Life in a Medieval City Read Online Free PDF Page B

the canal, stands a large stone building, the count’s palace. The great hall rises over an undercroft, with the living quarters in the rear. In front of the palace stands the pillory, a wooden structure resembling a short ladder, which often pinions a petty thief or crooked tradesman. The count’s own church of St.-Etienne forms an “L” with the palace, so that he can hear masses from a platform at the end of his hall. Immediately to the north is the hospital founded by Count Henry the Generous, and at the northwest extremity of the old city rises the castle, a grim rectangular tower surrounded by a courtyard with a forbidding wall. The ancient donjon of the counts, the tower is today used as a ceremonial hall for knightings, feasts, and tourneys.
    Near the center of the old city is the Augustinian abbey of St.-Loup, named after the bishop who parleyed with Attila. Originally it lay outside the walls, but following the Viking attack in 891, Abbot Adelerin moved the establishment into the city, St.-Loup’s remains included. The Rue de la Cité, principal street of the old town, separates the abbey from the cathedral, which is at the southeast corner of the enclosure. Workmen are busy on the scaffolding that sheathes the mass of masonry. A huge crane, standing inside the masonry shell, drops its line over the wall. Masons’ lodges and workshops crowd the space between the cathedral and the bishop’s palace.
    Near the old donjon is the ghetto. Well-to-do Jewish families live in the Rue de Vieille Rome, just south of the castle wall; farther south, others inhabit the Broce-aux-Juifs, an area enclosed by lanes on four sides.
    This is Troyes, an old town but a new city, a feudal and ecclesiastical capital, and major center of the Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages.

2.
    A Burgher’s Home
They live very nobly, they wear a king’s clothes, have fine palfreys and horses. When squires go to the east, the burghers remain in their beds; when the squires go get themselves massacred, the burghers go on swimming parties .
    — RENARD LE CONTREFAIT
a fourteenth-century clerk of Troyes
    I n a thirteenth-century city the houses of rich and poor look more or less alike from the outside. Except for a few of stone, they are all tall timber post-and-beam structures, with a tendency to sag and lean as they get older. In the poor quarters several families inhabit one house. A weaver’s family may be crowded into a single room, where they huddle around a fireplace, hardly better off than the peasants and serfs of the countryside.
    A well-to-do burgher family, on the other hand, occupies all four stories of its house, with business premises on the ground floor, living quarters on the second and third, servants’ quarters in the attic, stables and storehouses in the rear. From cellar to attic, the emphasis is on comfort, but it is thirteenth-century comfort, which leaves something to be desired even for the master and mistress.

Romanesque house at Cluny . Several twelfth-and thirteenth-century houses survive in France, in Cluny, Provins, Dol-de-Bretagne, Perigueux, Le Puy, and elsewhere. (Touring-Club de France)

Thirteenth-century house . No. 6, Rue d’Avril, Cluny, this was the home of a wealthy moneychanger. The irregular stone courses, Romanesque windows, and steeply pitched roof are characteristic of medieval house construction. The brick wall is a modern addition.
    Entering the door of such a house, a visitor finds himself in an anteroom. One door leads to a workshop or counting room, a second to a steep flight of stairs. The greater part of the second floor is occupied by the hall, or solar, which serves as both living and dining room. A hearth fire blazes under the hood of a huge chimney. Even in daytime the fire supplies much of the house’s illumination, because the narrow windows are fitted with oiled parchment. 1 Suspended by a chain from the wall is an oil lamp, usually not lighted until full darkness. A housewife