So the title leaves it open for a huge range of answers, so let me barrow it down a little.
Let's say a 15th Century village in Germany. What I am really interested in knowing is would it have had defences, walls etc? What would the population of been, and how densely packed would they have been (like would houses have been in rows or scattered). And finally what would have been the prominent buildings there? Would every village have a blacksmith, church, etc?
Hope this can be answered, thanks guys.
I studied this for a while at university, although my knowledge is limited to Britain (I doubt Germany would have been much different but I can't say that for sure).
There would have been a lot of variation in size, population and what was built there, but it is safe to assume a proper village as opposed to a hamlet would likely have had at least a chapel and probably a manor house of some sort, varying according to the wealth of the Lord and the village.
Villages can take many forms, from a cluster of houses around a green, to a row along 1 side of a road with large spaces in between, or a row of houses close together along a road or something more complex.
The area with houses would generally have been surrounded by fields, which were often farmed semi communally, where each family would have set strips of the field that they could farm. They could have multiple strips in each field but iirc this varied from place to place. Ridge and furrow ploughing was commonly used, which involved using a team of oxen to pull a plough creating a raised ridge in between furrows (like small ditches). This often resulted in fields with a shape like a stretched out S, because of how the oxen had to be turned. This can still be seen in the shapes of some fields today if you look at aerial photos or Google earth, sometimes you can even see traces of the ridges and furrows when driving past open fields in Britain.
Defenses would not have been very common as far as we know, beyond anything the Lord decided he wanted for his manor house and maybe a perimeter ditch, but that would realistically have been more to act as a visual boundary and keep animals where they are supposed to be.
A good example to look at is Wharram Percy in Yorkshire. It is a deserted medieval village which is easy to look up as a good amount of info including pictures is publicly available. It had rows of houses along roads, the outlines of which are still visible, and a church which is still partly standing.