The walled city

How many cities in England still have walls round them? Seeing the many mediaeval German cities that still have more or less complete fortifications makes you ask questions about how cities develop. Why do so few of ours still have their walls? I can think of York and Chester, while walls once surrounded several others, like Southampton, Canterbury or Colchester, but not much is left now. Why not? Lack of threat from outside attackers, advance of gunpowder weapons, decline of the powerful self-governing municipality, central control by a single monarch anxious to avoid leaving strongholds where rebellions might arise, greater freedom of trade and demise of the guilds which had regulated the number of craftsmen permitted to carry out their trade within a city. City walls and gates that controlled entry not only kept out enemies but also made it easy to keep a check on potential competitors. Because cities mostly lay on important roads and often rivers they were able to control traffic and levy tolls. If you wanted to pass through with your goods you usually had not only to pay a toll but also to put your goods up for sale on the market which occupied a central position in all cities. The final blow to city walls was probably dealt by the railways and after them by motor-driven vehicles. No longer was it necessary to break journey frequently. Goods travelled across country to the big markets in a few large cities. City walls got in the way of railway lines and trunk roads, not to mention motorways and airports.

What immediately strikes you as you look at the mediaeval layout of Mühlhausen is how self-contained it seems. You can imagine feeling very secure inside its walls once the gates were shut, and even today its inhabitants are more closely involved with the lives of their fellow citizens than in other cities where the past is less evident and the buildings show fewer traces of their earlier owners. The streets are hardly wide enough for vehicles to pass each other, many are still cobbled and the upper storeys of the timber-frame houses lean outwards. Yet not all are timber buildings. Some of the oldest, the churches, monasteries and patrician residences, are built in the local travertine, a calcium carbonate stone found in large deposits in the valley of the Unstrut River on which Mühlhausen lies. They are the ones that survived several major fires and the disastrous effects of the Thirty Years War 1618-1648.