In fantasy and story’s it’s fairly common for their to be some kind of city watch (the gold cloaks of game of thrones/ a song of ice and fire being a good example) but would these exist in real life? If so how many men would the city watch of say Paris have? What about other city’s? Was their any kind of uniform or was it like most medieval army’s?
Town watches did exist, but not quite in the way we’re used to seeing them in movies and video games.
I can’t speak to Paris specifically, but I can say some about practices in 14th century England.
In the mid to late 13th century, a series of royal edicts formalized the establishment of town watches in England. In general, a city would have six watchmen for every gate and 12 in every borough. A town would have four or six watchmen depending on population. In the 14th century, London was a special case with only six watchmen per ward. As London has 25 wards, that was 125 watchmen for all the streets in London, plus several dozen more at the gates (totaling nearly 200 all together).
Now, these watchmen were specifically night watchmen. Nighttime in the dark, narrow streets of medieval cities was seen as dangerous; a time when only the nefarious would dare be out and about. Night watches were set up to prevent this sort of thing. Their job was to close the city gates at nightfall, keep the peace and enforce the curfew by arresting anyone caught out of doors (unless they were men of good reputation and carrying a lantern), and reopen the gates at dawn. That’s pretty much it. Keeping an eye out for trouble during the day was seen as everyone’s responsibility (remember that people lived quite communally. You knew your neighbors).
As for equipment, we don’t know a lot. A lantern most certainly. Weapons aren’t specified as far as I can tell, but some sort of truncheon or something wouldn’t be impossible (there is an early 17th century woodcut of a London night watchman shown walking with a spear). He’d also have something to make noise with. The aforementioned 17th century woodcut shows the man carrying a bell, but we do have reference to 14th and 15th century night watchmen carrying horns, specifically shawms, a type of conical horn-like woodwind and ancestor to the oboe.
Yeah. Musical night watchmen were totally a thing. In the 14th century, it is known that shawm-playing night watchment provided entertainment in cities across Europe. By the 1400s, musically talented groups of night watchmen on their shawms started pulling double duty as the town’s band as well.
Who got to be a night watchman is an interesting question. By custom it seems it was intended that it was the civic duty of every homeowner to take their turn on the night watch, but in practice, people tried to skip their service or pay a substitute to take their place, or weasel out of it in other ways.
Now, there were other groups of watchmen as well established for other purposes. Special household guards established by the king or parliament, for example.