Why is Bree called a village and not a town?

[Rivendell_librarian]

There are towns in Middle Earth: Dale, Lake Town. Michel Delving in The Shire is described as a township with a town-hole.

Bree is the chief settlement of Bree-land and sits at such an important road junction of the East-West road and the North Greenway. The Prancing Pony would always be busy and there would need to be supporting artisans and businesses: blacksmiths, stables, farriers, carpenters, wheelwrights, a brewery nearby, a market for local produce and farmers to meet - maybe even an occasional livestock market, shopkeepers, candlemakers. Middle Earth has a relatively low population and I would have thought Bree merited being called a town.

 

[Deleted member 12094]

Aragorn for one called it "a little town":

“Strider” I am to one fat man who lives within a day’s march of foes that would freeze his heart, or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly.

... and JRRT called it "a large village":

Before them rose Bree-hill barring the way, a dark mass against misty stars; and under its western flank nestled a large village.​

​

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

Something on nomenclature:

Village

A village is a small settlement usually found in a rural setting.

www.nationalgeographic.org

On first reading Jane Austen, it took me a while to realize that when characters said something like "We shall soon be going to town" they were referring exclusively to London.

BTW, and irrelevantly, I recall Christopher saying that he thought one place on the Shire map, Nobottle, was so called because it was too small even to support an inn.

 

[Rivendell_librarian]

Maybe Nobottle was a place for teetotaller hobbits?

 

[Olorgando]

An interesting tidbit (of the seriously trivial category) is provided by the local elections in Bavaria, which were held on 15 March. If no single candidate receives over 50% of the vote for mayor or county equivalent, there is a runoff between the two leading candidates two weeks later, which was yesterday (though for the first time in history voting was only possible by snail mail).

The tidbit involves the election as mayor in one runoff which was won by a 19-year-old law student. This was in what was called "Bavaria's second-smallest city with 1050 inhabitants." Which makes me guess that 1000 inhabitants is the threshold for a community to call itself a city (with some other parameters like clearly defined city limits; 10 hamlets of 100 inhabitants each, scattered over an area, would very probably not qualify as a city).

I'm not sure if this has any organisational relevance, but the TV teletext also list the outcomes of elections in "cities of over 10 000 inhabitants" for mayor.
The next definitive threshold is 100 000, called "large city", which the city I live in hovered around for a while, switching "first place" with another city in a different state in the ranking of Germany's "smallest large city". That's past history, as the population is now officially over 110 000.

Then there's our southern neighbor, Nürnberg, Bavaria's second largest city, which did some hovering around the 500 000 mark. This does seem to be of some relevance, as when there were divergent numbers coming out two different statistical sources, one above and one below 500 000, there was quite a quarrel about who was right, as it had financial consequences.

But then the city where I live, eighth and smallest of Bavaria's large cities, would be a world metropolis in terms of population at the end of the Third Age! 😵

 

[Aldarion]

In Middle Ages, the difference between a city and a village was often the existence of city walls... smallest city in Croatia had IIRC 20 - 40 inhabitants.

 

[Olorgando]

Well, during the confusingly named "Holy Roman Empire" (later multiplying the confusion by the suffix "of the German Nation"), cities were often granted their city status by the current emperor ("Kaiser", another misspelling of the Roman "Caesar" whose other prominent exemplar is the Russian "Czar", or "Tsar", German "Zar"). One important attribute of this status (I believe only conferred to larger cities like our neighboring Nürnberg) was that they were under the direct jurisdiction of the emperor, and all of those greedy regional potentates (dukes, counts, barons, …) hat to keep their grubby mitts off them. An injunction with widely varying levels of effectiveness, depending on widely varying reasons. But city walls were certainly one thing that were meant to keep the "grubbys" at bay.

I'm not sure for which span of time this is valid, but that "Holy Roman Emperor" etc. was an elective office (as was for a perhaps similar time the "German King"). The electors were called "Kurfürst", or as per English Wiki "Prince-elector". Apparently for a time up to the Thirty Years War, this included three Archbishops, a King, a Count, a Duke and a Margrave. Later things may have gotten more confusing. After 1440, every "Kaiser" was of the "House of Austria" aka the Habsburgs, and the two exceptions were related to the Habsburgs. Papal approval of the election was dispensed with in the early 16th century, and the guy from Corsica put an end to what was by then a sham in 1806. That Corsican also established, by the Napoleonic Code, not just but also for cities some innovations that survive to our days.

 

[Deleted member 12094]

LOL Rivendell_librarian: you started out quite a reflection! Good for you!

I'll throw in another 5 cents...

A "town" in medieval times in Europe could also be qualified as a community having acquired the right of holding a market, thereby ensuring economic activity inside its area. How about that...?

Ough - my point does not help: I do not see any market place mentioned in Bree, neither in our late Karen Wynn Fonstad's Atlas of ME, nor in LotR!

If so, then perhaps Bree is more like a "large village" than a "small town"!

 

[Olorgando]

...
Ough - my point does not help: I do not see any market place mentioned in Bree, neither in our late Karen Wynn Fonstad's Atlas of ME, nor in LotR!
If so, then perhaps Bree is more like a "large village" than a "small town"!

JRRT does not describe Bree much beyond the Prancing Pony, the gates and that Bill Ferny's house was near the east gate. I took a look at Fonstad's map of Bree, and it is on a much larger scale than that of Hobbiton - for what that's worth, she had to make some assumptions to fill in blanks left by JRRT. But just taking her map as a hypothesis, there seems to be a lot of open (or at least not "developed" with housing) space on the "downhill" side of the Great East Road wich runs through Bree (amazingly, there seems to be no "bypass", so almost all traffic would have had to pass through two gates either way!), basically the south-west part. So plenty of space for a market. On the other hand, it is by orders of magnitude too small for the agriculture etc. necessary to support the population of Bree. Perhaps there were fields and pastures to the west of Bree, perhaps they depended on the Shire (Farmer Maggot comes to mind) for supplies, perhaps a combination of both - and some other source(s), too.

Certainly Bree had a "wall" - if a living once, like Buckland's High Hay which fenced the latter off from the Old Forest. Such special hedges needed some skill in being formed and maintained; I assume one of the techniques would have been similar to basket-weaving to make such a hedge (nearly) impenetrable. And that thorny plants might have been popular, though perhaps less so with the "gardeners" who tended to the fortified hedge.

 

[Rivendell_librarian]

Yes - thanks for your thoughts A wall or other boundary and an internal market are good criteria. I suppose Butterbur could have got his supplies direct from local farmer(s) rather than a market in Bree but to maintain the population a market to me makes sense, along with a few shops and artisan businesses.