ABSTRACT
Profitable and beautiful, towns were loved by princes. Urban and village fortification and lordly castles were the material counterparts of the institutional restraints on war that gave defence an advantage over offence in this period. The Church tried to slow war at home in order to project it abroad in the Crusades. The growing freedom of the nobility, townsfolk and even villagers also limited service owed to princes, and hence impeded the employment of their militias for offensive wars. The urban distinction between workers and bourgeois also appeared in villages. In Switzerland and Savoy, the neighbours enunciating local custom and judging cases were not only called 'worthy' and 'the better and more ancient parishioners' but also, emulating Rome's ancient law, 'honest' or 'honoured men'. Like towns, some village boards of governors combined knights and commoners. The best-known example of all is the Swiss alliance of the small towns and villages of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwald in 1291.
