The maxim exists in various forms in German town law from the twelfth century onwards. If a man of unfree status came to a chartered town and lived there unclaimed for a year and a day, his lord's power over him lapsed and he became a burgess.
It was not charity. Towns needed people. They had high death rates, and they grew by immigration from the countryside for centuries, which means a rule that made runaways safe was a recruitment policy.
It also tells you what freedom meant in this period, which is not what it means now. It meant a legal status: subject to this court and not that one, owing these dues and not those, able to buy, sell, sue and make a will. It did not mean equality, and a poor journeyman in a chartered city could be a great deal more constrained in practice than a prosperous free tenant in a village.
Still, the principle is remarkable. In a world organised around inherited status, somebody wrote down that status could lapse by residence, and made it stick.
The towns of the western Roman Empire had shrunk drastically, as chapter seven described, and many were reduced to a cathedral, a market and a fraction of their old walled area with fields inside it.
What reversed it was the agricultural change of chapter thirteen. More food per acre, more acres cleared, and a growing population produce a surplus, and a surplus has to be exchanged. Add relative security once the Viking and Magyar raids ended, and add rivers and coasts, and market settlements begin to grow at bridges, fords, monastery gates and castle walls.
Three regions ran ahead. Northern Italy, which had never entirely lost its urban network and which sat on the Mediterranean trade. Flanders and the Low Countries, where cloth manufacture on an industrial scale grew up on English wool. And the Rhineland and the Baltic, linked by a network of merchant towns that eventually formalised itself into a league with its own diplomacy, its own fleets and its own wars.
By 1300 there were perhaps four or five cities in Europe over a hundred thousand people and a great many in the tens of thousands. That is small by ancient Roman standards and enormous compared with the year 900.
A town sat, legally, on somebody's land. The somebody was a king, a bishop, a count or an abbey, and he had the rights over it that a lord had over a village.
Townsmen wanted out of that, and what they wanted was specific. The right to hold a market and take its dues. Their own court, so that a merchant's dispute was judged by merchants under commercial custom rather than by a lord's steward under agricultural custom. Freedom from arbitrary levies, replaced by a fixed annual sum. Freedom from tolls elsewhere in the lord's territory. The right to elect their own officials. The right to build and hold walls.
They got these by two methods. The first was purchase, and it was often the better bargain for both sides: a lord going on crusade or fighting a war needed cash now, and a town could raise it. Charters survive in large numbers and read like the commercial documents they were.
The second was combination. Townsmen swore oaths to one another to act as one body, which is what the word commune means, and then negotiated from strength or fought. In northern Italy the communes went furthest and ended up as independent republics running their own foreign policy, which is why the map of medieval Italy is a list of cities rather than a country.
The bishops and abbots often resisted hardest, since a town on church land was a lucrative asset, and several of the most violent urban revolts of the period were against clerical lords.
Trades organised themselves, and the organisations did two contradictory things simultaneously.
On one side they were genuinely useful. A guild set standards for the goods its members made, which mattered enormously in a world where a buyer at a fair could not test cloth or metal before buying. It ran a training system: apprentice for a fixed term, then journeyman working for wages, then, in theory, master. It provided insurance in a world with none, paying for funerals, supporting widows, maintaining a chapel and an altar.
On the other side they were monopolies, and they behaved like them. They restricted the number of masters, lengthened apprenticeships when times were hard, kept out newcomers, fixed prices, and fought other guilds over which trade owned which operation. In the cloth towns of Flanders the tension between the merchant families who ran the export trade and the weavers and fullers who did the work produced repeated and sometimes extremely violent risings.
Women's position varied more than the general picture suggests. In some cities women worked in and even ran crafts, particularly in silk and in the food and drink trades, and widows commonly carried on a dead husband's business. In others they were formally excluded. Brewing was very widely a woman's trade until it industrialised, at which point it stopped being one.
Long distance trade needs instruments, and the ones invented here are still in use.
First, real coinage again. Western Europe had run on silver pennies since the Carolingian reform. In the thirteenth century Italian cities began striking gold again, and the Florentine florin and the Venetian ducat became international currencies held to a constant standard for centuries, which is what a reserve currency is.
Second, the bill of exchange. Carrying coin across Europe is dangerous and slow, so a merchant pays money to a banker in one city and receives a document instructing a correspondent in another city to pay his agent there, in the other currency, at a later date. This moves money without moving metal, and it also, conveniently, hides interest inside the exchange rate. The church forbade lending at interest. It did not forbid making a profit on currency dealing.
Third, the accounting. Double entry bookkeeping, recording every transaction twice so that the books balance and errors show, appears in Italian merchant records in the late thirteenth century and was described in print two hundred years later. It is impossible to run a large enterprise without something like it.
And behind all three, the fairs. The counts of Champagne organised a cycle of fairs in northern France where Italian and Flemish merchants met, and which developed their own commercial court, their own law, and a clearing system where debts were settled against each other at the end.
The ban on lending at interest had one further consequence, and it was ugly. Where Christians were forbidden and Jews were permitted to lend to Christians, Jewish communities were pushed into a business that was necessary, resented, and dependent entirely on a ruler's protection. When a ruler wanted the debts cancelled or the assets seized, the protection was withdrawn. That pattern, not theology alone, is behind a series of expulsions across western Europe from the late thirteenth century onwards.
It is worth picturing the thing, because the word town now suggests something much larger and much cleaner.
Most were small: a few thousand people inside a wall you could walk round in half an hour, with gardens, orchards, pigs and often vineyards inside the circuit. The wall was the single largest capital project the community ever undertook, it was frequently unfinished for generations, and its gates were shut at night and staffed by citizens taking turns.
Inside, the streets were narrow, unpaved in most places until late, and doubled as the drainage. Waste went into them or into the river that the town also drank from and that the tanners and dyers and butchers worked beside. Town records are full of orders about where you may not throw things, which is evidence both of the problem and of the attempt.
Fire was the standing terror. Timber framing, thatch, open hearths and workshops full of charcoal meant that a substantial share of European towns burned substantially down at least once. Regulations requiring tile roofs, party walls in stone, and buckets and hooks kept in each street are among the earliest building codes in Europe, and they were passed after the fire rather than before it.
And the town was loud and public in a way that is hard to reconstruct. Trade was conducted in the open, at fixed hours, in a designated place, with officials to check weights, precisely so that everybody could see the terms. Selling outside the market, or before the bell, was an offence with a name and a fine. A market economy of this period is not a private thing; it is a heavily policed public performance.
The political effect was that a king now had somebody to play against his nobles.
Towns had cash, which armies need and land does not readily produce. They wanted royal protection of trade routes and standard weights and coinage, which is exactly what a strengthening monarchy wanted to provide. So kings chartered towns, taxed them, borrowed from them, and summoned their representatives.
That last is where the assemblies of Europe come from. When a king wanted a grant of taxation beyond his customary dues he had to ask, and by the thirteenth century asking meant calling the people who could deliver consent: the great lords, the churchmen, and now the towns. The English parliament of 1265 summoned burgesses from the boroughs; the Spanish kingdoms had been calling town representatives to their assemblies for decades before that; the French estates and the German diets took the same shape.
Nobody intended to found representative government. They were solving a cash flow problem. But the principle that extraordinary taxation requires the consent of those taxed was established as a working practice in this period, and it is the thread that runs through chapters eighteen, thirty one and thirty six.
Firm: the charters, guild statutes, town accounts, merchant letters and account books. From the thirteenth century the urban documentary record is very rich, and one Italian merchant's surviving business archive runs to well over a hundred thousand items.
Soft: population figures. Estimates for medieval city sizes come from tax lists, hearth counts and guesses about household size, and reputable figures for the same city can differ by half.
Soft: the maxim itself. Versions of the year and a day rule appear in real charters, but the neat German slogan usually quoted is a nineteenth century condensation, and the rule was never universal.
Contested: whether guilds were on balance good for the economy. One case says they solved quality and training problems that markets could not, and their decline had costs. The other says they were rent seeking cartels that suppressed competition and innovation for centuries. The evidence supports both depending on trade, place and period, and anyone offering a clean verdict is selling something.
A caution about the freedom. Towns were not democracies. Almost all of them were run by a small group of wealthy families holding the offices among themselves, and the risings of artisans against those families are a constant of the fourteenth century. The town was a place where a different set of people were in charge, not a place where nobody was.