Towns and the urbanisation of medieval society The phenomenon of the pre-industrial

Also undisputed is that in Europe between roughly 1000 and 1300 all three tendencies coincided; after that, the size of most towns stagnated, or even fell. While this ties in with general population decline in the late Middle Ages (see Table 9.1), quite remarkably the share of the urban population on the whole kept increasing, judging by the growth of the number of small and medium-sized towns during that same period (see Table 9.2). Moreover, regions where urbanisation had been weak before 1300, such as the northern Low Countries, central and northern Europe, now experienced a modest increase.