge wool- producing country and therefore wool was plentiful and therefore less valuable than in, for example, Rome), traders learned that they could buy wool for a cheap price in England and sell it for a profit elsewhere. Furthermore, they could then use some of this new capital to purchase from other countries the developed product (for example,

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