Here's a thought: if I were to ask you to explain the difference between a village, hamlet, or a town as you would define them nowadays, would you say there is a rule of thumb?

Maybe we'd be able to look at a combination of dictionary definitions as well as various local government requirements using different words to define different kind of communities. But you'd also probably find a myriad of newspaper clippings, literary references, and other articles using the terms pretty arbitrarily. Is the "West Village" of Manhattan a real village? Is Georgetown in Washington DC a town? In the Rocky Mountain ski resort area of Jackson Hole the largest town is called Teton Village, however this place is legally classified as a "Census-Designated Place," while on some brochures it's called a "Hamlet" (I am aware this is a very specific reference). What even is a "Hamlet?" The only formalized definition is that which is used in some (not all) low-density subdivisions in the United Kingdom. And it is pretty much only in the United States and United Kingdom (along with some other common-law systems) that communities can choose to be organized under different forms and have different classifications. In other places like my native Italy, all territorial subdivisions are strictly regimented: every square inch of Italy is (working upwards in size) part of a Comune, which must be part of a Provincia, which in turn must be part of a Regione. We can get nitpicky and point out that some discretion is used if a Comune decides carve out a semi-autonomous Frazione (and some Provincia are called Citta' Metropolitana) but we probably agree that this system is very different to whatever is going on in most of the Anglosphere. How then can we distinguish a city from a town or village in Italy, if for the Ministry of the Interior they are all called, "Comune?"

We have to understand that descriptors like "Village," "Town," or "Hamlet" exist to communicate the characteristics of a community, most typically referring to its size. It is up to whomever is writing to choose descriptor, both when referring to historic communities or present communities.

But what I think you're really getting at is a question tied to urbanization patterns in medieval, or even pre-industrial, Europe. In what sorts of communities did people typically live in?

I am sure (and the text of your question almost confirms this to me) that you know full well that the population of Western Europe became relatively less urbanized in the post-Roman era. But you might be wondering what the implications of this trend are in practical terms: where did people go? How did they live?

It is true that people moved out of the city and into the country. But this does not mean people stopped living in proximity to each other altogether. A group of farms large enough to be farmed by a few families, or even a large estate worked by several serfs, can easily exist around a small village of a few hundred people (between ten and fifty family units). Estimates vary, and there is large regional variation, but a family unit can generally be expected to farm between ten and twenty acres around a town build on a hill, around a well, at a crossroads, or in a number of other places where people decide it is advantageous or desirable to live.

The organization of larger cities and towns was also highly variable. One of the most urbanized regions of Europe from the Roman Republic up to the 16th or 17th century was Italy, where the legal and social construct of the "Comune," long before its use in the peninsula's modern political and administrative organization, was closely associated with notions of urban identity. But urbanization was not a necessary condition of the Comune. The Comune was typically formed as an association of local landholders and magnates who happened to converge in an old Roman town in order to resolve disputes, but it could also be formed as an association of family units who existed in close-knit communities that did not agree on a place to converge (Venice, in its early stages of development, was like this). The Comune could certainly develop suburbs: these could be agricultural communities close to a great manor house, or these could be communities of free landholders. They could spring up where rapids made it necessary to unload barges onto pack animals, or where a road crossed a river. They could be towns whose most prominent dynasties had strong ties in the larger city, or they could be small hamlets whose inhabitants only ever traveled to the city in small numbers to bring the harvest to market. Some of the Comuni had many expansive satellite communities (Milan was one such place) while others had very few satellite communities (like Pisa, whose aristocratic dynasties were disinterested in affirming themselves far from the mouth of the River Arno).

Similar patterns existed in many other parts of the Western Mediterranean. In some places, like Provence and Catalonia, models similar to the Italian Comune emerged. In other places, like Andalusia and the Mediterranean Islands, there were comparatively fewer cities and towns (the large cities that did emerge, like Cordoba and Palermo, were often the result of the decisions of a ruler or monarch favoring a given urban area). But in each place, there were countless relationships between large and small communities whereby there was no single defining rule: if there were conditions for a thick net of satellite communities, such a network would develop, if conditions were only favorable for the development of a few villages here and there, the hinterland would look much different.

This can be quite a hard one to answer, given the semantics used in contemporary records are often vague at best. The development of proto-urban settlements in 9th and 10th century England is often intrinsically linked with the defensive burh network, yet the sites chosen as burhs or arx only occasionally overlap with those urbs or civitas that already existed. While burhs were usually bestowed with civil and economic functions, this was no guarantee that they would develop into major settlements, while some extant major settlements - Bristol, Shrewsbury, Dorchester or Wimborne being examples that spring to mind - seemingly receive no "official" acknowledgement of their status, at least until Domesday.

Even in Domesday there is little differentiation between towns, villages or hamlets beyond a settlement's stated size and value. A useful example of this is Wimborne Minster - a prominent Dorset wool production centre and market town, home of a Cerdicing royal monastery (later a minster church), adjacent to the royal manor at Kingston Lacy and according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle defended by at least a ditch and palisade. At the time of Domesday, Wimborne is host to 63 "villagers" households, 68 "smallholder" households, 7 "cottagers" and 15 slaves, giving it an estimated population of around 600 people and putting it well in the largest 20% of listed settlements. Wimborne has 45 "ploughlands" - a very rough unit of land measurement likely based on productivity rather than definite size but roughly analogous to (very approximately) 120 acres or 50 hectares each - as well as 150 acres of meadow for its significant sheep flocks and vast amounts of pasture. The lowest ranks of free peasantry, the smallholders and cottagers, often only held around 5 acres of land and may have worked some as kitchen gardens adjacent to their houses within the walls of the settlement, but for the majority of the peasantry - particularly the 'villeins' or 'villagers' who on average worked some 30 acres - would have done so in an extra-mural context. Fields were divided between tenants but likely worked communally, as suggested by the communal plough teams listed in Domesday. Lands were worked in a three-field rotation system, with livestock grazed on fallow fields and common ground. Rents were most often paid in the form of service, carried out on the lord's plough lands alongside the tenants'.

Extra-mural agriculture also happens in cities. Already by the tenth century, sub-urbia are starting to accrete around burhs, populated by those unable or unwilling to pay the murage to live inside the settlement's defences, but close enough to take personal refuge. In 10th century Cheshire, the fortification of Chester in 907 and Eddisbury in 913 leads to the rapid proliferation of settlement across the fertile Cheshire Plain. Burhs are roughly 40 miles apart, meaning no settlement is more than 20 miles from the defensive, social and economic functions they proffer or, in those instances where burhs don't develop into civitas, they are still within an average day's walk of a market town.