How Cities Broke Free from Feudalism — The Wealth of Nations

Smith contrasts ancient Greek and Italian towns, built by landowning citizens, with post-Roman burghs inhabited by tradesmen nearly in villanage, who paid passage, pontage, and stallage taxes until kings granted exemptions to favoured free traders in return for poll-taxes. Town revenues were farmed to sheriffs or jointly to burghers themselves; over time the farm became perpetual fee with fixed rent, turning personal exemptions into corporate liberties. Marriage, inheritance, and testamentary rights followed, along with corporations empowered to make bye-laws, build walls, muster militias, and keep watch and ward. What began as royal bargains over tolls hardened into urban self-government. Burghers who paid fixed rents to the crown in place of arbitrary exactions gained a stake in orderly markets and could invest in workshops without fear that a sheriff would seize tomorrow's stock.

Weak kings, unable to protect subjects from barons, allied with towns that hated and feared the lords. Mutual interest bound crown and burgh: they were the king's enemies' enemies. John of England, Philip I's France, and German emperors granted charters liberally; Swiss and Italian cities sometimes became republics that humbled rural nobility, forcing castle dwellers into burgh life, while French and English towns gained tax consent and parliamentary representation. Where inland country was fertile yet distant from navigable rivers, cheap provisions drew artisans who worked up local surplus that could not cheaply reach foreign markets. Manufacturers gave cultivators useful goods on easier terms and a better price for rude produce, encouraging further improvement in a reciprocal cycle.

Leeds, Halifax, Sheffield, Birmingham, and Wolverhampton grew in this inland pattern, though England's Spanish-wool cloth long preceded those later export manufactures. Order and security in cities let industry aim beyond bare subsistence while country cultivators hid savings from predatory lords. Smith's synthesis is political as much as economic: towns became engines of improvement because they won liberty and accumulated stock first, then extended manufactures whose refined output could cross land carriage where bulk corn could not. Spanish-wool cloth long preceded inland metal towns, yet both patterns show how urban industry re-acted on land fertility before foreign commerce completed the transformation of the countryside in the chapter that follows.