Life in a Medieval City

by Frances Gies, Joseph Gies

"Some particular books I found useful for A Game of Thrones and its sequels deserve mention... Life in a Medieval Castle and Life in a Medieval City , both by Joseph and Frances Gies." —George R.R. Martin, author of the series A Song of Ice and Fire Medieval history comes alive in Frances and Joseph Gies’s Life in a Medieval City , used as a research resource by George R. R. Martin in creating the world of Game of Thrones . Reissued for the first time in decades, Life in a Medieval City is the classic account of the year 1250 in the city of Troyes, in modern-day France. Acclaimed historians Frances and Joseph Gies focus on a high point of medieval civilization—before war and the Black Death ravaged Europe—providing a fascinating window into the sophistication of a period we too often dismiss as backward. Urban life in the Middle Ages revolved around the home, often a mixed-use dwelling for burghers with a store or workshop on the ground floor and living quarters upstairs. A developed economy, focusing on textiles, farming, and financial services, could be found in the town center, where craftsmen competed for business while adhering to the guilds’ codes of conduct. There were schools for the children, though only boys could attend and the lessons were taught in Latin by a priest. The church was a hub of both religious and civic life; services were lively and filled with song, and baptisms and other special occasions brought neighbors together to celebrate. The weddings of wealthier townsfolk were lavish affairs full of song and dance and drinking that could sometimes last for weeks. “An excellently written account of what is known of the life of medieval burghers.”—Library Journal

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Medieval, Medieval History, Historical, Research, Reference

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Frances and and her husband Joseph Gies were historians and writers who collaborated on a number of books about the Middle Ages as well as wrote individual works.

Reviews

[Sud666 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read, and enjoyed, many books similar to Gies' "Life in a Medieval City". This one is particularly good. When I saw that G.R.R. Martin used Gies books for research when writing his Game of Thrones, I knew I had to read this. I am glad I did.

Excellently written in an engaging and interesting style, it is a deep dive into the life of a Medieval City. The city of Troyes( in France), during the time period 1250 AD, is the city that is studied. Everything from what is in a Burgher's home, to the life of a Medieval Housewife, Small and Big Business, the Church, and many other topics. All are viewed through the lens of Troyes.

While many books like this have been written before, this is an exceptional one- engaging and well researched, it is full of information but very easy to read. Well done!

[Darwin8u · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Anything written in a book has a certain sacredness, all the established authors are authorities, and all are timeless, from Aesop to Horace."
- Joseph & Frances Gies



A nice survey of Troyes in 1250 AD. Joseph and Frances Gies examine everything from medicine to women to the church and cathedrals in Medieval Europe, focusing their historical lense on Troyes, which at the time was a prosperous center of commerce in Europe. Not super deep, but VERY interesting with some great nuggets. This book is written for general readership and seems to always jump to the next chapter just as soon as my interest was piqued. Here is a list of the chapters/subjects:

* Prologue
1. Troyes: 1250
2. A Burgher's Home
3. A Medieval Housewife
4. Childbirth and Children
5. Weddings and Funerals
6. Small Business
7. Big Business
8. The Doctor
9. The Church
10. The Cathedral
11. School and Scholars
12. Books and Authors
13. The New Theatre
14. Disasters
15. Town Government
16. The Champaigne Fair
* After 1250

[Laurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Understandably a classic of social history. I enjoyed learning that in 13th century Europe pepper was was so expensive (though not the most expensive of spices available, those were saffron and cinnamon) that pepper sellers would sell individual peppercorns to housewives. Enjoyable social history centered in 13th century Troyes, France.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 4 out of 5]

The modern mind is very susceptible to viewing the past as wholly different, and worse, from the present. We have all absorbed narratives of supposed progress that rely on painting the past in the grimmest light possible. But the daily lives of most people were not that different, and not less happy, at any given point in the human past, than they are now. Every person in every age faces challenges and burdens; some change as the ages pass, but challenges and burdens remain. This is not to deny that the material world has, for many, improved greatly, but as is well known, happiness is only very tangentially related to material benefits, and medieval man was, most likely, usually more happy and content than modern man, bound as he was in a sacramental world of meaning.

Joseph and Frances Gies were husband-and-wife historians who together wrote several books describing the nuts and bolts of medieval life. These are of particular value because they were written before the political corruption of the humanities. Since no modern popular history can be trusted as to its accuracy, reading unbiased and unbigoted books such as "Life in a Medieval City" is a treat. The authors talk about the normal lives of normal people, from various walks of life. They do not talk at all about the supposed oppression of LGBTIQCAPGNGFNBA people, or, for the old-fashioned, the supposed proto-Marxism of the peasantry. No, we get what average people did in their average lives, which is much more interesting.

I suspect that medieval people, even the uneducated, would not be as terrified or awed by the modern world, or by modern technology, as we like to think. It’s important to remember that people in earlier times were just as smart as us—and more clever, because the wrong move was more likely to end in you dying when everyone lived closer to the bone. If you showed a medieval peasant an F-16 screaming through the sky, he might think at first it was a dragon, but my guess is that he wouldn’t be nearly as terrified as we think, would be a lot more curious than we think, and if we explained what it was, would grasp the essentials very quickly and sensibly. Far too often I hear repeated the trite Arthur C. Clarke aphorism that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. That’s simply not true. I think that any person, from any era, grasps that magic is different from the actions of men. Grasping that is an essential part of a hold on reality, and just because in some times and cultures the boundary was thought porous does not destroy the essential distinction. If aliens showed up with some incredible technology, we would not consider it magic, no matter how advanced. In the same way, if we showed a medieval peasant an iPad and explained it was not magic, but writing with light, he would simply consider it another example of the type of tool used by monks. And if you showed him moving pictures on the same device, my bet is that he would be quite impressed, and might at first consider it magic, but when told the truth, would accept that readily, understanding it as a type of painting. He would not be confused or afraid. Being impressed by new technology is completely distinct from considering it magic. But it suits the modern Enlightenment-addled mind, with a belief in inevitable supposed progress, to think of the past as ignorant and fearful, and so we are subjected to these false stereotypes.

"Life in a Medieval City" focuses on the French town of Troyes around the year 1250. Its descriptions are drawn from primary sources, either about Troyes itself, or about surrounding towns with similar characteristics. Troyes was one of the famous Champagne market towns, and 1250 was the height of its power and fame, before the Black Death and before the centralization of political control stripped the French medieval towns of much of their autonomy. It was the time of Saint Louis IX, high medieval king (and the subject of an interesting recent study, Andrew Willard Jones’s "Before Church and State"). Troyes was rapidly growing, a walled town with about 10,000 people, at a time when Paris had 50,000 and Venice had 100,000 (and Baghdad was dropping from more than a million to close to zero, as the Mongols swept over the Abbasid caliphate, stopped only at Ain Jalut).

From the age of Charlemagne, Western Europe had gradually filled out with people and increased in industry. Towns followed the clearance of land with new technology, an endeavor led by monastic communities, with their corporate, long-range vision. Better agriculture, along with the revival of mining, created the financial wherewithal for a feudalistic society to flourish. The Counts of Champagne, beginning with the uncomplimentarily-named Thibaut the Trickster (d. 975), encouraged the growth of Troyes as a market town, so that by the thirteenth century it held two fairs, in the summer and winter (the “hot” and “cold” fairs), the summer one of which was the largest of the six fairs of Champagne. Only in the early thirteenth century, though, did Troyes get its own charter, allowing the town specific privileges, which was somewhat late among French cities. As with all such medieval cities, the townsfolk were jealous of their prerogatives, which did not include self-governance, but did include a wide range of customary freedoms and immunities—as with all medieval law, custom was much more important than statute law. Since the merchant class, the burghers, were the lifeblood of the town’s economy, they were keen to avoid war and other disruptions. So was the Count, who relied on the fairs to fund him. Thus, cooperation between the feudal lord and the town was generally close and efficient.

Most of the book is not about politics, though. It is about the daily life of the people. The authors describe a cross-section of society in successive chapters. They describe a burgher’s home, including furniture, table settings, and the like, noting that, again contrary to stereotype, table manners were very important. “Gentlefolk eat slowly, take small bites, do not talk while eating, do not drink with their mouths full.” They describe a housewife’s day; children and childbirth; weddings and funerals; small and big businesses; religion; the building of the cathedral; books; theater; and war and other disasters. Finally, they offer a lengthy description of the organization and running of the Hot Fair, the most important secular annual event in the town, and one tightly organized by the cooperation of Count and burghers, including extensive security protections, guarantees against theft for merchants travelling to the fair, and extensive regulatory controls to prevent cheating by sellers. It is all very interesting, and I did not know, either, that the name for “troy weight” measures, still used for precious metals, came from Troyes and its fair.

A few sections are of particular interest to me. The authors make clear that medieval women were not, contrary to the modern ideologically-driven myth, oppressed. “Women of all classes have rights in property by law and custom. Women can sue and be sued, make wills, make contracts, even plead their own cases in court. Women have been known to appear as their husbands’ attorneys. . . . Universities are closed to women, but they are equally closed to men except those who are being trained for the clergy, law, or medicine. Among the landed gentry, women are better educated than men. . . . . Women work outside the home at an astonishing variety of crafts and professions. . . . The lady of the manor takes charge of the estate while her husband is off to war, Crusade, or pilgrimage, and wives run businesses while their husbands are away.” Women did not serve as mid-level officials, because they did not bear weapons, but they often played high political roles, and “occupied positions of power and influence in the Church.” Certainly, men and women had broadly different roles, as is natural and dictated by biology (silly fantasies of Viking women warriors, the pushing of which is a big thing nowadays, not to the contrary). But the reality is that here, as always in the West, the relationship of men to women was one of mutual benefit and acknowledged give-and-take, not oppression (a point Jordan Peterson is fond of making, causing his enemies to wail and grind their teeth).

The Jews primarily lived in a ghetto, which was not an inferior accommodation, as we think of it now, but “a separate, privileged community, a foreign colony, not unlike the Christian merchants’ colonies in the Levant, or the colonies of Italians and other nationalities in London.” The Count’s court had to hear civil cases between Jews and Christians, where justice was applied impartially, but the witness of one person of a particular religion had to be corroborated by one of his co-religionists. Attacks on Jews as Jews were rare; the prime threat the Jews faced was from the higher nobility, who extorted Jews when they need money (a theme of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, which my mother read to me as a child). One form this took was expelling Jews, taking their property, and later letting them return, which had happened to the Jews of Troyes seventy years before, so certainly Jews faced threats not faced by Christians. But in general, relations between average Jews and Christians were amicable; the ideological Jew hatred of the twentieth (and to some extent, the nineteenth) century was far in the future.

Medicine was a rapidly developing science. Hospitals (contrary to the modern propaganda-driven myth, a Christian, not Muslim, invention, first organized for the general public by Saint Basil in the fourth century) were growing rapidly, and again contrary to myth, were focused on medicine, not just prayer. Parish churches treated other in need of care, including those with long-term disabilities, such as the blind or crippled, as well as foundlings. This was a society that viewed its responsibilities to those less fortunate as the responsibilities of each and all, not as the responsibility of others, much less the government, and therefore a society much less atomized than ours today.

All in all, how was this life for the people in Troyes? They did not ask themselves that question, since navel gazing is a modern sport. They had an integral society, closely bound together, though with the same interpersonal conflicts of any society. They did not suffer the modern problems of alienation and isolation, the Bowling Alone problems that modern man faces. They lived under the rule of law, not under despotism or anarchy, as the medieval world is often portrayed in movies. There is a strain of thought, epitomized by James C. Scott (for example, in his recent "Against the Grain"), which holds that very primitive man, hunter-gatherers, were the happiest. Maybe they were, though they accomplished nothing, and I’d take the High Middle Ages over clam-diggers any day. But for an example closer to home, the life of a peasant of Troyes in 1250 wasn’t all that different from the life of the Ingalls family in "Little House on the Prairie." Both worked the land and relied largely on themselves, their family, and their local community. Their life expectancy, their entertainments, and the strength and meaning they derived from their religious belief, were all basically the same. And most of us, reading about the Ingalls family, find their lives appealing, not terrifying. If we were dropped into thirteenth-century Troyes, it might be a culture shock, but I think most of us would soon find our footing and be quite happy.

[ALLEN · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a delight! Despite a contemporaneous blurb on the cover by George R.R. Martin, LIFE IN A MEDIEVAL CITY, along with its cousins LIFE IN A MEDIEVAL CASTLE and LIFE IN A MEDIEVAL VILLAGE, all by the husband-and-wife team Frances and Joseph Gies, has been delighting college students and other budding medievalists for decades. This volume zeroes in on the walled city of Troyes, Champagne region of France, in the year 1250, at the peak of its popularity for hosting not one but two medieval trade fairs each year.

Among the fun nuggets in this book:
-- In non-famine years, grains and meat were relatively common, but spices were uncommonly expensive. A housewife with a tight budget might be forced to buy just one peppercorn from a dealer, and it costs a coin that was half silver.

-- Most retail sales were performed on an abacus, Arabic numerals had not yet come completely into use, but the exigencies of multiple trade fairs in the Champagne region each year led to the proliferation of retail contracts and even the beginnings of "commercial paper" -- re-selling loans and delivery contracts.

-- The chief goal of the flying buttress was to permit taller sanctuaries permitting more windows admitting more light. However, the development of stained glass, especially narrative stained glass, was almost by accident.

As a trade location and "spot on the map," Troyes' glory lay in between the more Feudal 12th Century and the more advanced 14th Century to come. It was, in fact, the storm of trade through the Champagne region that led to the more advanced kind of society in which a national capital like Paris became more powerful than the trading cities. But in 1250, the Gies portray Troyes in admirable detail, including housekeeping, trades, education, food, government, the evolution of plays from church ritual, church life itself, and of course the magnificent trade fairs that dominated the business year.

For all this specificity, though, LIFE IN A MEDIEVAL CITY is easy to read and a relatively short work (just 229 pages exclusive of addenda and indices). The logical step after reading this book is to head for LIFE IN A MEDIEVAL CASTLE and LIFE IN A MEDIEVAL VILLAGE, or perhaps the more detailed Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel : Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages.

[Debbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Life in a Medieval City" is an educational nonfiction book. It covered all aspects of city life in the 12th and 13th centuries in Europe. The focus was mainly on what life was like in Troyes, France, but the authors also compared Troyes to various other European cities.

The content was technical (as in, serious research rather than interesting trivia), but the writing wasn't dry. I liked the depth of information and the quotes from documents written at that time. There were some black and white photos, illustrations, and maps (including one of Troyes in 1250 A.D.).

The book covered what a burgher's home was like, what life was like for the housewife, childbirth and children, weddings and funerals, small and large businesses, the doctor, the church, the cathedral, schools and scholars, books and authors (and poets), theater, disasters (including flood, famine, plagues, and war), how the town government worked, and the Champagne Fairs held in Troyes and other towns.

Overall, I found this book very interesting and informative. I'd recommend it to anyone wanting to know the details about what life was like in a European city in the 12th and 13th centuries.

[Karen Brooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is another outstanding addition to a captivating series for any history buff or beginner historian. Taking the reader through a 'typical' medieval city, in this case Troyes in 1250, the Gies' introduce us to all aspects of everyday life throughout the year - from schools and scholars, to authors and tanners, to the famous Hot and Cold Fairs that ran for a few centuries. Discovering what people ate, wore, how they interacted, the imposition of taxes, the return to Roman Laws and courts (and the increasing importance of lawyers who were despised back then LOL!), makes for fascinating reading. As a fantasy writer, these sorts of fact-filled and page-turning books are invaluable. Highly recommended.

[Charlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't understand how this book doesn't have an overall rating of at least 4 stars. Having a general obsession with Eleanor of Aquitaine, I am pretty aware of what life was like for the royals, but I can't say I knew what life was like for the average city dweller. This book allowed me to truly lose myself in the year of 1250, in the up and coming city of Troyes, as I a normal person of the time as I navigated through the local customs, laws, and every day life. When eating dinner, I would share a bowl of water to wash my hands with my neighbor, and we would have no soap available to us. Having to share a glass as well, I would have to remember to wipe my mouth before each sip. If I had the unfortunate experience of committing a crime, I would have a burger, a wealthy land-owing male, hear my case. Whatever he decided would be my fate. If found guilty, I would likely be put to death since there is no prison available to me. I found myself hoping I wasn't the poorest of the poor. The burgers seem open to bribes and my chances of not being killed go considerably if I am able to hand over some cash. Being a woman, I wondered what sort of personal freedom I would have. It sounds like women had more rights than I imagined. Life was hard for everyone in 1250, but it seems if my husband abused me, I might go ahead and abuse him right back. Women had roles in the church, as lawyers, and got a fairly good education for 1250. Having children was a bit trickier than I would like. The midwives thought whispering spells into your ear was an actual medical procedure. Cesareans were out of the question unless you were already dead.

I cannot believe this was written in 1969. I felt as if an author could have written this today. Thoroughly enjoyable!

[Jason Koivu · Rating 4 out of 5]

This series of medieval life books by Gies gives a solid overview of the various day-to-day happenings during the period as well as the pulse points of historically pivotal moments as they affected the Europeans of the time. It's perhaps not riveting reading for anyone other than history buffs. However, I've found it mildly entertaining and in the very least quite useful for research.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

Light but interesting overview of life in Troyes, a city with an important annual trade fair in the Champagne region. It's useful as I'm starting to read Helen Waddell's The Wandering Scholars about the itinerant poets and musicians who wrote the wonderful songs in her excellent Mediaeval Latin Lyrics. For example, the Giles' brief discussion of cathedral schools cleared up some questions about Waddell's description of the wanderers' education for me. But in fact, you would need most of a lifetime to read enough to fully appreciate The Wandering Scholars; I'm just rolling with it.

I think a better nonfiction book about the period, although it's more focused on an upper middle class (if that label was meaningful) Italian merchant and his wife, is Iris Origo's The Merchant of Prado.

[Hedlun · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came across this in our basement, it was from one of Stephanie's classes at Alma College. Fairly interesting and quick read. I liked how it was organized by topic: A Medieval Housewife, Small Business, The Doctor, and Disasters to name a few. Most interesting to me were A Burgher's Home and The Doctor. This book gave me a greater appreciation for how difficult life was and included details that get glossed over in even the best literature and film on this period.

[SlowRain · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me three starts over many years, but I finally got around to finishing this book. It's very informative, and great for people just starting out with the Middle Ages. The main theme running throughout the novel was the fairs. However, I'd say this wasn't a strong enough narrative thread to pull me along. It could've been better written, but it is what it is--a very good place to start.

[Riley Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned a ton! I love all these details of daily life, plus the quotations from people at the time. It really put things into perspective, the Middle Ages wasn’t all knights and glory- it wasn’t even mostly that! Loved the details about church services, women’s lives, and entertainment. I also appreciated the inclusion of Jews and what their situation was like in the city. Usually medieval studies just ignore them… which is dumb and anti-Semitic. I liked learning more about the Jewish population in France at the time.

If you like the medieval period at all or you just want to correct some of your suppositions about the “Dark Ages,” you’ll enjoy this!

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another excursion into temporal tourism.

Journey back to the year 1250 and walk the streets the French city of Troyes. Visit the shops and homes of the people. See how they live, how they dress, and how they see the world. Look over their shoulders and see what they eat, how they treat sickness, and raise and educate their children.

As always, the past is another country. They do things differently there.

[Peter Colclasure · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here are some fun medieval superstitions:

For a good harvest, sprinkle the ashes of a redhead on your fields. Cremated gingers practically guarantee a bumper crop. And the next time you see a condemned criminal being marched to the gallows, try to touch him. It’s good luck!

The more I read about the middle ages, the more I get the impression that it was a society composed of children. There’s an anecdote in this book about a wedding reception where the guests decided to celebrate with a jumping contest. On feast days, a common pastime was playing the fool, where grown men and women would put their hoods on backwards, bump into things, and bark like dogs. One historian described the medieval temperament as far more emotional than today. Back then it was socially acceptable to weep openly, laugh maniacally, and throw temper tantrums. Not exactly the behavior of sober, rational adults.

Without a modern educational apparatus to mold them, people retained a certain naiveté and whimsy into adulthood. Think what you were like when you were seven. Now imagine if no one ever corrected any misconceptions about the world, or reigned in your behavior. And imagine you lived in a world of death, disease, hardship, and fear.

That might be too hard on the middle ages. As this book makes clear, it was an era of progress, of technical and economic innovations, where people were weaning themselves off the stupor of the dark ages. But it was a gradual process. The Italian renaissance was still centuries in the future, but in the cities of Europe in 1250 there was a growing sense of individual rights and free enterprise.

This book was a quick, easy, charming read that tries to bring you back in time to Troyes, a French city, during the middle ages. Each chapter described one element of life at the time, how people worked during the day, how they ate, where their clothes came from, how education worked, marriage, birth, and death. A solid, no-nonsense primer on middle ages history.

[Athan Tolis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a Christmas gift from my son George. Expectations were guided by the one pound Sterling he paid for it at the school fair.

Boy, was I in for a surprise!

For a week of my life, this little gem of a book transported me to life in year 1250 at the city of Troyes in Champagne, France.

With no exaggeration, this voyage is a true craddle-to-grave job: you're taught how the new class of burghers (the authors avoid the word bourgeois) is delivered into the world by the midwife, schooled in the church and then perhaps at university, or alternatively how it enters an apprenticeship with one of the many new craftsmen.

This was my favorite part of the book, and a five star lesson in etymology for me too, perhaps because I'm not English. So I learned about the tanner and the fuller and the walker and what tenterhooks are too. The emergence and role of the guilds is covered very well, both from a historical and from a sociological perspective.

I also learned the proper etiquette for how a doctor should ask for compensation, which as far as I'm concerned he fully deserved, given his job entailed tasting his patients' urine for sweetness.

The weddings are covered here, the church as an institution and the cathedrals as both objects of art and feats of engineering. You get a good taste for developments in the letters (with many well-chosen and translated samples of poetry and prose) and the arts, including theater.

The whole time, moreover, you're reminded of the underlying structure in which this new class of city-dwellers was formed and (slowly) emancipated, one where power was shared between nobility and the church and only slowly and partially ceded to the ascending classes of craftsmen and moneychangers.

All of which, in turn, rested on the importance conferred to the city of Troyes by the two fairs it hosted, the "hot fair" in August and the "cold fair" in December, to which people would travel from literally the whole of Europe to trade their wares.

The guided tour through the fair is the crowning moment of the book, the point to where the authors build up over the first 200 pages, and you truly feel like you went there yourself.

I don't want to say for sure, but I think many of my dreams over the past few days were set in medieval Troyes!

[Ryan Castner · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was recommended by my Western Civ professor. I found the reading rather tedious at times and would recommend skipping the introduction entirely as it is just a fact dump that has no context to keep up with. Each chapter was organized as a focus on a certain topic, the cathedrals, the markets, the burghers, the home. This sorting made sense from an organization perspective, but it left the book feeling rather disjoint, almost like separate wikipedia entries. All this being said, it was full of information and worth a read if this is topic of interest to you.

[English · Rating 5 out of 5]

thought I had finished this book last year, but then I found it in my Audible library as unfinished. My memory! Even if I did read it a re-read can't hurt.

I have the paperback edition as well, so can always pick that up too. As much as I love the Gies work, I know some historians who think its a little outdated. (Their books were written in the 70s and 80s), Kind of ironic since they're covering events which happened over 700 years ago.

I think this might be my second favourite book by Joseph and Frances Gies after Life in a Medieval Village/Women in the Middle Ages. One thing I really liked is it gives a lot of insights into the lives of a group of Medieval people who are often overlooked and ignored especially in fiction: burghers or city dwellers.
A lot of stories focus only on the Lords and peasants, but these people were neither. They were in the Middle and many were actually very wealthy. Some were clerics and scholars attending universities and church schools which were always based in cities.

Others were merchants and traders, still others were what we might call "professionals" or apprentices, and then there were women who could run businesses. The book focuses on the French city of Troyes, which I found interesting as I don't know a great deal of French history.
I have two other books on Medieval London as well, but this is a fine addition to anyone's collection.

Recommended. Naturally.

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 4 out of 5]

A classic of social history, Life in Medieval City uses Troyes in 1250 to explore the ordinary life of the small yet prosperous bourgeois. This is an age of relative stability and wealth. The Catholic Church is the undoubted supreme power in Christendom. A system of interlocking guilds regulates the cities, and the sophistication of stone walls against the relatively crude military logistics of the age favors defenders. Troyes is situated to mediate trade between the weavers of Holland and Europe, and the great markets of the Mediterranean, with winter and summer fairs the source of the city's wealth.

It's still the Middle Ages, and if something is to be done (cooking, cleaning, crafts, farming...) it is likely to be done with backbreaking effort, but the population is on the rise and things are noticeably better than they were a hundred years ago. The dislocations of the Black Death and the Reformation are far in the future. This is a charming little book, and if scholarship has moved on since 1981, its foundational, accessible, and a steal at $2.

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Veel anekdotes over de middeleeuwen en dan met name over Troyes. Het leest als een hele lange opsomming. Een goed geschreven opsomming. Wat ik miste was meer context. Hoe representatief was Troyes voor heel Europa en de Middeleeuwen? Bepaalde passages kwamen niet overeen met het beeld dat ik heb van deze periode. Over de Middeleeuwen heb ik meerdere (hand) boeken gelezen. Tussen Frankrijk, Engeland en Italië waren er veel overeenkomsten maar ook veel verschillen. Dat laatste wordt genegeerd. Ik had het een beter boek gevonden als de auteur zich meer tot de lokale geschiedenis in Troyes had beperkt. Dan zou het minder lezen als een opsomming van anekdotes. Ondanks deze kritiek is het een boek dat ik met plezier gelezen heb. Zeker aan te raden voor een vakantie of een paar regenachtige dagen. Wat ik vooral plezierig vond was de uitleg over niet meer bestaande beroepen en de toelichting op de werking van gilden.

[Tex · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is exactly what I wanted in a treatise on medieval life. So much of what we read is about how the royals live or the clergy. What I wanted was to see how people make a living and go about their days.
I find it fascinating how much information is know by which parts of the population. The craftsmen have better knowledge of nature and geometry than the students (children of wealthy burghers).
"The pupil ... absorbs relatively little true scientific knowledge...H may learn, for example, that ostriches eat iron, that elephants fear only dragons and mice, that hyenas change their sex at will, that weasels conceive by the ear and deliver by the mouth."

In contrast, for the builders:
"The capitals of their piers are decorated with the leaves of plantain, ivy and oak, arum, ranunculus, fern, clover, coladine, hepatica, columbine, cress, parsley, strawberry, snapdragon, and broom--all observed with care and re-created with precision."

[Meredith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite the fact that this only centered on one European Medieval city, (Troyes in France) and not, say, the idea of what it was like to live in a city in France and Spain, Flanders etc was a bit disappointing, but I really enjoyed this regardless. Yes, some parts dragged a bit, and I would have enjoyed a more in-depth look at many of the themes presented, (e.g., women running their households, markets, how books are made) but overall an excellent "installment" in the Gies's "Life in a..." series. And an excellent Mother's Day gift (last year!) from my boys!



Four stars.

[Timothy Bergman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A more than fair review of a city of fairs.
Frances Gies takes the city of Troyes, just south of Paris, France, and uses it to explain how some of the day-to-day life of the city goes about. City life can be distinguished from rural life and I think Gies did a good job distinguishing the two. He begins with a quick history of the city up until 1250, including its many rulers and destructive raids, and then launches into the occupations, celebrations, hazards, and more.
For historians and authors, I couldn't recommend this book enough as an overview of town life in the high middle ages.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very easy read and interesting. The book does however focus on the middle classes, probably as there is little information on the poor folk. Having said that. Life was potentially difficult but also had it's joys.

[A · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice little book. I'm not a Medievalist so I can't quite tell if this wasn't really a fantastic book or beyond my intellectual capacity, but I agree with Gies here that the rise of the Umayyad Caliphate and its successors pretty much destabilized the European economy.

[Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly informative! I enjoyed this one :) Just wish it hadn't taken me so long, lol

[Cam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating.

[Tracey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Informative and I found it very interesting which is why I read.

[Mac · Rating 5 out of 5]

Buy.

I expected a dry and tedious read but instead was met with an enthralling informative breakdown of the period. The chapters are well organized and are absent of fluff. This book does exactly what its title tells you it will and teaches you everything about life in a medieval city. I will most definitely be reading everything else by the Gies.

[Vixen · Rating 4 out of 5]

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