322 Chapter 17
wealth although they did not rival the wealth of landed
nobles. Studies of wills probated during the Old
Regime have shown that nobles possessed more than
two-thirds of the wealth. A study of England in the
1740s has shown that the landowning aristocracy and
upper gentry (a total of less than 3 percent of popula-
tion) owned 95 percent of the national wealth.
Many countries, particularly those east of the Elbe-
Trieste line, prohibited peasants from migrating to the
towns and obtaining urban freedoms. Bavarian law,
Austrian law, and the Prussian legal code, for example,
all bound German peasants to stay on the soil. Even in
western Europe, some town charters restricted resi-
dence and citizenship, usually to people who showed a
means of support. Cities needed migration, however.
Conditions were generally so unhealthy that the death
rate exceeded the birthrate. Cities could only maintain
their size or grow by attracting rural immigrants. Thus,
restrictions on population mobility began to disappear
during the Old Regime. London grew rapidly in the
eighteenth century, yet recorded more deaths than
births in every year of the century until 1790; in 1741,
burials outnumbered baptisms by two to one.
The Social and Economic Structure
of Urban Europe
The towns of the eighteenth century varied in their
function as well as their size. Capital cities formed a
special category of large cities where government and
finance were centered, and the population was so huge
that it was a challenge just to feed them. The next
range of major cities were usually manufacturing cen-
ters (such as Lyons and Granada) or great port-cities
(such as Marseilles, Hamburg, and Liverpool). Impor-
tant regional towns similarly varied, as centers of ad-
ministration (both governmental and religious) and
manufacturing. European towns were not yet character-
ized by the heavy industry or mass production associ-
ated with modern urban life. Economic historians have
estimated that in 1750 Britain had attained only 10 per-
cent of the industrialization that it would reach by
1900; France, the Italian states, and the German states
were only at 7 percent to 9 percent. Manufacturing in
the eighteenth century chiefly meant textiles. Com-
bined textile manufacturing (wool, cotton, linen, and
silk) accounted for 28 percent of all British manufactur-
ing, whereas combined heavy industries (mining, met-
alworking, and construction) accounted for only 22
percent. Textiles similarly provided the traditional basis
of urban prosperity in many regions of continental Eu-
rope, such as northeastern France, Flanders, and the
city-states of northern Italy.
The occupational structure of towns varied with
the town’s function. A study of Bayeux, a provincial ad-
ministrative town in Normandy, found a working adult
male population of twelve hundred. Their employment
shows how an administrative town was different from
the image of towns as manufacturing centers. Slightly
more than 10 percent of the men of Bayeux were in the
educated professions, mostly lawyers and officials or
people trained in medical arts—physicians, surgeons,
and apothecaries. An additional 1 percent were tax col-
lectors (an independent occupation) for the monarch or
the regional nobility. The prosperous great merchants
(not shopkeepers) who traded in regional agricultural
or manufactured goods constituted nearly 3 percent of
the male population. At the opposite end of Bayeux’s
social spectrum, 10 percent of the population were ur-
ban laborers—a low number that shows that this was
not a manufacturing town. Between the two extremes,
approximately 75 percent of the male population were
engaged in trades. Most of them worked in the produc-
tion or distribution of food (grocers, butchers, and bak-
ers), clothing (tailors, cobblers, and wig makers), and
housing (hoteliers and innkeepers or the building
trades). The remainder of the population practiced
other trades characteristic of urban life: coopers, gold-
smiths, clock makers, saddlers, cabinetmakers, drapers,
dozens of other crafts whose practitioners were called
artisans.
At the pinnacle of the urban social structure sat the
wealthy patrician class of the big cities and great manu-
facturing towns—a bourgeoisie of banking and finance,
of manufacturing and commerce (see illustration 17.4).
This urban oligarchy lacked the hereditary titles and
privileges of the aristocracy. They were not yet as
wealthy as nobles, and they held much less political
power. But many families possessed enough wealth to
live nobly and aspired to aristocratic status. A few
members of this urban elite might enter the aristocracy
through state service, and some families married into
the aristocracy by providing lavish dowries to daugh-
ters who married nobles in debt. This wealthy class
lived handsomely, but they represented only a small
percentage of urban population, just as aristocrats did
in the rural world.
The typical town dweller in the Old Regime was
an artisan, and the dominant feature of an artisan’s life
was the guild—yet another corporation (see illustration
17.5). Guilds had developed in Europe in the late Mid-
dle Ages (between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries)