-Other cities grew around specialized industries or from opportunities for a wider trade than

was possible where markets were limited by the range of horse and mule. Growth was likely
to be slow where trading patterns remained essentially the same. Enterprise, by contrast,
brought remarkable growth in Britain, where Manchester and Birmingham both moved up
from modest beginnings to the 100,000-population mark during the 18th century. Atlantic
ports thrived during the same period with the increase in colonial trade.

-A typical urban experience, where there was no special factor at work, was therefore one of
stability. In more fortunate cities, where there was continuing economic stability or strong
corporate identity recovery even from the worst of war experiences could be rapid. Not all
towns were so resilient, however. Some Polish towns never recovered from the effects of
the Great Northern War.

-Between these extremes lay the mass of towns of middling size, each supervised by a
mayor and corporation, dignified by one large church and probably several others serving
ward or parish (and, if Catholic, by a religious house of some kind), and including a law
court, guildhall, school, and, of course, market. With its bourgeois crust of clerics, lawyers,
officials, merchants, and shopkeepers and master craftsmen catering for special needs—
fine fabrics, clothing, hats, wigs, gloves, eyeglasses, engravings if not paintings, china,
silver, glassware, locks, and clocks—the city was a world apart from the peasant. There
was an inclination to buy land for status and security. Custom and ceremony were informed
by a keen sense of hierarchy.

-A more serious threat to the old urban regime lay in another area where discontents bred
radicalism: the guilds. Not until the French Revolution and the radical actions of Joseph II of
Austria were guilds anywhere abolished. They had long displayed a tendency to oligarchic
control by hereditary masters. Another was the rise in urban poverty, as pressure on
resources led to price increases that outstripped wages.

The Peasantry

-In 1700 only 15 percent of Europe’s population lived in towns, but that figure concealed
wide variations: at the two extremes by 1800 were Britain with 40 percent and Russia with 4
percent. Most Europeans were peasants, dependent on agriculture. The majority of them
lived in nucleated settlements and within recognized boundaries, those of parish or manor,
but some, in the way characteristic of the hill farmer, lived in single farms or hamlets.
- There were about one million serfs in eastern France and some free peasants in Russia,
so the pattern is untidy; but broadly it represents the difference between eastern and
western Europe. Serfdom was a system of relations between the owners of land and the
peasant tenants who resided on it.

-The Russian was less attached to a particular site than his western counterparts living in
more densely populated countries. The imposition of serfdom was outlined in the Ulozhenie,
the legal code of 1649, which included barschina (forced labour). The serf could not marry,
move, or take up a trade without his lord’s leave. He owed labour (robot) in the Habsburg
lands for at least three days a week and dues that could amount to 20 percent of his
produce.

-Much of Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal there was some form of rent or
sharecropping. Feudalism survived in varying degrees of rigour, with an array of dues and
services representing seigneurial rights. It was a regime that about half of Europe’s
inhabitants had known since the Middle Ages.

-France provides the best model for understanding the relationship of lord and peasant. The
seigneur was generally, but not invariably, noble: a seigneury could be bought by a
commoner. Manorialism was an essential element of feudal society and was the organizing
principle of rural economy that originated in the Late Roman Empire.Manorialism was
characterized by the vesting of legal and economic power in the lord of a manor. The lord
was supported economically from his own direct landholding in a manor (sometimes called
a fief), and from the obligatory contributions of the peasant population who fell under the
jurisdiction of the lord and his court. These obligations could be payable in several ways: in
labor, in kind, or, on rare occasions, in coin.

-Besides priest or minister, the principal authority in most peasants’ lives was that of the
lord. The range of the peasant’s world was that of a day’s travel on foot or, more likely, by
donkey, mule, or pony. He would have little sense of a community larger than he could see
or visit. The peasant’s life was conditioned by mundane factors: soil, water supplies,
communications, and above all the site itself in relation to river, sea, frontier, or strategic
route. Its environment was formed by what could be bred, fed, sown, gathered, and worked
within the bounds of the parish.