Why You Would Never Want to Live in a Medieval City: Disease, Filth, Violence, and the Shocking Truths About Urban Life in the Dark Ages.

Thomas had been running for three days when he first saw the walls of London rising above the misty horizon.

He was twenty-two years old, with calloused hands from fieldwork and a heart burned raw by the knowledge that he would die in servitude if he did nothing. The estate where he had been born—a parcel of land owned by Lord Ashford—was his entire world, a world in which he had no choice, no future, no possibility of becoming anything other than what his father had been and his father’s father before him.

But he had heard stories. Whispered in the fields during harvest time. Murmured in the tavern on the rare nights when the lord’s steward wasn’t watching. Tales of a place where a man could escape. Where a serf could run for one year and one day, and if he wasn’t captured, he would become free. No one could drag him back. No lord could claim him. He would be reborn as a free person in the eyes of the law.

It seemed impossible. Too good to be true. But Thomas had nothing to lose except the life he already had—and that life was worth nothing.

So he had stolen a horse, ridden through the night, abandoned the animal at a village crossroads, and walked the rest of the way. Three days of terror, moving only at night, sleeping in forests, eating scraps of bread he had taken from the kitchen before fleeing.

And now, as the September sun broke through the clouds and illuminated the stone walls of London, Thomas understood that he had reached the threshold of a new world.

Part Two: The City Revealed

The gate guards barely glanced at him as he shuffled through with the morning crowd. A young man without identification, without an official ledger entry, blending into the chaos of arrivals. Thomas had heard about this—the informal networks, the underground rosters, the city officials who actively encouraged runaway serfs to abandon the countryside and populate the urban centers. Labor was needed. Growth demanded bodies. And the authorities, Thomas realized, were willing to look the other way.

He found himself in a narrow street that smelled of fish and animal dung. Pigs wandered freely among the cobblestones. Chickens pecked at refuse. Above him, wooden buildings leaned toward each other as if gossiping across the street, their upper stories overhanging the lower ones so severely that they nearly blocked out the sky.

Thomas flinched as something warm and foul splashed near his feet. He looked up and saw a woman at a window, emptying a chamber pot into the street. She didn’t even look to see where it landed.

This was London. The great city. The place of opportunity and freedom.

It was also a place that smelled like death.

Part Three: The Duality

Over the following weeks, Thomas learned to navigate the city’s contradictions.

By day, he found work as a porter, carrying goods from the docks along the Thames to the markets and warehouses scattered throughout the city. He earned enough to rent a small corner of a room in a crowded house, shared with five other men who worked different shifts so that each of them could have use of the bed for part of the day.

The work was hard. The pay was meager. But he was free. No one owned him. No one could tell him what to do with the coins he earned. No one could prevent him from dreaming.

In the evenings, Thomas discovered another London. A London of festivals and amusements. He saw young men skating on the frozen Thames in winter. He watched merchants haggling in market squares, the energy of their voices creating a kind of music. He heard church bells ringing across the city in constant harmony, calling people to prayer, marking the hours, structuring time itself.

He drank cheap ale in taverns where musicians played and people laughed. He attended religious processions where the entire city seemed to move as a single organism, united in faith and spectacle. He stood in the market square watching acrobats and storytellers, witnessing human creativity in its raw form.

But there was another London too. A darker London that Thomas encountered most viscerally during his first winter.

Part Four: The Shadow City

The plague of filth and disease was unlike anything Thomas had experienced on the countryside estates, where at least there was open space and the possibility of escape from one’s own waste.

In London, human and animal excrement accumulated in the streets. People dumped their chamber pots from windows without warning. Dead animals remained in open sight, untouched and rotting. The smell—a miasma of decomposition and human bodily functions—seemed to permeate everything. Thomas learned to cover his face with cloth when the stench became unbearable, though the remedy provided little relief.

Within two months of arriving, Thomas witnessed his first death from plague-related illness. A fellow porter named Martin, young and strong one week, burning with fever the next, dead within days. The body was removed quickly, dumped into a mass grave outside the city walls. Life continued. No one mourned. The city had no time for grief.

Thomas also witnessed the violence that simmered just beneath the surface of urban life. A dispute over a pile of garbage—literally a disagreement about where refuse should be deposited—ended with a man being stabbed to death. An argument between two merchants about the price of cloth escalated into a brawl that left three people bleeding in the street.

He saw a man beaten nearly unconscious because he had urinated from an upper story window. Another man killed because he had dumped rotten goods in front of a competitor’s shop. The city’s violence seemed to spring from trivial causes, but Thomas understood that it was rooted in something deeper: the desperation that came from living in such close proximity with so many others, all competing for resources, all struggling for survival.

The authorities tried to manage the chaos. In 1371, new ordinances were issued. People were forbidden from dumping waste directly into the streets. Households were required to carry their dirty water to designated drainage channels. The penalty for violation was two shillings—a substantial fine. In other cities, even stricter laws required residents to sweep the area in front of their homes on Saturdays.

In 1372, London introduced the first municipal garbage collection system. Thomas witnessed the innovation: twenty-four horses and twelve carts, moving through the city weekly, collecting refuse and transporting it outside the walls. It was crude, insufficient, but it represented an acknowledgment of the problem. The authorities were beginning to understand that cities required management, that human habitation at such density demanded structure and regulation.

Part Five: The Economy of Dreams

But what sustained Thomas through the misery and danger was the economy of possibility that London offered.

He worked in a city where a man could become something other than what he was born to be. He watched blacksmiths, carpenters, shoemakers, jewelers—all craftsmen who had learned trades and built modest prosperity. He saw merchants moving goods and accumulating wealth. He encountered lawyers and clerks whose literacy gave them access to power.

The guilds controlled much of this opportunity. Craftsmen organized themselves into formal associations that regulated production, maintained quality, and protected their interests. Thomas heard stories about serfs who had escaped to cities, learned a trade under apprenticeship, and eventually become respected artisans. They owned their own workshops. They lived above their businesses in homes that, while still crowded and unhygienic compared to what he had known, were theirs.

He also witnessed the physical transformation of the city. The construction of cathedrals and great basilicas provided employment for stonemasons, sculptors, carpenters, stained glass artists, and laborers. He saw the beginning of York Minster’s reconstruction, understanding that this project would employ hundreds for generations. The church, he realized, was not just a spiritual authority. It was an economic engine, the largest employer in the city, sustained by vast landholdings and tax collection.

Thomas began to understand London not as a single entity but as a layered ecosystem. At the top were the landowning elite who held property and seats on the city council. Beneath them were prominent merchants and lawyers who controlled commerce and legal authority. In the middle was a growing class of skilled craftsmen—the blacksmiths, carpenters, shoemakers, jewelers—who lived and worked in shopfront homes where the ground floor served as a workspace and the upper floors as living quarters.

At the very bottom were people like Thomas—unskilled laborers, porters, cleaners, livestock handlers, hired hands. But even at this level, there was possibility. He could learn a trade. He could save enough to rent a small shop. He could become something more.

Part Six: The Voices of the City

In his second year of freedom, Thomas encountered two books—or rather, two descriptions from chroniclers—that seemed to embody the profound duality of urban life.

The first was the account of a monk named Richard Devises, who described London as a “vast den of sin.” To Devises, the city was a snare brimming with temptations: taverns, gambling dens, brothels. He saw the city as proof of moral decay, as a place where men turned away from spiritual light toward carnal desire.

The second was the account of William FitzSteven, a cleric who painted London as a place of thrilling festivals, spirited amusements, and profound piety. He described young men skating on the frozen Thames, kicking balls in summer, experiencing vitality and community. To FitzSteven, London was not only a center of commerce and religion but a playground for the soul and body alike.

Thomas realized that both accounts were true. And neither was true. They were describing different aspects of the same city, filtered through different temperaments and beliefs.

On the same street corner, one could hear church bells ringing alongside the shouting of merchants and the laughter of children. On the same day, a solemn religious procession could be followed shortly by a tavern brawl over unpaid ale. The city was contradiction made manifest. It was a place of genuine opportunity and genuine despair, of spiritual transcendence and base depravity, of human creativity and human cruelty.

Part Seven: The Stranger’s Perspective

By his third year in London, Thomas had become integrated into the city’s life. He had regular work. He had friends among the other laborers. He had learned enough about trade and goods to begin understanding the complex commercial networks that connected London to other cities.

He had learned that the wool trade connected London to Bruges and Ghent—Flemish cities where English wool was transformed into fine textiles by some of the most skilled weavers in medieval Europe. He understood that ships carried raw wool from the English countryside to the docks at London, then across the English Channel to the Low Countries, where it was transformed into cloth that was worn by nobles from Paris to Venice.

He had learned the street names that marked specialized neighborhoods: Pie Corner where pies were sold, Beef Lane where cattle were slaughtered, Apothecary Street where medicines were prepared, Fisher Row where fishermen gathered. These were not random designations but historical markers of the city’s specialized economy.

He had watched the introduction of new laws and reforms, each one representing a small attempt to bring order to the chaos. The rewards offered to informants who reported illegal dumping. The ordinances against waste disposal. The weekly garbage collection.

But what struck Thomas most profoundly was the realization that medieval cities—despite their smallness by modern standards, despite their lack of sanitation, despite their violence and disease—were fundamentally similar to human communities of any era. They were places where people pursued dreams. Where they struggled with necessity. Where they encountered temptation and transcendence in equal measure.

Part Eight: The Choice

On the first anniversary of his arrival in London, Thomas stood at the top of a church tower and looked out over the city.

Below him, the narrow streets twisted and turned without apparent pattern. Buildings leaned toward each other. Smoke rose from countless chimneys. The Thames reflected the gray autumn sky. Somewhere in that maze of streets and alleys, tens of thousands of people were living, working, dying, dreaming.

From this vantage point, Thomas could see both the order and the chaos that characterized urban life. He could see the systematic organization—the market squares, the churches, the guild halls—that structure had imposed on the city. But he could also see the organic, unplanned growth—the narrow alleys, the crowded housing, the pigs and chickens wandering freely through the streets—that revealed the city’s fundamental unruliness.

Two chroniclers had described this place. One had called it a den of sin. The other had called it a hub of delight. Thomas understood now that what you saw in a city often depended on the lens through which you chose to look.

If he focused on the disease, the violence, the grinding poverty of unskilled labor, the unsanitary conditions, the moral decay that concerned the monks—then yes, London was a den of sin, a place of despair.

But if he focused on the opportunity, the freedom from servitude, the possibility of learning a trade, the festivals and amusements, the spiritual beauty of the great cathedrals, the energy of human creativity—then yes, London was a hub of delight, a place where anything seemed possible.

Thomas realized that both perspectives were valid. Both were true. And together, they created the complete picture of what a city was: a place where the highest and lowest aspects of human nature existed simultaneously, separated only by the width of a street or the span of a day.

Part Nine: Ten Years Later

Thomas was thirty-two years old when he finally returned to the countryside to visit his old village.

He was no longer a porter. He had spent five years as an apprentice stonemason, working on the reconstruction of London churches. The experience had taught him skills, discipline, and the satisfaction of creating something permanent. He had saved enough money to establish himself as an independent contractor, taking on small projects—reinforcing walls, repairing buildings, constructing additions to homes.

He had a wife now—a woman he had met at a market, the daughter of a cloth merchant. They had two children. He had ambitions to expand his business, perhaps to train apprentices of his own.

When he walked into his old village, the people who had known him stared. A man in decent clothes, carrying himself with confidence, speaking with the accent of London. He was transformed. He was no longer one of them.

But he remembered what London had been for him: a doorway to possibility, a place where the circumstances of his birth did not determine the trajectory of his life.

As he rode back toward London, toward the city that had adopted him and transformed him, Thomas understood that medieval cities—despite their smallness, their filth, their violence, their disease—had served a crucial function in human history. They had been places where the rigid feudal hierarchy could be escaped. Where a serf could become free. Where a laborer could become an artisan. Where dreams were possible.

The cities were not perfect. They would never be perfect. But they were necessary. They were the spaces where human potential could be realized, where the human condition—in all its complexity, its beauty, its horror—could be fully expressed.