What key resources would a 13th century small town or village have needed?

by ladifas

Clearly an exhaustive list of all the various resources needed would be impossible to compile. I would therefore like a short (ish) list of the key resources and materials an early 13th century town (of about 2000-3000 people) would have needed on a regular basis. A few obvious ones include food, water, and fuel (would this have primarily been wood?).

For each resource, would it have been produced in or near the village (as in the case of food), or would it have been imported from elsewhere (as in the case of gold, for most places)?

This question is about European towns and villages of the period, specifically English ones, although I imagine the resources needed were broadly the same across the continent.

Full disclosure: This question has also been posted on History SE, but has not received an answer there yet, so I am also putting it here to increase the likelihood of receiving a well put-together answer.

gothwalk

It's not so much that this question is difficult to answer as that it's difficult to give good sources, largely because this is not how historical questions are usually framed. Accordingly, the books I've listed below will give you a good bit of the information I'm summarising here, but it's still very much an interpreted answer.

So for an approach, let me first look at the two bottom layers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: "Physiological Needs" and "Safety Needs". These can be summarised as "food, water, warmth, rest" and "security, safety".

First: food. Since food preservation was limited, and food transport even more so, towns needed to draw this from their immediate hinterland. Grain (wheat, barley, oats, and rye) was the major staple for English towns, and it's also the one that can be brought from furthest and possibly among the easiest to store. So it could be imported from a considerable distance, or even from abroad in case of need. Other foods grown in quantity (cabbages and other brassicas, turnips, etc) came from the local area.

Dried and smoked meat and salted fish could also be brought considerable distances. Fresh meat had to be local, so this varied considerably by locale - in areas where there was lots of sheep, you ate mutton, and in areas where there were more cows, you ate beef, always assuming you could afford it. Game and wild food were also brought into towns in considerable quantity.

Every house had a vegetable garden. This was pretty much a certainty, and some of them were extensive - the 'burgage' was the typical town property of the era, consisting of a long narrow strip of land fronting onto a street. The house was built at the street side, and then the rest was for food production, and the keeping of chickens and pigs.

Water was pretty much a given; every town had access to water in the forms of rivers, streams, springs, or wells - without that, there was no town.

Warmth is not as essential in modern England as in many areas of Europe; the number of days in the year when you will suffer from cold if you're outside are few enough. 1300, however, falls into the period after the Medieval Warm Period, and was a colder climatic era than we have now. So shelter and fire fuel were important factors. Shelter came from buildings, which were built from whatever was locally available - wood (though this could come from somewhat further away than the others), field stone, or brick. I'm in no way an expert on architecture, but I do know that importing stone, marble, etc, for building was the exclusive province of the wealthy.

Fuel was often wood (gathered from the local hinterland), for which trees were coppiced - cut back at a certain stage of growth, after which they produce many vertical stems quickly, which can then be cut for firewood (as well as fencing and other uses). Some northern areas of England also used turf, cut from peat bogs. Coal (in this era, "sea coal", from exposed strata on shores) was used by blacksmiths and for other industrial uses, but not usually for domestic fires. Again, almost all of this was local. Hearths were often in the centre of rooms, with openings overhead for smoke to escape; chimneys, while known, were not to become common until much later. Houses did not have many rooms, and indeed, single-room houses were pretty frequent, with cooking, eating, sleeping and everything else happening in one place. From the modern point of view, most medieval buildings would have been pretty cold, except right by the fire.

Under the heading of warmth, though, we should also include clothing. Woolen and linen clothes dominated - linen was made all over England, and wool was imported from the upland areas where sheep were kept to lowland areas. Wool was big business for England in general. Silk and cotton were imported from abroad, and were definitely luxury goods. Every town would have had traditional sources of linen and wool.

"Rest" can be interpreted here as furniture - beds, chairs, and storage. There wasn't much of any of these, and medieval rooms look pretty bare to us. Beds were often for multiple occupants, chairs might only be one to a house with everyone except the head of household sitting on wooden benches or stools. Most places would have had one table, used for everything - countertops didn't exist. Storage was in chests or in open shelves, more often as free-standing units than fixed to walls. All of this took more wood, and bigger chunks than the firewood, so mature trees needed to be felled. These could come from further afield, as wood doesn't decay notably in months or even years after cutting. Big beams for roofs (and ships) were particularly valued.

To the second layer of the hierarchy!

Security came from the local lord. That's into the realms of politics, except insofar as metal was needed for weapons and armour, and for tools. Some towns were close to (or even centred on) mines, and other imported metal. Everybody needed it, so your 1300s town needs to get it from somewhere.

Safety can be interpreted as justice or as peace of mind - these came again from the local lord or from the church. The church deemd wine for the sacraments to be a necessity, and so wine was needed from somewhere - in 1300, in the cooler climate, this was imported from abroad. Beer would not do!

Coinage, and therefore gold, silver, etc, and luxuries - silk, furs, jewellery - were not necessities in the same way. Towns ran on coin, certainly, but a good deal of it was already notional - rather than paying cash for everything, accounts were kept and settled up at the end of a season or year, and a lot of what we'd call barter still happened. Coin, of course, was minted by the king, and not a local concern.

Finally, one oddball: cookware. Cooking pots were made from riveted metal (mined locally or imported), stone (imported soapstone, carved), or pottery (the most common, and very often local, but imported to areas that had no clay). Tableware was wooden (local), or pottery (see above) or pewter (more common than you might expect; imported to most towns, but lasted a long time). Knives fall under tools, spoons were wooden or horn, and forks weren't really a thing.

I think that covers most things...

Sources:

Georges Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West

Steven Epstein, An Economic and Social History of Later Medieval Europe, 1000-1500