s had
risen either not at all or at most from half a groschen to a groschen,
the price of rye rose from six or seven groschen a bushel to about
five-and-twenty groschen, that of a sheep from four to eighteen
groschen, and all other articles of necessary consumption in a like
proportion![16]

In the Middle Ages, necessaries and such ordinary comforts as were to
be had at all were dirt cheap; while non-necessaries and luxuries,
that is, such articles as had to be imported from afar, were for the
most part at prohibitive prices. With the opening up of the
world-market during the first half of the sixteenth century, this
state of things rapidly changed. Most luxuries in a short time fell
heavily in price, while necessaries rose in a still greater
proportion.

This latter change in the economic conditions of the world exercised
its most powerful effect, however, on the character of the mediaeval
town, which had remained substantially unchanged since the first great
expansion at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the
fourteenth centuries. With the extension of commerce and the opening
up of communications, there began that evolution of the town whose
ultimate outcome was to entirely change the central idea on which the
urban organization was based.

The first requisite for a town, according to modern notions, is
facility of communication with the rest of the world by means of
railways, telegraphs, postal system, and the like. So far has this
gone now that in a new country, for instance, America, the railway,
telegraph lines, etc., are made first, and the towns are then strung
upon them, like beads upon a cord. In the mediaeval town, on the
contrary, communication was quite a secondary matter, and more of a
luxury than a necessity. Each town was really a self-sufficing entity,
both materially and intellectually. The modern idea of a town is that
of a mere local aggregate of individuals, each pursuing a trade or
calling with a view to the world-market at large. Their own locality
or town is no more to them economically than any other part of the
world-market, and very little more in any other respect. The mediaeval
idea of a town, on the contrary, was that of an organization of groups
into one organic whole. Just as the village community was a somewhat
extended family organization, so was, _mutatis mutandis_, the larger
unit, the township or city. Each member of the town organization owed
allegiance and distinc