ABSTRACT
Each town housed a huge quantity of equipment, which in its turn required specialists to maintain and repair it. Despite the hazards of using earth, councillors at Munster adopted it when they restructured the city's defences in 1447. North German towns, which in the mid fourteenth century had been able to rely on their own citizens to take to the field, were finding by the fifteenth that it was necessary to hire mercenaries instead. Many individuals sought an easy profit by acting as middle men, able to meet the towns' needs by sub-contracting. Defence was a live issue for the towns of the late medieval Empire. Internal instability, growing disenchantment with personal military service, and the widening gap between the power of artillery and the ageing defences of most towns of late medieval Europe ought perhaps to have drained their martial enthusiasm.
