How did life for people in towns change in the late middle ages?

Answer 1

The major change to village and town life in the middle ages was the one that followed the Black Death - which peaked in the 1340's.

Before the Black Death population levels were relatively high all over Europe (relatively high by pre-Industrial standards - about 10% of modern population density). There had been a substantive population growth during the Eleventh and Twelfth centuries, so land was relatively scarce, and ordinary people were wholly dependent on smallholdings to supply food for their families.

Because land was scarce 1000 - 1340 landowners had immense social power. Feudal lords were able to insists serfs (agricultural workers - who were hardly better off than slaves) paid them in produce and labour in exchange for access to small parcels of land to farm on. Money wages were low or non-existent, and most serfs were forbidden by law from traveling away from the village where they grew up without the Lord's permission (which they never got).

In the 1340's the Black Death arrived, and killed between a quarter and a half of the entire European population: entire villages were wiped out, or abandoned.

At first this led to social disaster with widespread famine and breakdown of the social network. But once things began to stabilise again (from the 1360's onwar) serfs began to realise that agricultural labour was now in such short supply that they were able to negotiate with the feudal lords for money wages, better conditions of service, and even holidays. (If the lords couldn't find enough farmers, the lords also went hungry). In most areas some land had been left with no living tenant, so the farmers who had survived found they had much more land to farm on. This allowed the new generation of serfs to farm for surplus production (which they could sell for money), and even to diversify into meat and dairy farming. (Before the Black Death most farming was arable: people needed the food).

A feudal lord who continued to oppress his tenants (and many did) might find they had left in the night, and gone to farm somewhere else (where there was also a labour shortage). This was illegal, but since what there was of a police system had also died in the Black Death - nothing could be done.

So in the short term the Black Death was a disaster for the working people of Europe. But in the longer term it gave value to their labour, allowing them to ask for (and get) money wages, begin to farm for surplus on their holdings (even more money), and permitting them limited rights of travel to better themselves.

The new freedoms for the common people would eventually lead to the huge populist revolts of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth centuries, and then on to the rise of a middle class from the Sixteenth century on - but that took a little longer.