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The first part of David Nicholas's massive two-volume study of the medieval city, this book is a major achievement in its own right. (It is also fully self-sufficient, though many readers will want to use it with its equally impressive sequel which is being published simultaneously.) In it, Professor Nicholas traces the slow regeneration of urban life in the early medieval period, showing where and how an urban tradition had survived from late antiquity, and when and why new urban communities began to form where there was no such continuity. He charts the different types and functions of the m

The Later Medieval City, 1300-1500, the second part of David Nicholas's ambitious two-volume study of cities and city life in the Middle Ages, fully lives up to its splendid precursor, The Growth of the Medieval City. (Like that volume it is fully self-sufficient, though many readers will want to use the two as a continuum.) This book covers a much shorter period than the first. That traced the rise of the medieval European city system from late Antiquity to the early fourteenth century; this offers a portrait of the fully developed late medieval city in all its richness and complexity.David N

In the thirteenth century the county of Flanders was the leading commercial and industrial region of Western Europe. It had easy access by water and overland routes to the German Rhineland and to the fairs of Champagne. As the Italians from the later thirteenth century began to use a direct maritime link with the North, Bruges, on the North Sea, became the major clearing house for goods coming from Italy and the Hanse towns of northern Germany. Flanders originally had a large wool production; this led to its early preeminence in textile manufacturing. Although the growing urbanization of thecounty soon severely curtailed facilities for grazing, Flanders easily obtained English wool, which was simultaneously of a higher calibre and a cheaper price than the native product. At a time when the towns of northern Italy were still very largely finishers of cloth brought from outside, the towns of Flanders, and particularly the five great towns of Bruges, Ghent, Ypres, Lille, and Douai, had prosperous industries in textiles of varying types, but specialized in luxury cloths designed for export.