Medieval towns: everything you wanted to know

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. What was it like to live in a British town or city in the Middle Ages? Were they really filthy hotbeds of crime and violence? And where could you get a slap-up meal if you were hungry? In today's Everything You Wanted to Know episode, Professor Carol Rawcliffe answers listener questions about medieval urban life.

Filth and fire, fast food, foreigners and fighting in the streets, they're all covered in this conversation with David Musgrove. Can we kick off with a sort of a very quick summary of how urban spaces changed during the course of the Middle Ages? I mean, what I'd like to start out by saying is how different urbanization is in medieval Great Britain from the way it is now, which not all listeners may quite realise because far fewer people actually lived in towns than is the case now. I think Britain's very heavily urbanised today, but if you take England and Wales at the peak of urban life, which is probably beginning of the 14th century in terms of population, only about 15% of the whole population of England and Wales are actually

in towns and and in Scotland it's probably lower at about 10%. Very few of them have a population of over about a thousand people. And London, which at its peak has got about, I suppose, 80,000 people, it's not that big by modern standards, is it? I'm in Norwich. And that never gets above 25,000 and it's about eight after the Black Death.

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