with the interest on loans hidden in the fiction of a penalty for “late payment” in
order to avoid the church’s ban on usury.
Pooled resources made large-scale productive enterprises possible. A cloth
industry began, powered by water mills. New deep-mining technologies provided
Europeans with hitherto untapped sources of metals. Forging techniques improved,
and iron was for the first time regularly used for agricultural tools and plows,
enhancing food production. Beer, a major source of nutrition in the north of Europe,
moved from the domestic hearth and monastic estates to urban centers, where
brewers gained special privileges to ply their trade.
Brewers, like other urban artisans, had their own guild. Whether driven by
machines or handwork, the new economy was sustained by such guilds, which
regulated and protected professionals ranging from merchants and financiers to
shoemakers. In these social, religious, and economic associations, members prayed
for and buried one another. Craft guilds agreed on quality standards for their products
and defined work hours, materials, and prices. Merchant guilds regulated business
arrangements, common weights and measures, and (like the craft guilds) prices.
Guilds guaranteed their members—mostly male, except for a few professions—a
place in the market. They represented the social and economic counterpart to urban
walls, giving their members protection, shared identity, and recognized status.
The political counterpart to the walls was the “commune”—town self-
government. City dwellers—keenly aware of their special identity in a world
dominated by knights and peasants—recognized their mutual interest in reliable
coinage, laws to facilitate commerce, freedom from servile dues and services, and
independence to buy and sell as the market dictated. They petitioned the political
powers that ruled them—bishops, kings, counts, castellans, dukes—for the right to
govern themselves.
Collective movements for urban self-government were especially prevalent in
Italy, France, and Germany. Already Italy’s political life was city-centered;
communes there were attempts to substitute the power of one group (the citizens) for
another (the nobles and bishops). At Milan in the second half of the eleventh century,
for example, popular discontent with the archbishop, who effectively ruled the city,
led to numerous armed clashes that ended, in 1097, with the transfer of power from
the archbishop to a government of leading men of the city. Outside Italy movements
for urban independence—sometimes violent, as at Milan, while at other times
peaceful—often took place within a larger political framework. For example, King
Henry I of England (r.1100–1135) freed the citizens of London from numerous
