Medieval cities

Though he doesn’t deny that medieval cities had their forms of oppression and ugliness, Timothy Gorringe argues that the medieval city lived up to its claim: “the city makes one free.”

The city was a place to “escape from the oppression of feudal bonds,” and during the twelfth century the cities enjoyed a “communalist revolution” involving urban fraternities and guilds. Later medieval cities were divided into self-governing parishes, “and the city was the union of these districts, streets, parishes, and guilds.”

According to Lewis Mumford, the medieval city was “a collective structure whose main purpose was the living of a Christian life.” Summarizing Mumford, Gorringe writes,

“Hospitals and almshouses were built to serve the sick and needy, as, later on, were foundling asylums. ‘The lay orders, aiming at the practice of a Christian life in the heart of the city without the physical and spiritual withdrawal enjoined by the old monasteries, were part of an organized power to infuse every aspect of existence with Christian principles.’ IN this city the monopolgy of power and knowledge was renounced and laws and property rights reorganized in the interest of justice. Slavery and compulsory labour were abolished, and gross economic inequalities between class and class eliminated.”

Gorringe summarizes the findings of Richard Sennett as well, who saw “religious community in the medieval city . . . as a “point of moral reference. The almshouse, the parish church, and the hospital set standards against which to measure behaviour in other parts of the city. ‘It made a city a moral geography. For those under the sway of the new religious values sanctuary was the point of community – a place where compassion bonded strangers.’”

In these ways, the medieval city aspired to achieve the purpose of the city, which as Mumford claimed, is “to further man’s conscious participation in the cosmic and historic process.” Mumford elaborated: “Through its own complex and enduring structure, the city vastly augments man’s ability to interpret these processes and take an active, formative part in them, so that every phase of the drama is stages shall have, to the highest degree possible, the illumination of consciousness, the stamp of purpose, the colour of love. That magnification of all the dimensions of life, through emotional communion, rational communication, technological mastery, and above all dramatic representation, has been the supreme office of the city in history. And it remains the chief reason for the city’s continued existence.”

This creativity comes with costly upheavals, and Gorringe insists that from a Christian perspective the litmus test of the city is its service to the poor. On this point, the medieval city, for all its imperfections, was a genuine realization of Christian political order.