The towns
Most people lived in villages in the Middle Ages and did not often leave home. When they did go to town, they had to walk – up to ten miles (16 kilometres) each way.
Every town had a market. Peasants´ main reason for going to town was to buy and sell there. They sold the eggs, cheese, wool, or corn they had brought with them. And they spent the few pence they made on the things they could not grow or make – shoes, cloth, pots and pans.
There were no big shops or factories in the towns. The only shops, apart from the market stalls, were the front rooms of craftsmen´s houses. Customers stepped straight from the narrow, dirty streets into the workshops.
Most townspeople were part-time farmers. There were fields and common land outside every town, and gardens inside the walls. Some families kept animals in their homes. Hens and pigs searched for food in the heaps of refuse in the streets.
London was the biggest town in England. About 10,000 people lived there in 1066. Like other towns, it grew in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Even so, it was just a cluster of streets on the north bank of the Thames, between the Tower of London and Fleet Street. Rich merchants and great lords owned the only stone houses.
Walter Robson: Medieval Britain; Oxford University Press, 1991/2000, page 70