Medieval towns were very small, leaving very little room for expanding, therefore the roads, and the houses were very small. Since the houses were made out of wood and were so close together the risk of a big fire was great because the fires were always in the house.
Even though the town was built so close together that wasn’t the worst part. Since the people back then had not come out with water and sewage systems, people threw out all their waste into the middle of the street where other people could get infected by the smell of the by-products. Pigs were the only garbage cleaners; they would go around and eat all of the by-products. Another part of life in the city was the pollution that inhabited all of the air; the people on the towns would go threw the streets and breathe all of the air. Thus causing a lot of sickness. So, basically living in the city was not a good thing.
Living in the countryside also has its ups and downs. By living in the countryside people had better air than the people in the cities had also people didn’t have to worry about being polluted by all the trash that was lying around. Since there was space in the countryside the people built their houses away from each other, by people doing that the people reduced the chance of fires spreading a destroying a whole city. But one problem that was constant with the problem of the people in the cities was that the water was still polluted by all the waste that all the people put into the river or the ground. One problem that the countryside people had that city people didn’t have was that the countryside people didn’t have any defense from the enemies. But the people in the cities did.
If I was to choose whether to live in the countryside or in the towns I would choose to live in the countryside because the death rate in the cities was probably higher than the death rate in the countryside. If I were going to die, I would rather die by fighting than die by smelling other people’s trash and feces.History Essays
