Anatomy of a Medieval Town: Walls to Workshops
From bath houses to bakeries, medieval towns packed a genuinely impressive range of building types into their walls — and several of them come with details odd enough to be worth stealing for fiction wholesale.
Take the bridges. Urban bridges were rarely simple river crossings; many, like London Bridge (built 1176–1209, twenty arches, buildings three to six storeys high) and Florence’s Ponte Vecchio, had shops and homes built directly onto them. London’s Bridge Masters collected rent from the 140 buildings on the bridge itself and eventually came to own considerable land beyond it — one served an astonishing 23 consecutive years in the post. Cathedrals, meanwhile, were a genuine arms race: Laon reached 79 feet in 1194, Notre Dame hit 108 feet by 1163, Chartres beat that at 121 feet the very same year, and Amiens eventually topped out at 426 feet long. Beauvais tried to go even higher and paid for it — part of its vault collapsed in 1284, and the whole project limped on, interrupted by the Hundred Years War, for over three centuries.
Bath houses split firmly by class: proper bath houses were frequented mainly by nobility, higher clergy, and wealthy townspeople, while everyone else made do with “stews” — cheaper wooden tubs that, delicately put, often came with a prostitute’s services included. Many closed in the 14th century amid scandal.
And then there are mills: a town needed roughly one grain-mill wheel for every 600 to 1,200 inhabitants, and the church typically owned between half and three-quarters of a town’s mills outright — which tells you rather a lot about who was quietly making money off everyone else’s daily bread.
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