OF THE BURGHERS AND THE FLOWERING OF CITIES IN THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES

Abstract

The paper holds that both medieval cities and their proper class, the burghers, were but the fruit of the overall growth that the Ilth throught to the 13th Centuries underwent and that both were integral parts of the feudal system then in force. It goes on to argue, quite otherwise to the opinions of Pirenne and other historians of his ilk, that neither could be thought of as islands of progress or activity nor as social leading lights who shattered the molds of feudal society with pre-capitalist notions from the Ilth Century onwards. The paper further holds that they could never be considered as being fated to develop just those modes of front-running behaviour as would break with feudal relationships in any way to be thought, «revolutionary», let alone such as appertained between lords and peasants. The paper roundly declares that to imagine that the settling and prospering of the cities was due the spread of commerce would be to take a symptom for a cause for, it is here urged, urban resurgence, thought it did go hand in hand with commercial expansion, was itself, like that expansion, but a consequence of somethig prior and more basic: agrarian expansion.