Herbert Knittler (ed.), Minderstädte, Kümmerformen, Gefreite Dörfer. Stufen zur Urbanität und das Märkteproblem. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Städte Mitteleuropas, Band XX. Linz: Österreichischer Arbeitskreis für Stadtgeschichtsforschung, 2006. xvii + 356pp. 3 maps. 1 table. €69.00 (original) (raw)

Urban History, 2007

Abstract

wine, drinking glasses, dyestuffs and linens, exchanged for grain, firewood and timber, tallow, hides and skins and woollen goods. Above all these developments, however, the author singles out the expansion of beer-brewing as the most significant, in terms of its early establishment (the later fifteenth century) and the rapidity with which it spread. Retailing and brewing were both profitable, particularly for alien brewers who dominated the export trade, and a broader stimulus was exerted on the rural economy through the extensive cultivation of barley and the commercialization of malting. Small domestic brewers, especially women, were adversely affected as the taste for hopped beer reduced the demand for home-brewed ale. A good deal of descriptive information is assembled about wage rates and conditions of work, but in the absence of serial data, few clear generalizations seem possible. Low rents and food prices after 1450 generated increased purchasing power, and by the 1520s, roughly 53 per cent of taxpayers across the region were wage-dependent and buying food for at least part of the year. Until population pressure built up in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, these conditions suggest a moderate degree of prosperity, especially when viewed alongside complaints about the spread of leisure pursuits such as card-playing, gambling, tennis and bowls. In addition to these pleasures, Canterbury residents could also try their hand at ‘closh’ (skittles played with a mallet), but needed to travel as far afield as Sandwich to find a brothel in the late 1490s. Improbably, the latter was under municipal control. If, as the author concludes, the economic changes of the period were not in themselves pivotal, they nevertheless provided the basis for future growth. But hopped beer and card games must have seemed poor compensation for the disappearance of customary land, and an ever-widening division between the upper and lower levels of society. David Ormrod University of Kent

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